GM: Is it too soon?: Tampering with creation

By SIMON COLLINS

New Zealand is about to open the door to genetically modified foods at a moment when most of the rich world's consumers are shunning them. In the two years since the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification recommended "proceeding with caution", there has been little change in the scientific consensus.

There is still no evidence that genetically modified (GM) organisms do any harm either to human health or to the environment. Nor, however, are there long-term studies which prove that there is no harm.

But what has clearly changed is that the consumer revolt, which was just gathering in Europe when the royal commission sat, has been strengthened by broader health worries in the world's affluent societies and has spread around the globe.

This means that when it considers each application for a GM release after the moratorium ends on October 29, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma) will have to weigh up not just the health and environmental risks, but also the potential economic risks to our exports.

Consumers say no

When the royal commission reported in July 2001, it said it was "too early to predict consumer reaction with any certainty". Since then there has been a torrent of evidence, and it all points one way.

An international poll by the Washington-based Pew Trusts, published in June this year, found that 55 per cent of Americans felt it was bad to alter fruit and vegetables scientifically "because it could hurt human health and the environment".

Only 37 per cent felt it was good to alter plants "because it increases crop yields to feed more people and is good for the environment". The numbers who thought it was bad in the other six countries surveyed were 63 per cent in Canada, 65 per cent in Britain, 74 per cent in Italy, 76 per cent in Japan, 81 per cent in Germany and a huge 89 per cent in France.

A Roy Morgan poll last month found slightly smaller numbers saying they would not buy GM food if they could help it: 46 per cent in the US, 49 per cent in New Zealand and 55 per cent in both Australia and Britain.

A telephone survey of around 150 people in each country by the New Zealand consulting firm Berl, published in April, found 30 per cent of Americans, 36 per cent of Australians and 37 per cent of Britons would be "less inclined" to buy even completely unmodified fruit from New Zealand if this country allowed any GM plants or animals.

Elsewhere, evidence is conflicting. A survey found that 79 per cent of Taiwanese students and 82 per cent of Americans would willingly eat foods with GM ingredients, compared with 44 per cent of Norwegians and just 17 per cent of Japanese.

An Asian Food Information Centre street poll found that more than 80 per cent of people in three Chinese cities and in Manila would buy "food that had been modified with biotechnology to improve nutrition, taste or freshness or to protect the environment".

But there are ample signs of opposition. In a 2001 report based on reports by US Department of Agriculture posts, Dale McDonald wrote: "From Poland to Korea to Australia to Mexico, GMOs are getting hit with consumer demonstrations, academic studies, government food-labelling orders and outright bans."

A 2001 survey of Korean consumers found 76 per cent would not buy GM food. Naturally, businesses have responded. South Korean corn importers switched their orders from the US to non-GM Brazilian suppliers two years ago. Canada's canola exports to the European Union collapsed when Canada went GM.

The biggest supermarket chains in Britain, France, Belgium and Switzerland, the European food giant Unilever, Japan's big four brewers and US food companies such as Heinz have all banned GM products. Nestle in Britain is seeking to eliminate GM content from its products. McDonald's and Burger King stopped buying GM potatoes in 2000, effectively ending GM potato cultivation.

Logically, the British Cabinet Office's strategy unit concluded in a report last month: "If consumer attitudes towards GM foods are negative in the short term, then any net cost and/or convenience savings associated with the current generation of GM crops would be likely to be outweighed by the lack of a market".

Who needs it?

A common theme in that report and in others is that GM foods, as distinct from medicines, "do not yet offer discernible benefits to consumers".

One day, understanding what various genes do may help scientists to splice useful qualities into food plants which could help them grow in hot or dry conditions, last longer on the supermarket shelf, improve their nutritional content or get rid of allergens.

But only four GM crops are commercially significant, accounting for 51 per cent of the world's soybeans, 20 per cent of our cotton, 12 per cent of canola (used for cooking oil) and 9 per cent of maize, or corn.

And those four crops have been modified for just two traits: to withstand spraying with weedkillers such as glyphosate, or Roundup (83 per cent), and to insert into the crops a protein made by the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which kills harmful insects that try to eat the crop (25 per cent). Some crops have been modified for both traits.

These changes have benefited only the farmers who grow the crops and the chemical companies that make them, and the weedkillers to go with them - mainly Monsanto, which accounted for 91 per cent of the world's GM crops in late 2001.

Before the new crops were developed, farmers used various sprays that each killed specific weeds, often by ploughing the ground to spray between the rows of the main crop before the crop came up.

Now they can use Roundup as an all-purpose spray that kills everything except the crop that has been modified to withstand it. The overall effect is that they can use less toxic sprays, especially on Bt crops which contain their own "built-in insecticide". That is good for the farmers' pockets, for their health and for the environment. But for ordinary consumers, it has done no good - and may prove to have done harm.

Is it safe?

Michael Meacher, the British Environment Minister who was sacked in June for expressing fears about GM food, points to evidence that:

* Rats fed on GM potatoes by Dr Arpad Pusztai at Scotland's Rowett Research Institute sometimes developed changes in their gut structure and reduced immune responsiveness to harmful agents compared with rats fed on ordinary potatoes.

* A trial commissioned by Britain's Food Standards Agency found that DNA from GM soybeans was transferred to some bacteria in the gut of people who ate the soybeans.

* More than 50 Americans developed allergies from eating "StarLink" maize intended for stockfeed which was mixed by accident with maize for human consumption.

* Allergy rates are rising in all rich countries, for unknown reasons, which scientists presume may be related to our increasingly indoor, sedentary lifestyles. Some believe there is a link with the fact that 60 per cent of all processed foods in industrialised countries now contain ingredients derived from GM soybeans.

* The widespread use of Roundup-resistant plants has led to Roundup-resistant weeds, initially with ryegrass in Australia. It is likely to be only a matter of time until Bt-resistant insects develop.

Meacher says GM foods should be tested on volunteers for between five and 10 years, like new medicines, before being approved for general use.

"There is nothing wrong at all with biotechnology for pharmaceuticals and medicines," he said in Auckland this month. "It's when it is applied to food where it isn't necessary. The human race has fed itself for a quarter of a million years perfectly satisfactorily, and there is a big downside risk [with GM]."

However, an exhaustive 300-page GM Science Review published last month by a British Government-appointed panel concluded that "to date, there is no evidence currently commercialised GM crop varieties or foods made from them are toxic, allergenic or nutritionally deleterious".

"What is the evidence?" it asked. Its answer: tests which found that molecules of GM foods were "substantially equivalent" to original natural foods, apart from their minor genetic changes; and "the absence of evidence of harm" from the GM foods that have been widely eaten for seven years now.

Pusztai's research was not finished because he was sacked after voicing concern about testing procedures for GM foods. No one has ever repeated his study. The Science Review said there was no evidence that the risks of GM were any greater than the risks in other breeding practices, such as radiation-induced mutation.

It said DNA could be transferred into the gut from any food, not just GM food, and insects and weeds could be expected to develop resistance eventually to any new chemical designed to control them. This process could be slowed by keeping non-GM "refuges" for pests and weeds mixed in with GM crops.

The allergies in people who had eaten StarLink corn were later found not to have been caused by the corn.

In fact, detecting allergens in GM foods, where only a few genes had been altered, was easier than finding them in new products created by conventional breeding, such as kiwifruit.

"After the introduction of kiwifruit to the British diet, it became clear that a fraction of the exposed population developed an allergy to it," the report said.

"The societal response appears to be that those who are allergic to kiwifruit should simply try to avoid eating it. The removal of kiwifruit from the British diet would probably not be considered a reasonable response to the problem."

Over to Erma

In New Zealand, it will be up to Erma to weigh up the benefits of each proposed GM release against the risks to human health and the environment and to New Zealand's export markets.

Erma is not exactly known for its ability to take a wide view. A review released by the Government last month said the agency's 60 staff were "perceived to weight science inputs more heavily in risk and benefit ratings than other considerations".

Nevertheless, in a March report to the Cabinet on managing GM after October 29, the Treasury said that: "Prior to any decision on a GM release application, Erma would consider any negative economic spillover impact that might result."

In a paper endorsing the Treasury view, Finance Minister Michael Cullen and Environment Minister Marian Hobbs said Erma "would consider any submission made by an industry or individual that release of a GMO would have a significant negative impact on either the submitter or the economy as a whole.

"Similarly, the benefits considered would include the direct benefits to the applicant as well as wider benefits to New Zealand as a whole."

Here, as overseas, the initial benefits will go largely to farmers and chemical companies. Crop and Food Research's application for field trials of Roundup-resistant onions, for example, will let onion growers do without other weedkillers apart from Roundup, cutting their costs and increasing their net income.

"Onions are economically important to New Zealand. They are our third or fourth-biggest horticultural crop, with exports of $100 million a year," says Crop and Food scientist Colin Eady.

But Roundup resistance is just a start. Eady is already working with collaborators on other genetic changes to improve the onions' flavour, health attributes and resistance to other pests and diseases.

Each improvement may be small. But the cumulative effect of years of gains has made crop yields in general much higher in rich countries like New Zealand. Genetic engineering is not the only way we can continue to make such gains, and while our customers remain leery, it makes sense for us to venture only with care. Yet in the whole spectrum of advancing human understanding, our new knowledge of the genes that make us what and who we are, offers more potential than anything else for improving our condition.

"This is unprecedented. This is not developing a new type of propulsion. This is not inventing a TV set," says the chief executive of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Dr Steve Thompson.

"This is absolutely fundamental to the human race, because it is all about what the human race is and all creation. We can now tamper with creation. It is indeed exciting, awe-inspiring - and potentially terrifying."

In its submission to the royal commission three years ago, the society listed a series of safeguards that were needed before the moratorium on GM releases could be lifted.

With Parliament's education and science committee due to report back by September 5 on the bill setting the terms for "conditional release" of new organisms, Thompson says the safeguards the society wanted are now very nearly in place. "So we are not unhappy that the moratorium is lifted now."

Those safeguards will allow Erma to set conditions such as safe separation distances between GM and non-GM crops, or to allow a release in only one region to test a GM organism's effects on the environment before approving general commercial release.

"Two hundred years ago a scientist would do something and if it went wrong he would probably blow up his hut, or his house," says Thompson.

"These days the scale at which we are doing science is such that we have the capacity to do incredible good, but we also have the capacity to do tremendous bad if we get it wrong.

"There is now the potential for making a mistake of disastrous consequences. That's why we have to be very cautious."