'Frankenstein food' a good thing? It's all great GM lies

'Frankenstein food' a good thing? It's all great GM lies

By
Joanna Blythman

PUBLISHED:

23:44, 17 December 2012, UPDATED:08:19, 18 December 2012

There is no doubt that it was a
declaration of the Government’s colours on genetically modified farming
when Environment Secretary Owen Paterson rounded on critics of GM
technology as ‘humbugs’ last week, and insisted GM food should be grown
and sold widely in Britain.
During
the course of his ringing endorsement, he managed to spark outrage and
alarm by claiming ‘there isn’t a single piece of meat being served [in a
typical London restaurant] where a bullock hasn’t eaten some GM feed’.
His
belligerent intent was quite clear. The message he wanted to get across
was that GM crops are already here and in the food chain, there’s
nothing to fear — and nothing we can do about it.




Outspoken: Environment Secretary Owen Paterson
rounded on critics of GM technology as 'humbugs' last week, proving his
stance on the issue

This is exactly the sort of
ill-informed complacency the biotech corporations pushing GM crops seem
to encourage. But the truth is that Mr Paterson is wrong — and worse
still, being misleading.
For
a start, he is displaying a remarkable ignorance of how livestock
farming works in this country. Most premium beef in Britain comes from
cattle raised on grass, animals that would not be fed any feed-mix that
could potentially contain imported GM material.
The
same goes for organically farmed beef: the feeding of GM material is
expressly banned under

So there are plenty of
succulent steaks in London restaurants and in butchers’ shops across the
land that come from cattle that have never seen a single grain of GM
feed. And the same goes for lamb, as most sheep are grass-fed.
As
Environment Secretary, Mr Paterson should know this, or at least have a
small army of civil servants who can tell him. And yet he still rode
into attack, desperately trying to convince everyone that GM crops are
here, that they’re being fed to British farm animals without causing any
harm, and that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
Is
it coincidence, I wonder, that he did so after ministers and senior
civil servants met in the summer with some of the giants of the biotech
and agro-chemical world to discuss how best to advance the cause of GM
crops in this country?




Holes in knowledge: The Environment Secretary's ignorance of how livestock farming works in the UK is shocking

The biotech giants are trying
everything they can to get GM crops growing in Britain. And if our
regulators swallow uncritically the pro-GM line, they could make this
breakthrough.
More than ten
years after the only large-scale GM crop trials conducted in this
country were generally accepted to have been a failure, having caused
significant and measurable harm to wild plants, insects and birds, the
Coalition Government now seems to have been convinced that GM crops —
many of which could end up in animal feed — are the agricultural way
forward.
Mr Paterson says
he is now sure they are ‘a good thing’ and have ‘real environmental
benefits’. It is only the wise caution of other European countries such
as France and Germany that is delaying the arrival of GM crops in this
country.
But if they are
such a good thing, why is the Government allowing them to enter our food
chain by the back door? EU rules require foods containing GM material
for human consumption to be clearly labelled, so why won’t the
Government introduce a labelling scheme for products from animals
reared on GM feed, too?
After
all, the latest NOP poll conducted in 2010 found that 89 per cent of
British people want food from GM-fed animals to be labelled. Ministers,
however, know what the big biotech companies responsible for the
development of GM crops discovered some years ago: that if they are
labelled as GM, the public won’t buy them.
Advocates
of GM crops say this is simply a knee-jerk, semi-hysterical response to
all the adverse publicity that surrounds GM and the alarmist talk of
so-called ‘Frankenstein foods’. They’re particularly fond of pointing
out that GM food is just food and that digestive systems — be they of
farm animals or humans — won’t be able to distinguish it, or the
nutrients it contains, from non-GM food.
But
there’s a growing body of scientific evidence that shows this isn’t
true. Most worrying are the findings of Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini
and his team at the University of Caen in France, who found that rats
fed for an extended period on GM maize were several times more likely to
develop tumours of the digestive tract and suffer severe kidney and
liver damage.




Controversial: Advocates of GM products claim
that the human and animal digestive systems will not be able to detect
it - an idea that is rapidly being proved wrong by science

The GM maize they were being
fed was one of the most common, a variety that had been genetically
modified to give the plant resistance to the weedkiller glyphosate,
better known under its brand name, Roundup. Such resistance, in theory,
allows the farmer to suppress weed growth with glyphosate and allows the
remaining maize to thrive, free of all competition from weeds.
Except
it hasn’t worked out like that, as farmers in the U.S. and Canada, the
two countries where GM crops were most enthusiastically adopted, have
discovered to their cost.
Yields
have been disappointing and new ‘super-weeds’ have emerged that are
every bit as resistant to glyphosate as the GM maize is. As a result,
U.S. farmers have to use ever-larger amounts of herbicides and
pesticides (herbicide use rose by more than 30 per cent in 2007-8 alone)
causing untold devastation to the natural environment and sparking a
disastrous decline in honeybee numbers.

And then, to top it all, along comes
research, including that done by Professor Seralini, that indicates the
result may not even be safe to eat.
More
research needs to be done to identify just what it is that is causing
the laboratory animals to develop fatal diseases. But already it is
becoming clear that, contrary to everything the cheerleaders for GM are
telling us, some of the modified genetic material can indeed survive
digestion, and can pass into the bloodstream of an animal in the form of
an intact protein.

But it’s also possible that the
powerfully toxic agro-chemicals used alongside GM crops, such as
glyphosate or certain insecticides, are being absorbed directly into the
plant where, in due course, they poison the animal that eats it.
That
might explain some anecdotal evidence I came across recently concerning
a Danish farmer whose pig herd had mysteriously fallen ill. Without
telling his staff, he secretly swapped the feed he had been using, which
contained GM material, for a feed-mix that did not and, lo and behold,
his pigs recovered.
Professor
Seralini’s findings are certainly no one-off. Another research
programme found that rats fed on genetically modified tomatoes developed
stomach lesions, while research from New Zealand has shown a GM variety
of wheat having the potential to produce liver damage.




Benefit? Farmers in the U.S. and Canada, the two
countries where GM crops were most enthusiastically adopted, have
discovered the cost with the rise of 'super-weeds'

In fact, as the deeply
concerning evidence on the health risk of GM crops stacks up, opposition
to them looks like a wise precaution.
It
seems that, if they are given the choice, consumers are absolutely
right to reject GM foods. In 2010, a poll conducted by the European
Commission found 95 per cent of people rating GM foods as potentially
unsafe and lacking in any real benefits. But the problem is that we are
not being given the choice.
In
America, where the big agro-conglomerates wield tremendous influence,
foodstuffs do not need to be labelled as containing GM ingredients.

So when the likes of Monsanto and
DuPont, two of the giants driving the development of this risky and
unpopular technology, point out that Americans have been eating GM foods
for years, they are quite right. But this is only because, in the
absence of labelling, U.S. consumers simply can’t tell whether what they
are eating contains GM ingredients or not.
Last
month, a referendum in California calling for GM foodstuffs to be
labelled as such was defeated by a narrow margin, but only after the big
biotech and food-processing companies spent almost $50 million on a
television advertising campaign that deliberately stoked alarm about
higher food prices if labelling went ahead.
What’s particularly worrying is that
those same international corporations are determined for Britain to
follow the American line, at least when it comes to products from
animals reared on GM feed.
Though
they are frustrated that EU rules dictate that foods for human
consumption containing GM ingredients must be labelled, at least they
know that when their crops go in animal feed, consumers will be none the
wiser.
But here the
bungling Environment Secretary might actually have done opponents of GM
crops a favour. Until he made his extraordinary remarks last week, few
people will have realised that in Britain there is no requirement for
animal feed that contains GM material to be labelled as such. Now,
thanks to the Environment Secretary, they do.




Statistics: In 2010, a poll conducted by the
European Commission found 95 per cent of people rating GM foods as
potentially unsafe and lacking in any real benefits.

Mr Paterson is correct on one
point — GM soya and maize is incorporated in livestock feed-mixes in
this country and is being fed to pigs, poultry and some dairy cows. So
it’s perfectly possible that the pork, chicken, eggs and milk in your
Christmas shopping trolley could contain residues of GM material.
And
yet the Government insists — no doubt to the delight of the chemical
companies — that it has no plans to introduce a GM labelling scheme so
that consumers can boycott goods from GM-fed livestock if they choose.
Now
the Soil Association, the body that campaigns on behalf of organic
farming, has called on the Government to introduce a comprehensive
system of GM food labelling without delay, a call I heartily endorse.
At
the moment, the only GM material entering the British food chain is
almost all in the form of livestock feed. But, given the pressure the
chemical companies are exerting on gullible ministers and the
Government’s apparent willingness to go along with everything they
suggest, it cannot stay like that for long.
So
far, there is only one brand of catering cooking oil that comes from a
GM crop being sold in Britain, together with the very occasional product
imported from the U.S. that contains GM soya, but this is bound to
change.



Listen: The Government should take into account the strong feeling of consumers across the county

The Government should take into
account the strong feeling of consumers who don’t want this change to
happen — a British Science Association survey showed public support for
GM crops declining from 46 per cent in 2002 to just 27 per cent now.
Even
more important, however, are the growing signs that the much-trumpeted
GM revolution that was supposed to end world hunger for ever simply
isn’t happening. Indeed, when GM crops are planted, it is commonly found
that yields do not increase beyond those achieved by traditional
breeding methods.
The U.S.
Department of Agriculture has conceded that ‘GM crops do not increase
yield potential’, while in India bankrupt farmers have been committing
suicide. GM crops have proved a dismal failure, and MPs there have been
visiting Monsanto’s ‘model villages’ to investigate the issue.
When
commercial gene manipulation first became possible in the Nineties, it
seemed as though GM crops would be the answer to the world’s food needs.
But with yields failing to increase, input costs rocketing, new
super-weeds and super-bugs emerging and the damage to delicate but vital
ecosystems becoming more and more apparent, it is clear they are not.
What’s
more, conventional plant-improving methods are producing better
results, without the attendant risks. For instance, it is a small plant
breeding company in Wales that has come up with a blight-resistant
potato that can be grown without pesticides, not the GM giants.
The
biotech companies, such as Monsanto and Bayer, have invested huge sums
in developing GM crops and, not surprisingly, they want to see a return
on that investment, and the profits they were so confidently expecting.

But the potential cost,
both to our health and to our environment, is too high — and the
Government cannot and should not pretend otherwise.
A
labelling scheme would allow British consumers to vote with their
wallets. But how much better — and safer — it would be if GM crops never
arrived in Britain at all.


Source:-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2249687/Frankenstein-foods-good-thing-Its-great-GM-lies.html