Seeds of doubt

>> Scrapping over genetically modified foods

by NAOMI BLOCH

Lately it seems that Canadians have developed bigger conundrums when cruising down the grocery store aisle than how to keep badly engineered shopping carts from veering into unwary pensioners. It's the mysterious and possibly genetically engineered contents on store shelves that have consumers biting their nails. The Canadian food industry estimates that around 70 per cent of processed food sold contains one or more genetically modified (GM) ingredient. Frozen pizza pockets might be basted in vegetable oil from soybeans engineered to resist weedkillers. The plus in a carton of premium crackers might be syrup from insect-resistant corn.

A poll conducted in February by Léger Marketing for Quebec Science and Protegez-Vous magazines interviewed 1,000 Quebecers on their primary food fears. Thirty per cent of respondents under 35 said they distrusted GMO foods. And two-thirds of respondents from households earning less than $20,000 said they'd prefer to eat organic foods over the GM variety, even though the former can cost four times as much.

The desire to know what's in the food we're eating has fuelled the quest for mandatory labelling of GM foods, but how will this knowledge help consumers make informed choices any more than reading that a TV dinner contains "guar and xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan and natural grill flavour," as published on an organically labelled Cascadian Farm meal?

Clearly, just knowing what's in there isn't enough. But finding more satisfactory answers when it comes to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) might prove just as ambiguous. One side of the debate, led by the biotech industry, claims that GMOs are essentially harmless to humans and could have positive effects like reducing pesticide use and diminishing world hunger. The other side, featuring vocal players like Greenpeace, says these claims are bunk. In black and white terms, it's an easy guess just which side is which, but delving deeper unveils a myriad of greys.

Industry rules

A key problem is that the commericalization of biotechnology is developing too quickly for either national regulations or international environmental and consumer protection policies to keep up. Which is not to say that regulations don't exist. Companies who wish to sell GM seeds or foods in Canada first have to meet both Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Health Canada requirements. CFIA is responsible for regulating GM plants, assessing their impact on the environment and biodiversity and ensuring livestock feed safety. GM crops and foods meant for human consumption must meet Health Canada's Guidelines for the Safety Assessment of Novel Foods as well.

"In terms of environmental safety assessments, we've developed our approach here based on international thinking on the issue," explains the CFIA's Bart Bilmer, director of the office of biotechnology. "We held a couple of large consultations with all stakeholders, and the guidelines and regulations that we have in place now are a result those processes."

These guidelines were developed in the '80s, a lifetime ago by biotech standards. Recently various government agencies asked the Royal Society of Canada to select an expert panel of independent scientists to investigate the current regulatory process, analyze the direction of the industry and make recommendations to improve regulations of food biotechnology in Canada.

Since 1994, more than 45 foods derived from genetically modified crops have been approved by Health Canada. These include canola varieties resistant to weedkillers; potato varieties resistant to Colorado potato beetles; corn varieties resistant to herbicides as well as those resistant to corn borers (crop-destroying insects); soybean varieties and more. Currently these plants are considered to have rather simple genetic modifications--the addition or modification of a single gene out of 26,000. International biotech companies such as Monsanto and Aventis own most of these products.

Needless to say, the Royal Society panel had a healthy number of recommendations to make when it released its report this past January. "There could perhaps be some practices that would be less damaging to the environment if the right transgenically modified plant is developed," claims panel member Marc Fortin, chair in McGill's Plant Science department and a specialist in plant molecular biology. "However, it's not simple to determine whether a genetically modified plant is really an improvement or not over current practices, because genetic modifications might have more unintended effects than what we've generally recognized so far."

The panel deemed that safety testing in the GM food industry is not evaluated using appropriate scientific scrutiny. "It's difficult to have a claim for scientific rigour when the same process that is currently used in science throughout the planet is peer review," says Fortin. "We do not have that system in place for the evaluation of the safety of GM crops at the moment."

But Bilmer feels this is not quite accurate. "We had an outside peer review committee help develop the guidelines which included university professors, consumer groups and environmental groups. So the very foundation of this was based on outside experts." Still, he admits that the agency is looking into the possibility of using additional, more independent sources to appraise industry studies during the safety review process.

Stink over Starlink

Despite what the general public might believe, the largest concerns expressed by the scientific community are not direct human health risks but rather the possible environmental implications of transgenic crops. Though some hoopla has been raised over the chance that GM foods might contain allergens that will cause mild to severe reactions in predisposed people, it is generally felt that the current round of GMOs approved for human consumption pose little risk. The panel has recommended changes to Health Canada's regulations to prepare for the more complex genetic changes coming down the pipeline, which may require more advanced techniques to predict allergenicity.

Some of the first types of GM plants to hit the market were insect-resistant crops. Insect resistance has thus far been created using a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuriniensis (Bt). This gene directs cells to manufacture a protein that is toxic to specific insects, in particular caterpillars and beetles that eat crops. Depending on the strain of Bt used, different insects can be affected. Bt-modified versions of various crops exist, including corn, cotton and potatoes. The now-infamous Starlink corn is a Bt-corn product.

Starlink was identified as potentially containing allergenic properties and thus was only approved for animal feed in the States, and is not legal in Canada. When Starlink, owned by Aventis, erroneously entered the human food supply, anti-GMO activists had a field day. Yet some supporters of biotech foods complain about the hype concerning the allergenic effects of current transgenic foods. "You kind of have the impression that Greenpeace invented this concern," says Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill's Office for Chemistry and Society and outspoken proponent of GMOs.

"The Starlink corn issue was totally scientifically absurd. The distributors, of course, made this ridiculous error of getting it into the human food supply. However there was no risk whatsoever to humans."

Indeed, last week U.S. health officials announced that though 28 people out of 51 who complained of feeling sick after eating Starlink in processed foods exhibited allergic symptoms, none of those tested showed any hypersensitivity to the Cry9C protein--the protein on which the Starlink ban is based. This may come as a surprise to those who've picked up on Greenpeace's provocative Franken-Tony the Tiger ("They're Grr-r-ross!") anti-GMO campaign, but the Starlink fiasco certainly raises issues about preventing a repeat of such occurrences.

Genetic pollution

"Our basic policy is that we are against the dissemination of GMOs for mainly environmental reasons," says Éric Darier, GMO campaigner at Greenpeace. "We're concerned about the unknown consequences in terms of genetic pollution: superweeds, increase in chemical use, harm to beneficial insects, the threat to organic farming."

In 1998, a Swiss study showed that green lacewing caterpillars were more likely to die if they'd eaten corn borer catepillars that fed on Bt corn rather than regular corn. This example has led to fears that the entire food chain could be disrupted by the new technology. Another issue is that targeted insects could evolve to survive Bt pesticide. The industry is trying to safeguard against this by instructing farmers to plant 20 per cent of their field with non-Bt crops.

There are further fears that if pollen from certain GM plants reaches a weedy relative, the additionally fortified wild plant might become unusually resistant to predators. In the case of farmers' fields, herbicide-resistant weeds could force the farmer to resort to more extreme chemical use to eradicate the invaders.

But Fortin cringes at some of the Greenpeace terms. "Superweeds is a cute keyword but I don't think it addresses what's really happening out there. Gene flow is the transfer of recombinant DNA incorporated in genetically modified plants into wild populations. How will that effect wild populations? Will they become a little bit more aggressive, or a little bit less aggressive? Will they spread a bit more, lose habitat or gain habitat? How will that affect the behaviour of the wild populations?

"We don't have a wild corn population in Canada, for example," continues Fortin. "So for some plants the question is easier to answer. For other plants, like canola, it's a question that's a lot more difficult to answer. And the research is simply not there."

Which is the crux of the problem for both sides of the debate. Pro-GMO folk often cite the reported benefits of Bt cotton. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1999 American growers in states using high amounts of Bt cotton sprayed 21 per cent less insecticide than usual. "Cotton is one of the most pesticide-intensive crops grown in the world," says Schwarcz. "So if you want to have an impact somewhere, that's a good place to do it." And Bt corn is proclaimed by some advocates to produce a five to 15 per cent increase in yield, which should translate into less pesticide usage for the same amount of crop.

But anti-GMO activists have different beefs. "A study released just this May clearly shows that Ready Roundup soya needs more herbicide than non-transgenic soya," says Darier. "In 1998, the use of herbicide on transgenic soya increased by 30 per cent in at least six U.S. States." The biotech industry counters that while more herbicide may be used for some crops, the weedkillers applied are the more benign glyphosate herbicides, rather than the more toxic and less biodegradable chemicals traditionally used in large-scale, monoculture farming.

"To talk about GM plants is an oversimplification," cautions Fortin. "Each genetic modification is different and we have to stop putting them all in the same basket. We have to start studying what each one of those does in terms of affecting the environment."

Feed the world

Then there's the advocates' proposal that foods can be genetically engineered to be more nutritious or to survive in difficult farming conditions, which could be a godsend to malnourished developing nations. "Genetic modification makes it possible to have crops that will grow in soil that has a lot of salt content, for example," says Schwarcz. "More importantly, it will make it possible to improve the quality of the crops." Schwarcz refers to the engineered crop known as Golden Rice, which was developed by two researchers who produced rice with enhanced beta-carotene and other carotenoids, nutrients the body converts into vitamin A. UNICEF estimates that some 124-million children around the world are dangerously deficient in vitamin A, and the two European scientists appeared to be addressing this humanitarian need. "Vitamin A is made in the body from beta-carotene, which is the pigment that we have in carrots for example. But rice contains virtually no beta-carotene. This predisposes them to various types of cancers and to eye problems," says Schwarcz.

But critics contend that while there may be scientists with noble charitable notions, the reality of distributing these products is more troubling. The GM food business, they claim, very much resembles the pharmaceutical market--including many of the same players--and is more likely to follow the example set by big pharmas' responses to the African AIDS epidemic. In the case of Golden Rice, despite being the result of public research, the GMO is now ensnared in around 70 patents owned by 32 companies and institutions, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.

Because of the complexity of licensing arrangements, the inventors relinquished their rights to Greenovation, a biotech spin-off company from the University of Freiburg, which then struck a deal with AstraZeneca (now Syngenta). Critics say the deal not only ceded a decade of publicly funded research to commercial control, it also strengthened the North's command of patents worldwide. Beyond this is the censure that investing in monoculture staple crops is not a well-conceived solution, since it contributes to already unbalanced food production patterns.

With the global market for biotechnology applications projected to reach $50-billion annually by 2005 (revenue projections exceed $5-billion by 2002 in the Canadian agricultural biotech industry alone), halting GMO research and production seems a pipe dream. But cautious optimists will admit that, with proper controls, some good may come.

Greenpeace's Darier cannot imagine such a rosy picture. "Sure, with regulations and proper scientific mechanisms in place there could be some potential benefit to some plants. Except that when it comes to GMOs we have to look at the broader picture."