Currently browsing posts about: GM(Genetically Modified)

Joeva Sean Rock.  We Are Not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana.  Michigan State University Press, 2022.  188 pages

I enjoyed getting to know Joeva Rock when she had a fellowship in my NYU department, and was honored to be asked to blurb her book:

We Are Not Starving is an utterly compelling account of how the failure of international donors to understand and respect the recipients of development aid contributes to the failure of their projects.  Through the industry’s attempts to introduce GMO crops in Ghana, anthropologist Joeva Rock draws lessons essential for anyone who wants international development to work.  If you want to understand the real, on-the-ground politics of GMOs, start here.

A couple of excerpts from the manuscript:

• Ghanaian officials recognized the limitations posed by IPRs [Intellectual Property Rights] as an important way to collect financial benefits from GMO.  Thus, rather than describe GMOs as a humanitarian technology, as donors sought to do, Ghanaian officials and scientists went out of their way to stress that, when coupled with IPRs, GM seeds were “the secret” to obtaining profit, revenue that was sorely needed in the post-structural adjustment era of gutted state infrastructure.
• Ghanaians continually critiqued global discourses and development industry standards wherein philanthropists and professionals in the Global North set boundaries for conversations about hunger, collapse Africa into a homogenized, starving entity, and the prescribe solutions based on these racialized myths.  These critiques are reflective of recipient fatigue and are often held in tension with discourse emanating from the same donors that sponsor the work of GMO advocates, who rely on images and texts that depict Africa as languishing and starving.

You would think the beleaguered FDA would have better things to do.

It sent out a press release announcing new “Feed Your Mind” materials to increase public and professional understanding of GMOs, in partnershipwith USDA and EPA.

My first question: Who paid for this?

The answer:

Funding for the “Feed Your Mind” initiative was provided by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 to conduct “consumer outreach and education regarding agricultural biotechnology and biotechnology derived food products and animal feed, including through publication and distribution of science-based educational information on the environmental, nutritional, food safety, economic, and humanitarian impacts of such biotechnology, food products, and feed.”  More funds were provided through 2018 and 2019 Appropriations bills.

How’s that for effective lobbying by the food biotechnology industry!

Why do I think this is pro-GMO propaganda?

I started with the Discussion Guide for Health Educators.  It has just a few questions and answers.  For example:

Q.  Are GMO’s safe to eat?

A.  Yes…they are just as safe to eat as non-GMO foods.

Q.  Is here a link between GMOs and cancer?

A.  No.  GMO crops are not changed in ways that would increase the risk of cancer for humans or animals.

I don’t think these answers are necessarily wrong.  They just don’t tell the whole story.

These materials have nothing to say about:

• Consolidation in the biotechnology industry
• Corporate control of commodity agriculture
• Glyphosate, the herbicide used with GMOs and considered carcinogenic by international health agencies and US courts
• How GMO crops have taken over, driving out everyone else
• How pesticides used on GMO crops contaminate organic production
• The ways GMO companies harrass independent farmers by enforcing intellectual property rights
• How the Farm Bill subsidizes GMO corn and soybeans, causing them to be overproduced and corn to be used for ethanol
• Congress’s absurd Bioengineered labeling, widely ignored.
• The consequent lack of transparency in the supermarket

No wonder so many people look for Non-GMO labels on food products.

Take a look at these materials and judge for yourself (I particularly recommend the video for consumers).  It and the rest are quite short.

• A video and infographic for consumers:
  • Video: “GMOs, Farm to Table”
  • Infographic: “Where Can You Find GMOs?”
• A video and discussion guide for health educators:
  • Video: “GMOs and Food Safety: A Guide for Health Educators”
  • Discussion Guide: “A Question of GMOs”
• A video and factsheet developed in partnership with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for registered dietitians (RDs)/registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) and nutrition and dietetics technicians, registered (NDTRs). Interested RDs/RDNs and NDTRs can earn free continuing education units through the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ EatRight® Store.
  • Video: “Understanding GMOs”
  • Factsheet: “Understanding GMOs”

For More Information

• Feed Your Mind – Agricultural Biotechnology Initiative
• Resources for Healthcare Professionals
• FDA Releases New “Feed Your Mind” Consumer Education Materials (September 2020)

Bartow J. Elmore.  Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future.  Norton, 2021.

I was interested to read this book for three reasons.

• I was familiar with Elmore’s his excellent previous book, Citizen Coke, which I blogged about in 2014.
• I ran into Bart Elmore in, of all places, the restaurant of an otherwise empty hotel in Brasilia while I was on book tour for the Portuguese edition of Unsavory Truth, and he was doing the research for this book.
• I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the Monsanto events I described at length in the second half of Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety.  Not much, as it turns out.

This is a history of the company from its beginnings in the early 1900s as a producer of saccharine; to its production of 2, 4-D, PCBs, and other toxic chemicals; to its development and dependence on glyphosate; to its purchase by Bayer just as courts were deciding in favor of plaintiffs arguing that glyphosate was responsible for their cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

From my reading, Elmore bends over backwards trying to be fair to the company but nevertheless paints a picture of a company that put profits over all other consideration, regardless of what its products were doing to human health.  It’s not a pretty story.

Elmore is an historian who seems to be trying to remain dispassionate.   He is disappointed that Monsanto lied when it claimed its products were safe and genetically modified foods would feed the world.   His book, he says,

reveal[s] that GE [genetically engineered] technology was erroneously deployed over the past two decades and was more about selling chemicals than investing in real solutions to our food problems, which has resulted in wasted opportunities and wasted resources [p. 277].

I think what he documents about this company’s history of profit-driven lack of ethics is chilling.  It deserves more than disappointment.  It calls for outrage.

We grow lots of corn in the U.S.

• Most of it is genetically modified, meaning that the potentially carcinogenic herbicide, glyphosate, gets dumped all over it in enormous quanitities
• 40% of the corn is used to produce ethanol; this provides an incentive to grow corn in places where water is limited or land is poor.

One argument in favor of using corn for ethanol is that using ethanol for fuel reduces climate change.

But recent reports suggest that using corn for ethanol is a net loss for the planet.

• Jessica Fu writes in The Counter. Corn ethanol was supposed to help the climate. Instead, its production may have made things worse:  Environmental advocates have long warned that incentivizing ethanol production could be a net loss for the planet. A new study suggests that those fears may be well-founded.  Read more
• Virginia Gewin in Civil Eats writes: How Corn Ethanol for Biofuel Fed Climate Change
• C. Jones points out: Iowa is addicted to cornography, but we would all be better off using electric power.
• Dr. Jonathan Foley concludes:   It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System: As a crop, corn is highly productive, flexible and successful. As a system, the same is not true.

Comment: Growing corn for ethanol is makes no sense at all.  It’s bad for land and water.  Dumping glyphosate also makes no sense.  We need an agricultural policy that promotes agroecology/regenerative agriculture/sustainability, and that promotes the health of everyone involved in production and consumption.

On January 1, the USDA’s useless rules for labeling bioengineered (BE) foods, those formerly known as genetically modified (GMOs), went into effect.

Will the new rules help you figure out which items in the produce section or anywhere else in the store have been genetically engineered?

Not a chance.

I am particularly curious about what’s in the produce section.  It’s easy enough to know which genetically modified foods have been approved by the FDA; the FDA has a website for this purpose.

But just because they’ve been approved does not necessarily mean they are in production and in your supermarket.

To know which ones are genetically modified, it would be nice to have labels.

Instead, we have the results of USDA’s obfuscation, as I discussed in a blog post two years ago: Goodbye GMO, Hello Bioengineered: USDA publishes labeling rules.  It’s worth repeating:

Thanks to Tufts Professor Sheldon Krimsky for sending me this gem.

Residues of glyphosate in food and dietary exposure.  John L. Vicini,Pamela K. Jensen,Bruce M. Young,John T. Swarthout, Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety.  First published: 16 August 2021.

The study: A review of existing data on amounts of glyphosate residues in foods as compared to maximum limits or tolerances set by European or American regulatory agencies.  The study also reviewed data on levels of glyphosate in urine samples.

Conclusion: “Exposures to glyphosate from food are well below the amount that can be ingested daily over a lifetime with a reasonable certainty of no harm.”

In my view, one of the strongest reasons for public distrust of GMOs is the behavior of the GMO industry, with the secretive, aggressive, corporate behavior of Monsanto as the most glaring example.

I saw this myself.

In the late 1990s, I was at a meeting of food industry executives, among them the CEOs or high ranking officials of several agricultural biotechnology companies, including Monsanto.

The others were openly furious with Monsanto’s CEO for ruining public trust in their products: “You have ruined this for us.”

But Monsanto’s reputation did not stop Bayer from buying the company in 2018 (for $63 billion, no less), something it—and its stockholders—must surely regret (some are suing the company).

As Carey Gillam of US Right to Know has just reported, “Appeals court rejects Bayer’s bid to overturn Roundup trial loss and slams company for “reckless disregard” for consumer safety.”

In a decision handed down on Monday, the 1st Appellate District in the Court of Appeal for California rejected Monsanto’s bid to overturn the trial loss in a case brought by husband-and-wife plaintiffs, Alva and Alberta Pilliod.

This is the third trial in which juries awarded millions of dollars to plaintiffs who claimed that they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a result of exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

To head off subsequent trials, Bayer said it would pay about $11 billion (yes, billion) to settle about 100,000 pending cases, and would pay $4.5 billion more to offset further liability for Roundup claims.  Bayer also announced it would stop selling Roundup and other glyphosate herbicides for home use in the US by 2023 (but it will still sell Roundup to farmers.  And it is taking its case to the Supreme Court to get a reversal of a cancer-claim case.

What I find remarkable about the Pilliod decision is the judge’s scathing comments on Monsanto’s corporate behavior.  As quoted by Gillam:

• “Monsanto’s conduct evidenced reckless disregard of the health and safety of the multitude of unsuspecting consumers it kept in the dark. This was not an isolated incident; Monsanto’s conduct involved repeated actions over a period of many years motivated by the desire for sales and profit.”
• Monsanto acted with a “willful and conscious disregard for the safety of others.” Monsanto “failed to conduct adequate studies on glyphosate and Roundup, thus impeding discouraging, or distorting scientific inquiry concerning glyphosate and Roundup.”
• “But rather than fairly stating all the relevant evidence, Monsanto has made a lopsided presentation that relies primarily on the evidence in its favor. This type of presentation may work for a jury, but it will not work for the Court of Appeal.”
•  “Summed up, the evidence shows Monsanto’s intransigent unwillingness to inform the public about the carcinogenic dangers of a product it made abundantly available at hardware stores and garden shops across the country.”

Or try this footnote:

The effects of all this on Bayer’s stock prices?

Other People vs. Monsanto/Bayer cases are in the works.  Stay tuned.

Food Navigator reminds me that GMO labeling has not yet been implemented.

Compliance with the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard (NBFDS) – which requires firms with annual sales of $2.5m to label ‘bioengineered’ foods, beverages, and supplements – is mandatory from January 1, 2022. So is the industry up to speed? It’s a pretty mixed bag, according to labeling experts.

We know that corn, soybeans, and cotton are genetically modified (also canola and sugar beets).

But what about products that you might buy in supermarkets?  Those remain a mystery.

The FDA lists “completed consultations” for genetically modified foods—effectively, approvals—here.  These include Fuji and other apples, potatoes, and squashes, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily in supermarket produce sections.

Confusingly, the USDA has its own list.

• Alfalfa (pdf)
• Apple (Arctic^TM varieties) (pdf)
• Canola (pdf)
• Corn (pdf)
• Cotton (pdf)
• Eggplant (BARI Bt Begun varieties) (pdf)
• Papaya (ringspot virus-resistant varieties) (pdf)
• Pineapple (pink flesh varieties) (pdf)
• Potato (pdf)
• Salmon (AquAdvantage®) (pdf)
• Soybean (pdf)
• Squash (summer) (pdf)
• Sugarbeet (pdf)

It would be nice to have supermarket produce labeled, although the label, as I’ve written previously, is not as helpful as it might be.

I can’t wait to see if stickers like this actually appear on GMO squash, apples, and salmon.  The compliance date is coming soon!