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WTO and Biotech Crops: Let Them Eat Precaution

  • 1.  WTO and Biotech Crops: Let Them Eat Precaution

    Posted 02-20-2006 08:30





    February 8, 2006

    What the WTO decision on GMOs really means

    By Jon Entine
      
    Tuesday's rebuke of the Europe-wide ban on bio-engineered crops and food by the World Trade Organization (WTO) has sent anti-biotech advocacy groups scrambling. The United States, Argentina and Canada argued the moratorium had more to do with protectionism than precaution, and the WTO agreed.

    Well-funded activists are now flooding the Internet with "hysteria-grams" trying to recast this stunning victory for common sense and careful science into a morality play: nefarious corporations aligned with bully nations force feeding "Frankenfoods" to helpless consumers.

    Even before the decision, Greenpeace blasted the WTO as "unqualified to deal with complex scientific and environmental issues." Friends of the Earth Europe scowled "European safeguards" were being "sacrificed to benefit biotech corporations." U.S.-based Consumers Union lambasted what it called a "preemptive effort to chill the development of new policies for regulating GM crops."

    If this decision is upheld by WTO members, Europe will not be forced to alter its regulations or labeling requirements or "force" consumers to "buy and eat food that they do not want," as Europe's leading consumer organization, BEUC, claims. It will demand the European Union (EU) observe its own regulatory process - using sound science to evaluate new products. That's not been happening. Although the EU officially lifted its legal ban on GM crops and foods in 2004, squabbling among member states have left the moratorium in place with 16 products bottled up in committees.

    Some European countries have been exploiting the controversy to protect their farmers and keep prices high - international agreements and public policy be damned. Even with this ruling, political realities suggest this subterfuge may not end soon. Greece recently announced it would defy EU regulations and broaden its unauthorized ban on GM-modified corn seeds.

    Greenpeace and Co. has been on the attack since the first generation of biotech crops were introduced more than a decade ago. Why? Because they were brought to market by corporations and aimed mostly at commodity crop farmers. Biotech farming has generated enormous economic and environmental benefits, dramatically reducing reliance on environmentally harmful pesticides by supercharging the natural defenses of a crop using genetic material already in place or by introducing genes from other plants or animals.

      
    We're now entering the second phase of the biotech revolution: addressing malnutrition and aiding smaller farmers. Scientists are developing nutrition-enhanced crops and foods such as "golden rice" that could help tens of millions of malnourished children who go blind or die each year from Vitamin A deficiency. On the horizon are futuristic "farmaceuticals" - medicines made by melding basic methods of ag with advanced biotech.

    Yet, in a dark, parallel universe of the privileged, anti-biotechnology groups contend we should abandon even these revolutionary life-saving uses of crop biotech. Egged on by socially responsible investors and funded by the organic and natural-product industries, which thrive on GM food scares, professional protestors are quick to cite the lowest common denominator in fabricated scientific disputes: the so-called "precautionary principle" - the controversial notion, rejected by mainstream science, innovation should be shelved unless all risks can be avoided. They assert "Trojan Horse" genes not subject to built-in checks and balances in nature could unleash a "genetic Godzilla."

    Slogans like "better safe than sorry" may have a nice ring of moderation but they are scientifically simplistic. There have been no documented health problems linked to GM crops and no evidence genetic modification poses greater risks than crossbreeding and gene-splicing, which have given us such products as the tangelo and seedless grapes. The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization has endorsed the safety and health benefits of biotech crops, urging their extension to the developing world.

    The hypothetical risk of biotech must be balanced against the lives being lost as new products remain trapped in a regulatory maze. In 2002, Zambia and Zimbabwe, wary of offending their major trading partners in the EU, cited the "precautionary principle" in rejecting donations of bioengineered grain that could have helped feed 10 million undernourished people, thousands of whom ultimately died.

    Today in the Philippines, where 42 percent of the diet comes from white rice, a recent study by UN food experts estimates golden rice could avert 879 deaths, 1,925 corneal ulcers and 15,398 cases of night blindness each year. A Philippine-based based anti-biotech group with ties to Greenpeace has aggressively lobbied against golden rice on the grounds the benefits from beta-carotene are minimal - claims rejected by scientists.

    We should also be skeptical of opinion polls cited by biotech opponents suggesting that consumers, particularly in Europe, are dead set against these new products. "If you really want to understand whether European shoppers will buy genetically modified foods given the opportunity, ignore the agents provocateurs, the media, and the panicked reactions of the big supermarket chains, and look instead at the behavior of ordinary consumers," notes David Bowe, a member of the European parliament's Committee on Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. "When Safeway and Sainsbury's put GM tomato puree side by side with their non-GM counterpart in 1999 the proof was definitely in the puree. The GM product was seen to offer real added value. It was less expensive and in numerous blind tastings consumers seemed to prefer the flavor. It sold as well as the non-GM product."

    While not a silver bullet, GM technology offers unique tools to address international food needs. Biotech crops are grown mostly in major farming nations like the United States, Argentina and Canada. But, farmers in developing countries such as Brazil, China, India, and in Eastern Europe, with hungry stomachs to feed, are vigorously embracing the technology. Last year, 8.5 million farmers in 21 countries grew biotech crops on 222 million acres, an 11 percent increase from the year before.

    There are valid concerns, including the degree to which corporations should be allowed to patent beneficial seeds. But, years of demagoguery and misinformation have taken an enormous tollnnpolluting public opinion, profoundly altering the trajectory of biotech applications, and damaging the financial wherewithal of corporations and university research. The biggest losers are the children, frozen out of the benefits of the green revolution many of us take for granted.

    Entine is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He edited and co-authored "Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture."

    E-mail: runjonrun@earthlink.com



    Europe, WTO battle over biotech crops

    By Julia Watson
    U    PI Food Writer

    Published Februa    ry 15, 2006

    This week a pre    liminary ruling on biotech crops was issued by the World Trade Organization that could prevent national and local governments from setting their own environmental and human health regulations in cases where scientific uncertainty exists.
         
        It's a major blow for those who believe in what is called the Precautionary Principle -- the notion that innovation should be shelved unless all risks can be avoided.
         
        In question is the European Commission's regulatory system, which has delayed the widespread sale of biotech crops until better scientific evidence can prove them not to harm the environment or human health.
         
        Ask Jon Entine who is to blame for the European Union's resistance to biotech foods, and he will tell you it isn't the media campaigns that labeled genetically modified crops and seeds "Frankenfoods." Nor is it any scientific evidence that such foods are dangerous to eat.
         
        According to Entine, an adjunct fellow at the National Research Initiative since 2002 and contributing author and editor of the just published "Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture" (American Enterprise Institute Press), the whole debacle amounts to no more than a trade dispute between the EU and the United States.
         
        The European Union has refused approval for products made from modern biotechnology for almost 7½ years, "blocking," according to the Foreign Agricultural Service U.S. Mission to the European Union, most U.S. exports of corn and hindering trade in other products.
         
        Since the United States filed a WTO case against the European Union in 2003, challenging its de facto moratorium on new genetically modified crops approval, only a handful of products have been endorsed for sale in Europe.
         
        "The science is clear," Entine told Eat To Live. "Biotech foods are no more dangerous than conventional foods."
         
        Releasing them for sale in the European Union, he believes, would send a crucial message to countries in the developing world that the First World operates by a free-trade system. And this, the EC's so-called moratorium is blocking.
         
        As Eat To Live has reported, the National Research Council recently issued an excoriating rebuke to the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector general for findings that showed the USDA did not require inspections of field-test experiments of GM crops and often didn't even know where these tests were taking place. Nor did it ensure that crops were destroyed as required once the tests had taken place. Independent reviews of the U.S. regulatory system on GM crops have found it similarly at fault.
         
        "Organic farms are not going to feed the poor," Entine states. Biotech farming produces yields, he says, at a rate three to four times higher than conventional farming. It should be presented in the EU as a consumer option.
         
        "The EC has very strict regulations for what it allows in the marketplace and what it puts on labels. If the population doesn't want this, they have got their choice."
         
        The European Union ascribes its chariness to the precautionary principle. EU producers of artisanal foods would argue that the U.S. applies that same principle over the import from Europe into the United States of unpasteurized products such as cured meats, salamis and raw-milk cheeses younger than 60 days.
         
        Steve Suppan, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy research director and author of a briefing paper on the issue, said in an institute news release, "Beyond GE crops, the WTO ruling as reported sets a broad precedent to inhibit the ability of WTO member states to set food safety, public health and environmental health measures where there is scientific uncertainty about the adequacy or quality of data submitted for commercialization approvals."
         
        There are fears that should the ruling remain unchanged before its final publication, it could be used as a legal tool against GE bans passed in EU member states and in several Asian and African WTO member countries.
         
        In 2002 emergency food aid supplies of unmilled grain from the United States were turned back by Zambia on the grounds it could contain genetically modified products which, were they to escape, would contaminate domestic seed. This despite Zambia being one of the countries worst affected by famine in Africa. Zimbabwe and Mozambique also expressed concerned over accepting genetically engineered grain.
         
        Entine says it's important to send a message to developing countries that they can take GM crops. "They should feel free to embrace GM crops and feed their poor.
         
        "The precautionary principle is very limited. You can't use it to throw away all technologies. We have to weigh the risks involved against helping the poor when they are dying."