There is a lot of competition for our attention, and many issues that seem urgent and controversial. Sometimes important issues just fall off the radar because of this competition. Part of our goal at SBM is to keep tabs on relevant issues – antivaccine efforts, promotion of pseudoscience in medicine, weakening consumer protection laws, and many others. That is when a lot of harm occurs, when the public is not paying attention, and fanatics are tirelessly working in the background to subvert science and public health. So when an important issue has not been in the news recently, I like to take a look and see what’s going on.
GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is one of the topics I try to track carefully, even when it’s not making headlines. The first GMO food was approved in 1994 (a GMO tomato that is no longer on the market), so we are getting close to 30 years of GMOs. Opponents of GMOs falsely claim that they have not been studied enough (there is more evidence for their safety than other food products) and that there may be long term unknown risks. They were wrong 30 years ago, but it was at least true that GMO introduction into the food market and animal feed was new. But the “new” argument, by necessity, doesn’t age well. By now, if there were any actual risk to GMO foods, we would likely be seeing the result – and we are not.
The labeling of GMOs have been updated in the US, and while there is no evidence that this is useful information to consumers, there has been a reasonable improvement. The USDA now uses the term “bioengineered” to refer to any food product that has detectable levels of altered genetic material – genes that could not have results from usual breeding techniques. The term “GMO” now is restricted to those organisms with foreign DNA introduced, usually transgenic, from distant organisms, not possible with breeding. Bioengineered can also refer to a host of processes, such as using CRISPR to alter existing genes without introducing new genes.
As an aside, I find it ironic that a large number of available crops were produced over the last century through mutation breeding. This technique uses chemical or radiation to dramatically increase the rate of mutation (a thousand to a million fold) to increase the number of varieties to select from. But mutation breeding is not considered GMO or bioengineered. Many other crops are hybrids, even forced hybrids that would not occur in nature. But labeling such crops would be pointless, and banning them impossible, and they constitute virtually our entire agricultural industry.
Safety of bioengineered crops
Each bioengineered crop is studied for safety, to ensure that they do not introduce any new allergens or toxins. They are more studied than non-bioengineered crops, even those produced through mutation breeding. The claim that bioengineered crops are not adequately studied is simply wrong and hypocritical.
But we also have a lot of ecological evidence about GMOs in general. Because of the agricultural advantages of many GMO crops, animal feed transitioned from entirely non-GMO to mostly GMO very quickly. A 2017 review of studies, essentially two decades after this switch, found:
Based on this literature review, we conclude that there is no clear evidence that feed composed of first generation GM crops has adverse effects on animal health.
Literally trillions of animals have been fed with GMO feed without any detectable negative health effect. However, switching to non-GMO feed can have negative effects. According to research conducted by Iowa State University, such a change would increase greenhouse gas emissions by 7%, increase land use, and increase the price of food.
To date there have been over 3,000 studies looking at the health and environmental safety of GMO crops, without any evidence of harm or a legitimate safety issue. Based on this evidence, 280 scientific organizations around the world have declared that GMOs are just as safe as non-GMO foods and present no special risk. There is, in fact, an overwhelming scientific consensus that GMOs currently on the market are safe and pose no threat to the environment.
On the contrary, GMO technology has been critical to the agricultural industry, increasing efficiency, food safety, and reducing spoilage. Banning GMOs would have a net negative effect on the environment and worsen food security. This effect will only get greater in the future, as GMO technology progresses and the human population grows.
This disconnect between public fears, caused by a fearmongering campaign of misinformation, and a strong scientific consensus based on decades of research is stark and very dangerous. One particularly poignant example is the fate of golden rice – a bioengineered variety of rice with enhanced beta carotene meant to reduce the burden of vitamin A deficiency, especially in developing parts of the world. There are no legitimate concerns about golden rice – the patent rights are freely licensed, there is no issue with pesticide use, and there are no safety issues. The best opponents can do is to request even more research – and endless game of shifting the goalpost, or to claim that golden rice is not that effective. It seems what they are really afraid of is that golden rice will be successful, shifting public opinion away from their propaganda.
The Philippines has approved golden rice, and so far farmers have produced over 100 tons of golden rice grain. However, activists have managed to convince the Philippines Supreme Court to keep this grain away from malnourished children by claiming that it is a risk to nature. There is a temporary stay on releasing the grain, pending arguments about the safety and environmental impact of golden rice. They are trying a desperate last minute plea to relitigate the scientific evidence that has already been reviewed. This is a tragedy in the making, based entirely on pseudoscience.
The GMO saga is still playing itself out. On one hand, time is on the side of science here. The longer we go without the fears of anti-GMO activists being realized, the stronger a case we build for the safety of bioengineering technologies and specific crops. Further, the technology continues to improve, and new applications are being developed. The need for bioengineered crops is also growing, and issues like climate change, food security, and land use, are increasingly eclipsing the false concerns of activists. But at the same time it is easy to exert a sort-of heckler’s veto on the technology, making it too controversial and too costly to be commercially viable. That is exactly what we are seeing play out in the Philippines over golden rice.
This gets back to the core problems – activists are tireless, while the defenders of science and common sense have countless battles on their hands and a lot of competition for their attention. We should not take our collective eyes off the issue of golden rice and the broader issue of the benefits of bioengineering. The stakes are just getting higher.
