Transatlantic split persists over GM food
Note the article below states "the longer-term and more serious impact for Europe may lie beyond GMOs, in more
sophisticated agribiotechnologies to develop modified foods that carry a particular health benefit – such as reducing
the incidence of diabetes. Some of that research is being carried out in Europe, including a project called Lipgene,
involving 25 laboratories across Europe co-ordinated by Trinity College, Dublin, which is working on a linseed oil to
contain fats that occur in fish oil and have cardiovascular benefits. But more advanced and large-scale efforts are
under way in the US.
Last month Kellogg, the cereal maker, said it would put in its baked products a type of soyabean oil developed by
Monsanto that eliminates the need for hydrogenation, a process that normally creates harmful fatty acids."
However, according to a GM Watch report, this latter trait has come from conventional plant breeding - the only GM
aspect of this soya plant is that it is herbicide resistant, a trait that has been around for ten years. If correct,
this would appear to be another classic case of biotech spin doctoring in order to mislead the public into thinking GM
technology is delivering benefits which don't in fact exist.
Good enough to fool the Financial Times, anyway, it would seem. For more information see - http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6037 ;
Why trust these people on anything?
NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
Tearing Down Biotech's 'Berlin Wall'
The Acceptable Face Of Ag-biotech
=======================
Financial Times
Transatlantic split persists over GM food
By Raphael Minder and Jeremy Grant
Published: January 31 2006 19:56 | Last updated: January 31 2006 19:56
At the cereal aisle of the Safeway supermarket in Washington’s Tenleytown district, Ellen O’Brien scans the shelves. She
picks out a box of Wheaties, made by General Mills, and turns to eye jars of Smucker’s Goober Strawberry peanut butter.
Does she know cereals and peanut butter may contain genetically modified ingredients? “I have to say I’m blissfully
unaware,” says Ms O’Brien, who works in healthcare finance. Like most American shoppers, she accepts that three-quarters
of processed foods sold in the US contain GM organisms. But in Europe, GM food is absent from supermarkets and remains a
subject of much consumer suspicion.
A study produced for the International Food Information Council last year showed that fewer than 0.5 per cent of
American consumers identified food biotechnology as a safety concern. In contrast, a Eurobarometer opinion poll across
the 25-nation European Union found that 54 per cent considered GM food to be dangerous. It is a transatlantic divide
that will be thrown into renewed stark relief this month as a landmark trade dispute between the two regions comes to a
head.
The World Trade Organisation is about to rule in a case brought against the European Union in 2003 by the US, Canada and
Argentina, which claim that an EU moratorium on the approval of GM foods and crops, introduced in 1998, lacked
scientific basis and created an unfair trade barrier. The case has significance beyond the moratorium, which the EU
argues has in any event become all but obsolete following its enactment of stricter labelling and tracing legislation
and the limited resumption of product approvals in May 2004, when the EU gave clearance to a GM corn developed by
Syngenta.
Instead, the ruling will be important in efforts by the US to prevent
European GM concerns from spreading, especially to Asia and Africa.
David Bullock, professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois, says with a neatly chosen
metaphor: “The US is trying to nip things in the bud.’’
GM crops – first grown in the three nations that brought the WTO case – now cover 90m hectares (222m acres) in 21
countries. Summing up the challenge for American farmers – for whom exports already represent one-quarter of their cash
receipts – Richard Crowder, the chief US agricultural negotiator, says: “As incomes rise in the rest of the world and
our market further matures, trade will be ever more important for agriculture.”
Since the first commercial amounts of GM soyabeans, cotton and maize were planted in 1996, US farmers have become
increasingly reliant on the advanced crop types produced through genetic modification. The technology involves selecting
specific genes from one organism and introducing them into another to produce traits – such as drought-resistance or
resilience against pests – that can increase farmers’ harvests. About 85 per cent of soyabeans, 76 per cent of cotton
and 45 per cent of maize planted in the US in 2004 were of GM varieties, according to the Pew Initiative on Food and
Biotechnology.
US President George W. Bush once provocatively invited visiting European leaders to the White House dining room with the
words: “Let’s go and eat some genetically modified food for lunch.” In Europe, few politicians are willing to endorse
GMOs – and some even avoid condemning the burning of trial fields by anti-GM activists such as José Bové in France.
Patrick Rudelsheim, a specialist on European GM regulation who supervised field trials for several leading GM companies,
says: “A field destruction in itself is a serious investment loss, but perhaps more depressing is the subsequent lack of
support from the authorities. It’s often pure
judicial laisser faire.’’
At the retail level, Europe’s GM clock has arguably been turned back in the past decade. The little GM food that was
available, notably tomato purée sold in the UK by the Sainsbury and Safeway chains in 1996, was subsequently removed
from the shelves amid a wider food safety debate. Today, one European supermarket executive says, it would be “almost
commercial suicide’’ to sell GM food.
Ragnar Löfstedt, professor in risk management at King’s College London, identifies three main reasons for Europe’s
aversion to GM food. First, he argues, Americans’ trust in their Food and Drug Administration is far greater than that
of Europeans in their own health regulators (the wariness dating as far back as the 1960s Thalidomide birth deformities
scandal). Second, the US has avoided food scandals on the scale of the “mad cow’’ crisis of the 1990s, which led to a
decade-long ban on British beef exports. That coincided with the first GM crop trials and brought “a knee-jerk
reaction’’ by the EU in its decision to stop approving new types of GM products in 1998.
Third, Prof Löfstedt and others stress, was a faulty communications strategy by GM companies, in particular Monsanto of
the US, the industry leader, when it targeted Europe. He says: “Monsanto was not culturally sensitive enough to realise
the potential for a European public backlash. GMOs, rightly or wrongly, are perceived to be an American issue and
Europeans don’t like Americans to tell them what to do.’’
Europeans have therefore remained sceptical about whether GMOs are harmless, notably when it comes to growing GM crops
alongside traditional produce, where strains can cross- pollinate. American politicians and GM scientists argue that the
burden of proof lies the other way, namely to find evidence that GM crops cause harm. Jonathan Ramsey, a Monsanto
spokesman in Europe, says European consumer perceptions will shift, adding that people had “reflected on the scare
stories that were around 10 years ago on super weeds and fish genes in tomatoes and have come to see that this was
actually scaremongering”.
Yet the real ideological – and commercial – battleground for GMOs is increasingly in the developing world. Alarm was
raised in the US when
Zimbabwe in 2002 refused an aid shipment of US grain because it might have contained GM maize. The debate has also been
intense in countries such as Zambia and Ethiopia. The US has tried to strengthen its case by arguing that GM crops can
alleviate poverty, not least since they eliminate the need for poor farmers to budget for inputs such as insecticides.
Officials have pointed to agricultural progress in countries such as Brazil, which almost doubled its GM crops last year
to 9.4m hectares, the fastest growth rate worldwide.
However, many environmental and consumer groups contest those benefits. In a report last month focusing on Monsanto,
Friends of the Earth underlined some of the paradoxical aspects of GM farming in the developing world – including an
alleged increase in the use of herbicides to combat weeds that have grown tolerant to Roundup Ready soyabeans, a leading
GM crop. The result, according to Charles Margolis of the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, a non-profit advocacy
group, is that “companies like Monsanto are now telling these farmers to use really toxic chemicals. It’s a joke.’’
In spite of such scepticism – and regardless of the WTO case – the US can point to signs that it is starting to win the
argument on GM acceptance globally, according to recent statistics on the extent of GM crop plantings. A study produced
last month by the non-profit International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications and funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation showed that developing countries have adopted GM crops at four times the pace of developed
economies in the last decade. Of the 8m farmers growing such crops globally, 90 per cent were located in developing
countries.
Acceptance of GMOs is receiving a further boost with the emergence of largely government-backed research into the
technology in China – which is developing a strain of rice rich in vitamin A – (see below right) as well as work in
India and even Iran, which joined the GM-growing club last year.
Experts say such developments may have more effect than any WTO pressure on Europe to relax its opposition to GMOs. Even
within the Vatican it is recognised that GMOs can have a role in reducing poverty (see below left). But the short-term
prospects for GM farming in Europe remain unclear. Of the four countries that started or resumed GM crop production last
year, three were EU members: Portugal, France and the Czech Republic. However, that has been countered by growing
regional opposition to GMOs – 172 regional governments across Europe have sought or implemented bans on GM crops,
according to Friends of the Earth, the environmental campaign group.
At a national level, Switzerland’s voters rejected GM crops in a referendum last November. Maria Rauch-Kallat, health
minister of Austria, which currently holds the EU’s presidency, says she believes her country’s “strict resistance’’ to
GMOs will remain. “Like others in Europe, Austrians are very close to nature. Our vision of a good society is certainly
not one where everybody is allowed to do whatever is technologically possible.’’
According to GM proponents, the first consequence of such resistance is that Europe is losing corporate investment. They
cite Syngenta, which in 2004 started moving its biotechnology research headquarters from Britain to the US “to be in a
more positive environment for this kind of work”. Christian Verscheuren, director-general of CropLife, a trade
association representing Monsanto and other leading GM companies, says: “The industry has not given up on Europe but it
has considerably scaled back.”
But the longer-term and more serious impact for Europe may lie beyond
GMOs, in more sophisticated agribiotechnologies to develop modified foods that carry a particular health benefit – such
as reducing the incidence of diabetes.
Some of that research is being carried out in Europe, including a project called Lipgene, involving 25 laboratories
across Europe co-ordinated by Trinity College, Dublin, which is working on a linseed oil to contain fats that occur in
fish oil and have cardiovascular benefits. But more advanced and large-scale efforts are under way in the US. Last month
Kellogg, the cereal maker, said it would put in its baked products a type of soyabean oil developed by Monsanto that
eliminates the need for hydrogenation, a process that normally creates harmful fatty acids .
Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative, says:
“There is some potential that the European industry could be left behind with regard to other kinds of applications [for
GMOs]. If you have a regulatory and political climate that is not conducive to R, they [Europeans] could end up losing out.” Europeans might not take readily to Goober Strawberry peanut spreads, with
or without genetic tweaks. But for the world food business, even in Europe, gene modification is fast becoming what
could be described, not just metaphorically, as a bread-and- butter issue.