Genetically Modified Crops: A Danger or an Agricultural Right?
Germany is the latest country to object to genetically modified crops. There’s a small but powerful European group battling against the planting of commonly-grown pest- resistant staple foods, and the latest mutiny by the German Agriculture Ministry has resulted in the banning of MON 810 – sold under the trade-name YieldGard, a genetically modified corn variety.
The Agriculture Minister, Ilse Aigner, declared that the Ministry had concluded that sufficient evidence existed to support arguments that MON 810 posed a danger to the wider environment. The crop is grown in less that 0.2% of Germany’s cornfields, but even so, the ban is based on the claim that the genetic modification is harmful to aquatic wildlife.
The decision is important because it is in opposition to a European Commission decision that lifted EC wide bans on MON 810 that had been instituted, now while MON 810 is legal across the EC, it has been banned by the national governments of Austria, France, Greece Hungary and Luxembourg. On the other side of the battle lines are Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden who support the Commission’s claim that a ban was unjust after the crop was declared safe by scientists at the European Food Safety Authority. Sitting uneasily in the middle is Wales, where the Welsh assembly chose to declare the entire country GM free in 2000 as part of its drive to add value and quality to the country’s vast number of agricultural acres.
MON 810 was allowed to be grown in Germany from 2005 onwards, despite the fact that over two thirds of German consumers think GM crops should be banned in foodstuffs. The polarity of views is interesting. M S Swaminathan, ‘The Father of Economic Ecology’ is on record as saying that GMOs shouldn’t be grown in or marketed to the developed world, where they aren’t necessary, but should be created for the developing world, to meet the food needs of large populations living in poverty and to allow such nations to develop a reliable food surplus that they can sell to the developed world.
Monsanto, which developed MON 810 is considering its options – the crop has a special resistance to the corn borer moth larvae, which tunnel into the corn stem, causing the head to bend and the crop to fail. MON 810 is commonly grown in the USA, Latin America and China.
There have been regular scientific claims that GMOs are not stable – most recently it was researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biology in Barcelona in 2006 whose research seemed to show that a transgene insert may have moved from its mapped location as supplied by Monsanto on the gene map. Reliable peer-reviewed results of this apparent ability of the inserted material to travel around the genome is not yet available and it’s impossible to tell whether this is a serious problem or not. If it does turn out to be true, there will be renewed calls to ban all GMOs until they can be proved safe for the environment and safe for consumption.
Drying corn courtesy of Ogwen at Flickr under a creative commons licence
Interesting quote by M S Swaminathan about utilizing GM crops to create a food surplus for the developing world — but what he fails to realize is that genetically modified crops have not been shown to produce an increased yield!
GM crops increase yield because the plants have stronger defenses against pests and herbicide. Less loss equals more yield. Get it?
How we eill know for sure if the crop is harmful?
Most GM crops do not have increased yields (it varies on a case-by-case basis with regards to crop, location, environment, management plans etc.), except in certain specific situations (GM cotton in parts of Australia, for example), though they do generally allow better weed and pest management.
However, if strict pesticide/herbicide management protocols are not observed, all advantages gained from GM crops are lost, as herbicide and pesticide resistant weeds and pests emerge (for the same reasons as to why antibiotic-resistant bacteria arise - when you kill off the things in a population that aren’t resistant to a pesticide, the things remaining will be a) resistant and b) produce resistant offspring).
This is one reason why GM crops are not a magical cure for the ills of the developing world - without strict government regulation, all benefits are lost. Some (many?) third-world countries do not have the infrastructure required for such regulation.
And it’s not just a case of each country doing it’s own thing, either - all it takes is for a pesticide/herbicide resistant insect/weed to spread across the border and again, the advantage of GM is lost.
An interesting question is how different countries approach the question of GM - some ask “How do we know for sure if the crop is harmful?” others ask “How do we know for sure that it isn’t harmful?”
Fact is there are no long-term studies on the health and environmental effects of various GM crops. So some countries choose to err on the side of caution, while others take a more short-term view.
Oh yeah - and the inserted genes are definitely capable of moving around the plant’s genome, through processes such as homologous recombination (and a bunch of others). It would be naive to assume that this isn’t occurring, but I can’t see it causing many problems.
Niklaus makes two interesting points - the first is that the model for GM crops being useful is always predicated on a fairly intensive agricultural structure, which is why Monsanto, for example, has always been clear about the value of crop improvement in the developed world, and hasn’t actually oversold the idea of increased yield in the developing world.
The second is the more complex one though: there is a ‘general’ belief that the rigour of scientific research (replicable standardised results) should somehow follow into scientific development. In other words, what is done once, or at first, should be done always. This general belief is false because the range of variables operating on a scientific development is uncontrolled, while the variables in experimental science are strictly controlled.
Essentially it means that we will never be able to say what the outcomes of a scientific development will be. Gene inserts may move, sooner or later. Given that it’s in the nature of both transplanted and genetic material to change in structure, the gene inserts will either be rejected or modified by the organism as a whole. This happens in nature all the time, but there seems to be a view that scientists should be able to offer guarantees about stability once science gets outside the laboratory. What we need to do better is understand and manage risk, not manage science.
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