Next, and driven by a desire to keep up with this sexy new technology, the EU introduced a similar regulatory framework, again designed to not impede progress. (17)The regime, which meant that new GM products were permitted to be released without any safety or toxicological tests (18) was not considered satisfactorily rigorous by many people.
Then Acting Professor of Genetics at Cambridge University, Don MacDonald, suggests that testing GM foods for side effects and safety is far less rigorous than for pharmaceuticals and that FDA regulations let GM foods through the middle of their regulatory system.
An article in
Nature
on October 7, 1999, from Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit suggests "substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept" based on "a commercial and political judgement masquerading as if it were scientific."
Even Monsanto PR man, Bernard Marantelli, admits substantial equivalence "does seem a bit weak at times."
Dr Margaret Burchett, an environmental toxicologist at Sydney’s University of Technology, suggests that "if we’re introducing a new ingredient into food, why is it not more important to do the same sort of testing as we do with drugs?" Her view is that researchers who routinely work out the toxicity of new pharmaceutical drugs and other chemicals of unknown potential impact on human health should, in the same way, be able to establish the potential toxicity of GM foods.
According to the
Nature
article, such testing would have had two main drawbacks.
First, it "would delay access to the marketplace by at least five years and would add approximately $US25 million per product to the cost of research and development.
Second, by definition, using Acceptable Daily Intakes ADIs (usually defined as one-hundredth of the highest dose shown to be harmless to laboratory animals) would have restricted the use of GM foods to a marginal role in the diet."
The scientific argument was more pragmatic: "Sure they’ve been tested," says Dr John Archer, of Cambridge University’s Genetic’s department. "They’ve been tested for five years on millions of Americans!"
Concerns for the third world.
Monsanto’s so-called "terminator gene" and Roundup Ready seed created a serious issue around whether farmers in the developing world should become locked into a cycle of dependence on patented seed.
Furtive introduction.
People were eating GM foods imported from the US, such as soy products, (60% of processed foods contain soy (19), including the syrup for Coke, McDonalds hamburger buns, Heinz ketchup, Betty Crocker cake mixes and some baby foods (20), corn (which incorporated the controversial antibiotic ‘marker’ genes) and
Flavr Savr
tomato paste (which had cost US$ 95m to get onto the market) before they knew much about the technology at all.
Footnotes:
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