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February 11, 1999
AGAINST THE GRAIN
A new book by Marc Lappe and Britt Bailey, AGAINST THE GRAIN, makes it clear that genetic engineering is revolutionizing U.S. agriculture almost overnight.[1]
In 1997, 15% of the U.S. soybean crop was grown from genetically engineered seed. By next year, if Monsanto Corporation's timetable unfolds on schedule, 100% of the U.S. soybean crop (60 million acres) will be genetically engineered.[1,pg.5] The same revolution is occurring, at the same pace, in cotton. Corn, potatoes, tomatoes and other food crops are lagging slightly behind but, compared to traditional rates of change in farming, they are being deployed into the global ecosystem at blinding speed.
The mass media have largely maintained silence about the genetic engineering revolution in agriculture, and government regulators have imposed no labeling requirements, so the public has little or no knowledge that genetically altered foods are already being sold in grocery stores everywhere, and that soon few traditional forms of food may remain on the shelves.
Genetic engineering is the process whereby genes of one species are implanted in another species, to give new traits to the recipient. Traditionally the movement of genes has only been possible between closely-related species. Under the natural order established by the Creator, there was no way dog genes could get into cats. Now, however, genetic engineering allows scientists to play God, removing genes from a trout or a mosquito and implanting them in a tomato, for better or for worse.
Three federal agencies regulate genetically-engineered crops and foods -- the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The heads of all three agencies are on record with speeches that make them sound remarkably like cheerleaders for genetic engineering, rather than impartial judges of a novel and powerful new technology, and all three agencies have set policies that:
** No public records need be kept of which farms are using genetically-engineered seeds;
** Companies that buy from farmers and sell to food manufacturers and grocery chains do not need to keep genetically-engineered crops separate from traditional crops, so purchasers have no way to avoid purchasing genetically engineered foods;
** No one needs to label any crops, or any food products, with information about their genetically engineered origins, so consumers have no way to exercise informed choice in the grocery store. In the U.S., every food carries a label listing its important ingredients, with the remarkable exception of genetically engineered foods.
These policies have two main effects:
(1) they have kept the public in the dark about the rapid spread of genetically engineered foods onto the family dinner table, and
(2) they will prevent epidemiologists from being able to trace health effects, should any appear, because no one will know who has been exposed to novel gene products and who has not.
Today Pillsbury food products are made from genetically-engineered crops. Other foods that are now genetically engineered include Crisco; Kraft salad dressings; Nestle's chocolate; Green Giant harvest burgers; Parkay margarine; Isomil and ProSobee infant formulas; and Wesson vegetable oils. Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos and Ruffles Chips -- and french fried potatoes sold by McDonald's -- are genetically engineered.[1,pg.92]
By next year, if Monsanto's plans develop on schedule -- and there is no reason to think they won't -- 100% of the U.S. soybean crop will be genetically engineered. Eighty percent of all the vegetable oils in American foods are derived from soy beans, so most foods that contain vegetable oils will contain genetically engineered components by next year or the year after.[1,pg.52]
It is safe to say that never before in the history of the world has such a rapid and large-scale revolution occurred in a nation's food supply. And not just the U.S. is targeted for change. The genetic engineering companies (all of whom used to be chemical companies) -- Dow, DuPont, Novartis, and preeminently, Monsanto -- are aggressively promoting their genetically engineered seeds in Europe, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, India, China and elsewhere. Huge opposition has developed to Monsanto's technology everywhere it has been introduced outside the United States. Only in the U.S. has the "agbiotech" revolution been greeted with a dazed silence.
Monsanto -- the clear leader in genetically engineered crops -- argues that genetic engineering is necessary (nay, ESSENTIAL) if the world's food supply is to keep up with human population growth. Without genetic engineering, billions will starve, Monsanto says. However, neither Monsanto nor any of the other genetic engineering companies appears to be developing genetically engineered crops that might solve global food shortages. Quite the opposite.
If genetically engineered crops were aimed at feeding the hungry, then Monsanto and the others would be developing seeds with certain predictable characteristics: (a) ability to grow on substandard or marginal soils; (b) plants able to produce more high-quality protein, with increased per-acre yield, without increasing the need for expensive machinery, chemicals, fertilizers, or water; (c) they would aim to favor small farms over larger farms; (d) the seeds would be cheap and freely available without restrictive licensing; and (e) they would be for crops that feed people, not meat animals.
None of the genetically engineered crops now available, or in development (to the extent that these have been announced) has any of these desirable characteristics. Quite the opposite. The new genetically engineered seeds require high-quality soils, enormous investment in machinery, and increased use of chemicals. There is evidence that their per-acre yields are about 10% lower than traditional varieties (at least in the case of soybeans),[1,pg.84] and they produce crops largely intended as feed for meat animals, not to provide protein for people. The genetic engineering revolution has nothing to do with feeding the world's hungry.
The plain fact is that fully two-thirds of the genetically engineered crops now available, or in development, are designed specifically to increase the sale of pesticides produced by the companies that are selling the genetically engineered seeds.[1,pg.55] For example, Monsanto is selling a line of "Roundup Ready" products that has been genetically engineered to withstand heavy doses of Monsanto's all-time top money-making herbicide, Roundup (glyphosate). A Roundup Ready crop of soybeans can withstand a torrent of Roundup that kills any weeds competing with the crop. The farmer gains a $20 per acre cost-saving (compared to older techniques that relied on lesser quantities of more expensive chemicals), but the ecosystem receives much more Roundup than formerly. To make Roundup Ready technology legal, EPA had to accommodate Monsanto by tripling the allowable residues of Roundup that can remain on the crop.[1,pg.75] Monsanto's patent on Roundup runs out in the year 2000, but any farmer who adopts Roundup Ready seeds must agree to buy only Monsanto's brand of Roundup herbicide. Thus Monsanto's patent monopoly on Roundup is effectively extended into the foreseeable future -- a shrewd business maneuver if there ever was one. However, this should not be confused with feeding the world's hungry. It is selling more of Monsanto's chemicals and filling the corporate coffers, which is what it was intended to do. "Feeding the hungry" is a sales gimmick, not a reality.
Monsanto's other major line of genetically engineered crops contains the gene from a natural pesticide called Bt. Bt is a naturally-occurring soil organism that kills many kinds of caterpillars that like to eat the leaves of crops. Bt is the pesticide of choice in low-chemical-use farming, IPM [integrated pest management] and organic farming. Farmers who try to minimize their use of synthetic chemical pesticides rely on an occasional dusting with Bt to prevent a crop from being overrun with leaf-eating caterpillars. To them, Bt is a God-send, a miracle of nature.
Monsanto has taken the Bt gene and engineered it into cotton, corn and potatoes. Every cell of every plant contains the Bt gene and thus produces the Bt toxin. It is like dusting the crop heavily with Bt, day after day after day. The result is entirely predictable, and not in dispute. When insect pests eat any part of these crops, the only insects that will survive are those that are (a) resistant to the Bt toxin, or (b) change their diet to prefer other plants to eat, thus disrupting the local ecosystem and perhaps harming a neighboring farmer's crops.
According to Dow Chemical scientists who are marketing their own line of Bt-containing crops, within 10 years Bt will have lost its usefulness because so many insects will have developed resistance to its toxin.[1,pg.70] Thus Monsanto and Dow are profiting bountifully in the short term, while destroying the usefulness of the one natural pesticide that undergirds the low-pesticide approach of IPM and organic farming. It is another brilliant -- if utterly ruthless and antisocial -- Monsanto business plan.
Ultimately, for sustainability and long-term maximum yield, agricultural ecosystems must become diversified once again. This is the key idea underlying organic farming. Monoculture cropping -- growing acre upon acre of the same crop -- is the antithesis of sustainability because monocultures are fragile and unstable, subject to insect swarms, drought, and blight. Monocultures can only be sustained by intensive, expensive inputs of water, energy, chemicals, and machinery. Slowly over the past two decades, the movement toward IPM and organic farming has begun to take hold in this country -- despite opposition from the federal government, from the chemical companies, from the banks that make farm loans, and from the corporations that sell insurance. Now comes the genetic engineering revolution, which is dragging U.S. agriculture back down the old path toward vast monocultures, heavy reliance on machinery, energy, water, and chemicals, all of which favors the huge farm over the small family operation. It is precisely the wrong direction to be taking agricultural technology in the late 20th century, if the goals are long-term maximum yield, food security, and sustainability.
It is a wrong direction for another reason as well.
When 100% of the soybeans in the U.S. are grown from Roundup Ready seed -- next year -- then 100% of America's soybean farmers will be dependent upon a single supplier for all their seed and the chemicals needed to allow those seeds to thrive. In sum, Monsanto will have achieved a monopoly on a fundamental food crop. It is clear that Monsanto's goal is a similar monopoly on every major food crop here and abroad. If something doesn't change soon, it is safe to predict that a small number of "life science" corporations (as they like to call themselves) -- the majority of them American and the remainder European -- will have a monopoly on the seed needed to raise all of the world's major food crops. Then the hungry, like the well-fed, will have to pay the corporate owners of this new technology for permission to eat.
DIOXINS--THE VIEW FROM EUROPE
The term "dioxin" encompasses a family of 219 different toxic chemicals, all with similar characteristics but different potencies.[1] In recent years, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization, has labeled the most potent dioxin, called TCDD, a known human carcinogen.[2] IARC has labeled many of the less potent dioxins "probable" human carcinogens.
Low-level exposures to dioxins are also known to interfere with the immune system, the reproductive system, the endocrine system, and the early growth and development of humans and animals.[3] In sum, dioxins are a family of powerful all-purpose poisons.
In the early 1990s, many governments, including the U.S. government, reported that everyone in the industrialized world is exposed to substantial quantities of dioxins day in and day out, thus acknowledging a humiliating failure of the world's public health apparatus.
In 1991, the U.S. EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] with considerable fanfare announced it was undertaking a full-blown scientific re-assessment of dioxin. Nine years later, that re-assessment has now disappeared from view and may have died, a victim of politics. (See REHW #390, #391.) The big corporate dioxin dischargers are also major contributors to federal election campaigns, and the Clinton/Gore administration at this point in history seems incapable of even gumming the hand that feeds it. Furthermore, since 1994, the Republican-dominated Congress has dropped all pretense of acting independently of its corporate sponsors.
Meanwhile, a meeting of 40 scientists convened in Switzerland last May by the World Health Organization concluded that dioxin is 2 to 10 times as toxic as it had seemed in 1990,[3] and a group of German scientists concluded last April that dioxin may be responsible for 12% of human cancers in industrialized countries.[4] If this estimate were correct, it would mean dioxin is responsible for 120,000 cancers each year in the U.S. This new German estimate is at least 10 times as high as previous estimates by U.S. government scientists (see REHW #390, #391).
The good news is that the levels of dioxin in the environment have dropped as much as 50% in the last decade as governments in Europe and local activists in this country have forced industry to adopt cleaner technologies.[3] Still, many of the effects of dioxins are delayed by a decade or more, so health effects from past exposures will continue to manifest themselves for several decades.
Except as laboratory curiosities, dioxins are never intentionally produced because they have no commercial value. However, they are created as unwanted byproducts by most combustion processes; during the manufacture of many kinds of chemicals, pesticides and wood preserva- tives; during incineration of medical, municipal and hazard- ous wastes; in metal smelting; and in the manufacture of paper. An important pathway for spreading dioxins into the environment is using sewage sludge as a soil amendment or a fertilizer.
Dioxins are also present in cigarette smoke at about the same concentration found in the stack of a municipal incinerator, the difference being that no one draws the smoke from an incinerator into their lungs undiluted, or exhales incinerator flue gas into an enclosed room for others to breathe.[5]
Some dioxins are more toxic than others, and the scientific community has established a way of comparing the toxicities and the quantities of various mixtures of dioxins. The technique is called TEQ, or toxic equivalents. The TEQ system takes into account the variations in toxicity and expresses toxicity in terms of the most toxic dioxin, which is TCDD.
For example, U.S. EPA estimates that total dioxin emissions in the U.S. averaged about 3000 grams (3 kilograms, or 6.6 pounds) per year TEQ in 1995. This means that all of the dioxins released into the environment in 1995 in the U.S. had a total toxicity equal to the toxicity of 3000 grams of TCDD.[6] (EPA acknowledges considerable uncertainty in this estimate; the true average lies somewhere between 1200 grams and 7900 grams TEQ, EPA says.[6,pg.2-7])
According to EPA, the major sources of dioxins in 1995 were municipal garbage incinerators (1100 grams, 36% of the national total); medical waste incinerators (477 grams, 16%); cement kilns burning hazardous waste (153 grams, 5%); industrial coal combustion (73 grams, 2.4%); residential wood combustion (63 grams, 2%); industrial wood combustion (29 grams, 1%); diesel engines (33 grams, 1%); copper smelting (504 grams, 17%); aluminum smelting (17 grams, 0.5%); forest fires (208 grams, 7%); incineration of sewage sludge (6 grams, 0.2%); plus 375 grams (12% of the national total) spread directly into the nation's soils in sewage sludge.[6,pg.2-13] (The total is not exactly 100% because of rounding.)
Dioxins do not dissolve readily in water, but they do in fat. Therefore, fat-containing foods tend to be contaminated with dioxins. Adults in the U.S. take in between one and 10 picograms of dioxin TEQ per kilogram of body weight per person per day (pg/kg/day).[1,3] (A kilogram is 1000 grams, or 2.2 pounds; a picogram is a trillionth of a gram and there are 28 grams in an ounce.) Eighty to 90 percent of our daily dioxin intake comes from eating milk, meat and fish.
Breast-fed infants take in 70 picograms of dioxin TEQ per kilogram of body weight per day -- seven to 70 times as much as the average adult.[3] Despite this, breast-fed infants are healthier than infants fed bottled formula.
The cancer hazard from routine exposure to dioxin has recently been estimated by a group of German scientists.[4] They report that, for adults, the lifetime cancer hazard lies somewhere between one per hundred and one per thousand for each picogram of dioxin TEQ ingested per kilogram of body weight per day (pg/- kg/day) Since the daily ingestion in the U.S. ranges from one to 10 pg/kg/day, we can calculate that the cancer hazard from environmental exposure to dioxin ranges between one per thousand and 100 per thousand. The middle of this range would be 50 per thousand. Because the average person's lifetime chance of getting cancer is now about 400 per thousand (or four in 10), we can see that routine exposure to environmental dioxins may be making a substantial (12%) contribution to the danger of cancer in this country, if the German estimate holds true. If it holds true, it qualifies as a public health disaster.
The mechanisms by which dioxin causes cancer remain poorly understood. In most studies, dioxin seems to be a powerful promoter of cancer, rather than an initiator. In other words, once a cell has been made cancer-prone by something else, dioxin may push it over the edge and turn it into a full-blown cancer. This would explain why dioxin seems to cause a general increase in many cancers among exposed populations.[2]
However, a study published during 1998 made it clear that dioxin can cause breast cancer in rats without either initiating it or promoting it in the traditional sense. As we reported earlier (REHW #630), researchers in the U.K. exposed pregnant rats to small amounts of dioxin on the 15th day of pregnancy.[7]
The female offspring of the dioxin-exposed pregnant rats were born normal, but by the time they were 7 weeks old, their mammary glands had developed an unusually high number of "terminal end buds" -- the places in a breast where breast cancers develop. Four studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between the number of terminal end buds in a breast and its susceptibility to breast cancer.
The British researchers went on to expose these young rats (and a control group) to a well-known carcinogenic chemical, dimethylbenz[a]anthracene. The dioxin-exposed young rats developed many more breast cancers than did the control group.
Thus a chemical (like dioxin) that, under some circumstances, appears to protect against breast cancer may, in fact, under other circumstances, cause it.
Based on non-cancer health effects, the World Health Organization's meeting on dioxin in May, 1998, recommended that the "tolerable daily intake" of dioxin should be between 1 and 4 picograms per kilogram of body weight per day (pg/kg/day). To reach this number, they took the lowest observed level that caused problems in laboratory animals and reduced it by a safety factor of 10. Normal practice in such circumstances would be to apply a safety factor of 100, but, according to a knowledgable source who asked not to be quoted, if the WHO group had applied a safety factor of 100 they would have been declaring much of the food supply in industrial countries dangerously contaminated, which they were reluctant to do for political reasons.
The middle of the range that they adopted -- one to 4 pg/kg/day -- would be 2.5 pg/kg/day, 4 times as low as the World Health Organization's 1990 recommendation, which was 10 pg/kg/day as the tolerable daily intake. Thus the tolerable daily intake recommended at the May meeting for an adult weighing 70 kg (154 pounds) would be 2.5 x 70 = 175 picograms per day, or 175 x 365 = 63,875 picograms per year.
Now that we know that a picogram of dioxin has some public health significance, we are in a better position to appreciate that 3000 grams of dioxin emitted each year by industrial sources in the U.S. is a very substantial quantity. If we multiply 3000 grams by a trillion to turn it into picograms, then divide by the U.S. population (260 million), we can see that 3000 grams of dioxin TEQ represents 11 million picograms of dioxin TEQ for each man, woman and child in the U.S. each year.
Scientists at the May, 1998, World Health Organization meeting concluded that, based on animal experiments, the following effects might be expected in humans: decreased sperm counts might be expected in humans who have a daily dioxin intake of 14 pg/kg/day; learning disabilities and endometriosis might be expected in humans with a dioxin intake of 21 pg/kg/day; suppression of the immune system might be expected in offspring of humans with an intake of 37 pg/kg/day.[3,pg.25] The May, 1998 WHO meeting "recognized that subtle effects may already occur in the general population in developed countries at current background levels, 2 to 6 pg/kg body weight. They therefore recommended that every effort should be made to reduce [dioxin] exposure to the lowest possible level," according to a statement released by the World Health Organization.[3]
All together, not very reassuring news from Europe about dioxin, we conclude.
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