Capitalism Fouls Things Up
Do you care what's in the food that you and your family eat? Do you care that multinational chemical corporations can now determine what is in the food you eat? Do you worry that corporations, interested mainly in maximizing their profits and controlling the international marketplace, are now genetically engineering (GE) or genetically modifying (GM) the foods we eat every day? A growing number of people around the globe do care. From Great Britain to India, a mass movement against GE foods is rising on an international scale.
Genetic engineering is simply the practice of altering or changing the genetic blueprints of living organisms whether they are plants, animals, humans or micro-organisms patenting them, and then selling the resulting foods, seeds or other products for profit.
The corporations which foist these products on us claim that their new genetically engineered products will make agriculture sustainable, eliminate world hunger, cure disease, and vastly improve public health. Sure! And thirty years ago nuclear power proponents were telling us that there was no need to worry about the safety of nuclear energy and that nuclear power plants would generate electricity for us that would be "too cheap to meter". These latest proclamations sound similar to promises that have been made in the past about any number of wonder drugs and other manufactured products.
The major agricultural crops affected today by genetic engineering are soya, canola and corn. According to Jennifer Story, Health Protection Campaigner for the Council of Canadians, "Today, about half of the canola and corn grown in Canada, and one-quarter of the soya, are genetically engineered. As a result, up to 75 percent of the processed foods we buy may contain one or more of these grains."1
Since GE crops are mixed with regular crops after harvesting, we have no way of knowing whether the foods we buy contain GE products. Furthermore, the companies that produce GE products, and those that sell the final products in grocery stores, are determined to prevent GE food labelling. They know from many studies that the majority of people are suspicious of an untested technology and reluctant to buy food that they know to be genetically engineered. The solution, from the company's perspective, is to avoid labelling GE products.
In January of this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that the "FDA has not found it necessary to conduct comprehensive scientific reviews of foods derived from bio-engineered plants ... consistent with its 1992 policy".2 Genetically modified crops will receive the same consideration for potential health risks as any other new crop plant, despite the knowledge that there are specific reasons why testing should be done.
For example, some genetically modified plants have been implanted with antibiotic-resistant genes, raising fears that the resistance genes could spread from the plant and subsequently be responsible for the development of herbicide resistant weeds. New genetically modified potatoes, engineered with a gene from the snowdrop plant to produce agglutinin, which may reduce susceptibility to insects, have been shown to induce intestinal changes in rats fed engineered potatoes.3 This should raise strong suspicions that eating these potatoes entails a certain amount of risk!
One of the early GE products on the market was bovine growth hormone (rBGH), designed by Monsanto to increase milk production in dairy cattle. Scientific studies have found a link between increased risk of human breast, prostate and colon cancers associated with drinking milk produced from cows injected with rBGH. There is also growing concern that the increasing amounts of hormones used in meat production is producing resistance to antibiotics in humans.
Increasingly, the content of the food we eat is determined by a shrinking number of multinational corporations. The ultimate goal of these corporations is to control every element of the food industry, from seed production to grain marketing, all the way to the final consumer product on the grocery store shelf.
The GE industry is currently dominated by five of the world's leading chemical companies. They include Monsanto (already notorious for its twin gifts to the world of PCBs and Agent Orange), DuPont (whose contributions to science include leaded gas, ozone-depleting CFCs and weapons-grade plutonium), Dow (famous for making Napalm and silicone breast implants), Novartis (the number one agrochemical company in the world) and Aventis (a newly merged creation of Rhone-Poulenc and Hoechst).4
Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, these chemical giants are repositioning themselves as supposedly "live science" corporations. They are establishing interlocking ownership over much of the world's pharmaceutical and food production industries. Monsanto is leading the way in North America where it now owns some of the largest seed companies. Similarly, Novartis, the number one supplier of pesticides and seeds globally, also owns Gerber, the largest baby food manufacturer in the United States.
Despite claims made by pesticide and herbicide manufacturers that GE crops would require less chemical applications, "Recent studies have found that US farmers growing GE crops are using just as many toxic pesticides and herbicides as conventional farmers, and in some cases are using more."5 The so-called "benefit" of these herbicide-resistant crops is that farmers can spray as much of a particular herbicide on their crops as they wish, killing the weeds without damaging their crop. Scientists predict that this could triple the amount of toxic chemicals used in agriculture around the world.
Researchers at Cornell University discovered this year that pollen from genetically engineered corn was poisonous to Monarch butterflies. Previous studies suggest that GE crops also have negative effects on a number of beneficial insects, including ladybugs and lacewings, as well as bees and possibly birds.6
Opposition to GE crops and food is advancing rapidly in country after country. In Europe, seven supermarket chains recently announced they would not sell genetically modified foods. Unilever, Nestlé and Cadburys-Schweppes (multinational food companies) followed suit. In India, the Supreme Court has upheld a ban on testing genetically modified crops. "Activists in India have set fire to fields of crops suspected of being used for testing."7 And in Great Britain, activists have succeeded in virtually eliminating GE foods from grocery stores. "The foods that do contain GE products are labelled, and improved labelling laws are coming into effect this fall."8 This comes on the heels of a "hot summer" in which several GE test crops were uprooted and destroyed by anti-GE crop activists from Greenpeace UK.
In Canada, Greenpeace Canada and the Council of Canadians recently launched a joint pan-Canadian campaign against GE foods, targeting Loblaw's, one of the countries largest grocery store chains. Amongst other demands, the campaign calls upon Loblaw's to remove GE products from its "President's Choice" and "No Name" brand products, and to phase out GE foods from all other products in its stores, while labelling all GE foods on its shelves in the meantime.
This is only the beginning in what will undoubtedly be a long and bitter struggle to wrest control of the food we grow and consume from the pesticide and herbicide-polluted hands of the international chemical industry. The attempts of international chemical companies to control our very diet must be stopped before they endanger the very future of the human race through the unknown and untested effects of genetically modifying the food we eat.
1. Jennifer Story. "Field of Genes", Canadian Perspectives, Fall 1999, p. 9.
2. Anonymous. "Health risks of genetically modified foods", The Lancet, Vol. 353, Number 9167, May 29, 1999, via Internet.
3. Ibid., The Lancet.
4. Barlow, Maude. "Five Problems with GE Foods", Canadian Perspectives, Fall 1999, p. 5.
5. Cummins, Ronnie. "Hazards of Genetically Engineered Foods and Crops: Why We Need A Global Moratorium", Campaign for Food Safety GE Fact Sheet & Guidelines for Grassroots Action, http://www.purefood.org, p.2.
6. Ibid., p. 3.
7. Ibid., The Lancet.
8. Ibid., p. 9.