Keep the pause button on GM pressed

Questioning a technology, especially of the kind that has serious unknowns and lacks clear social benefits, is not an attack on science

Jairam Ramesh, former Environment Minister for India, made the brave decision in 2010 to tell his then apex regulator of genetically modified organisms (GEAC) that it had failed to properly use available science to determine the safety — to human health and the environment — of Bt brinjal, created using genetic modification (GM). His decision followed careful evaluation of the science.

I was involved in Ramesh’s review. I read first hand the scientific evidence in my area of expertise provided to the GEAC and its responses. I was heartened to see that his decision was validated by the esteemed scientists that made up the Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee who have advised the Court on the need for better research and better process before continuing to release GM crops into the environment or using them as food.

Creating confusion

G. Padmanaban (“Sow the wind, reap a storm,” The Hindu, September 2) believes that the events surrounding the evaluation of Bt brinjal and now extending to other kinds of GM plants is an assault on science. He confuses science with technology. Science is the process of knowledge creation (or discovery) whereas technology is the means of knowledge application. This confusion causes some scientists to defend technologies that are questioned because they perceive questions on the technology as an attack on science. It is not.

There is much knowledge discovered or to be discovered that cannot be applied wisely — at least not now. GM plants are among the technologies that have both serious scientific unknowns and lack a clear social benefit — at least for now.

For over 30 years, GM has been promised to produce plants that will resist the stresses of drought, heavy metals and salt, that will increase yield, reduce the use of toxic pesticides and even fix their own nitrogen. To be fair, some GM crops have reduced the use of some toxic insecticides for a brief period. To be precise, though, none of these promises has been sustainably delivered to farmers.

Why not? Well, it isn’t complex regulation holding them back. By the year 2005, over 1,000 applications were approved to field trial stress-tolerant GM plants in the United States alone. None ever progressed out of the testing phase. The explanation for this is likely because stress tolerance is not a solution to the causes of stress. No matter how tolerant you make the plant to drought, using it in soil low in organic matter and unable to hold water will eventually further deplete the soil of moisture and the plant will struggle or die. GM is an attempt to use genetics to overcome the environment. This never works for long. That is why some call GM a distraction from investing in real solutions to the problems faced by real farmers.

A symptom

Herbicide use is increasing in the U.S. since it adopted GM maize (corn), soybeans and cotton. Insecticide use is down by a small bit, but extremely high compared to countries such as France which do not use GM crops. Western Europe’s maize yields match or exceed the U.S.’ yields using less pesticide. The yields in wheat and oilseed rape are increasing at an even faster rate in Western Europe than in the U.S. and Canada. This indicates a dangerous trend: those countries choosing to innovate in agriculture using GM are demonstrating lower productivity increases and greater dependence on chemical inputs in all crops compared to economically and environmentally comparable countries choosing to not use GM crops.

What is it about investing in GM products that seems to undermine other technologies in agriculture? GM products attract the strictest intellectual property (IP) rights instruments possible in agriculture (e.g., process patents). The use of those instruments concentrates investment and drives out simple but even more effective technologies.

Now every government research centre and public university seeks to compensate for the fall in direct public investment through licensing royalties from IP and the creation of partnerships with the private sector. This necessarily changes the kinds of questions they favour being asked by their researchers, the kind that will be supported by institutional resources or rewarded with promotion. With these policies in place we shouldn’t be surprised that every problem looks like it has a GM solution even to researchers who claim to have no entrepreneurial motivations.

Prof. Padmanaban’s ambition for a crop that provides all nutritional needs and grows everywhere demonstrates the poverty of the GM approach to hunger and malnourishment. Such a crop would quickly become obsolete as it would also serve as a wonderful meal for every conceivable form of pest. Meanwhile, it would undermine both biological and agricultural diversity as it became a weed in its own right.

Instead of that approach, supporting communities with education on nutrition and farmers with technologies that build up their soils, manage pests with little or no application of pesticide and manufactured fertilizers gives them the means and independence to grow a variety of crops and livestock to meet their dietary needs and sell their surplus in local markets.

This investment in agriculture is not as good at making intellectual property, but better for growing food. To properly support India’s mainly small holder farming requires removing the penalties and incentives on the public scientist to develop primarily technologies that bring direct revenue to their institutions. Instead, invest in them with public money and measure their success by the yields of farmers, the reduction of pesticides and fertilizer they use, and the increase in their wealth and health.

No missed opportunities

India is not missing out on the benefits of GM. So far, there haven’t been any proven to exist, or proven to be sustainable. GM crops are not designed to increase intrinsic yield and the largest scale and longest term studies bear out that they don’t yield more. Meanwhile, the cost of GM seeds is the fastest growing expense for U.S. farmers who are simultaneously suffering from weeds resistant to the herbicides excessively used on GM crops and pests resistant to the insecticides over-used in Bt crops. That likely would be India’s experience had it commercialised Bt brinjal which was developed with the least effective form of Bt for the target pest.

In addition, the safety issue still lingers over these products. It shouldn’t. The science needed to establish their safety exists and is affordable but it must be applied dispassionately and transparently. That is all Jairam Ramesh asked.

Claiming that GM crops are demonstrated safe by the absence of specific health claims from Americans is glib. There are no validated health surveillance programmes in the U.S. which could both detect and diagnose the cause of the most likely manifestations of harm if they do exist.

Meanwhile, more research studies accumulate with evidence of adverse effects, some quite serious. These studies require replication, but they run into roadblocks or fail to find new funding. Most often these studies report low level health effects using animal feeding studies, so it is not clear whether the effect would be the same, more or less in humans and more or less likely to be caused using GM plants cooked and processed, as humans eat them, rather than raw or processed the way they are provided to test animals.

Hunger, pestilence, and economic failure are the images of fear increasingly being used to drive acceptance of GM crops. Ignorance, anti-science, ideology and hypocrisy are the insults used to counter questions about the safety of GM crops coming from scientists and the public. What is right for India’s agriculture is too important a question to leave to fear and insult to decide. I think that both Ramesh and the scientists of the Technical Expert Committee knew this when they asked India to pause on the use of GM products. Pause so that all voices can be heard. Reflect on what the problems are and whether technologies solve them or mask them for a time, or even make them worse later. The Hindu

(Professor Jack A. Heinemann is Director, Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand)

GM crops: African opposition is a farce, says group led by Kofi Annan

GM crops: African opposition is a farce, says group led by Kofi Annan

Concern in Africa over genetically modified crops has been dismissed as fear of the unknown by an environmental group chaired by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general.

A report by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), published on Wednesday (4 September), describes opposition to GM crops as "a farce".

It points out that such crops have been subjected to more testing worldwide than new non-modified varieties, citing reports from the EU, the World Health Organization and the US national academy of sciences.

Only four African countries – Burkina Faso, Egypt, Sudan and South Africa – have fully commercialised GM crops. But Agra says most countries across the continent are at various stages of creating the environment for commercialisation.

Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda are conducting field trials of biotech crops, the final step before full approval of commercialisation. Most African countries have put in place the requisite policy and regulatory frameworks, despite public jitters over genetically modified food.

Agra's Africa Agricultural status report states: "There is growing public opposition to GM crops in Africa that is best described as a fear of the unknown. Unless milled, the import of GM foods is banned in Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. More important to seed-sector development, these bans signal the arbitrariness and unpredictability of public policy."

Agra is an independent organisation based in Kenya that aims to double the income of 20 million small farmers and reduce food insecurity by 50% in 20 countries by 2020. Critics of the group accuse it of showing its true colours after initial coyness over GM foods.

"This report clearly indicates their full support for GM crops, and their intention to use their influence to open African doors for Monsanto's and Syngenta's patented GM crops," said Teresa Anderson, international advocacy co-ordinator for the Gaia foundation, an advocate of food sovereignty that asserts the right of people to define their own food systems.

"Characterising the refusal of most African countries to commercialise GM crops … as 'fear of the unknown' is patronising and shallow. Agra has wilfully chosen to insult farmers' concerns in their aim to expand corporate agribusiness into Africa."

The Agra report urges African countries to further invest in agricultural research and development to ensure food security amid concern that some nations are lagging behind. "In terms of personnel engaged in agricultural research, Africa has the world's lowest capacity, with only 70 researchers per million inhabitants (compared with the US and Japan with 2,640 and 4,380, respectively)," it says.

It notes that smallholder farm yields fall short of the estimated potential for most food crops (cereals and pulses). The average grain yields remained at about one-third to half of the world's average (1.1-1.5 tonnes per hectare versus 3.2 tonnes per hectare) between 2000 and 2010. Sub-Saharan Africa has the greatest gaps between potential yields and realised yields for several crops, particularly maize and rice.

"Plausible explanations for the low yields include lack of access to quality resources such as water, inputs and low use of new technologies that require money – such as fertiliser, machinery and irrigation technology," the report says. "The development and dissemination of new technologies and practices that increase yield potential for a particular area depend on a country's ability to make needed investments, and farmers' skills and willingness to adopt the technologies."

Anderson said the key was quality, not quantity, of research, and questioned the approach of most agriculture research institutes. "They are usually focused on producing a few varieties that claim to address individual (not complex) issues," she said. "Farmers are advised to grow these new varieties instead of their traditional crops. What we are clearly seeing as a result is that seed diversity is disappearing in Africa, while communities complain that the new varieties are tasteless, lack nutrition, or are more vulnerable to particular pests."

The report coincides with a meeting in Maputo, Mozambique, of the African green revolution forum, organised by Agra. The focus of the talks – which bring together heads of state, ministers, NGOs and scientists – is "scaling up and financing inclusive agribusiness through transformative public private partnerships".

The forum takes place 10 years after 40 African countries, convened by the African Union, signed the Maputo declaration, committing at least 10% of their national budgets to agriculture development. Mark Tran for the Guardian, part of the Guardian Development Network

Experts underline need for adopting GM crops

Expressing concern over difficulties in meeting the rising demand for food, the experts, who attended a seminar on `genetically modified crops and food security' at Khalsa College stressed on the need to adopt GM crops. The seminar, dedicated to National Science Day, was held in collaboration with Punjab State Council of Science and Technology.

According to the experts, the food requirements cannot be met with the given agriculture outputs. Hence, GM crops have to be adopted for which an awareness campaign was needed to overcome misconceptions related to these new crops.

Avinash Nagpal of botanical sciences department, GNDU, said that GM crops and their role in ensuring food security had been a major issue of the decade. He said that adoption of these crops would end poverty and ensure sustainable development.

Nagpal maintained that this had been the issue of debate and had social-economic ramifications.

A quiz competition was held on this occasion. Prabhleen Kaur, Mannat Kaur and Namita Thakur, of chemistry department, stood first while Akashdeep, Navdeep and Joyti Devi were second and Rashmin, Sagar Malhotra and Mohammad Adil, of bio-technology department, were third in the competition.

College principal Daljit Singh said that the seminar aimed at creating awareness about the subject. Others present on the occasion included registrar Devender Singh, head of chemistry department MS Batra, JS Gandhi, Jasjit Kaur Randhawa, HB Singh, Mohammad Arshad, Taminder Singh Bhatia, Mukesh Chander and Amandeep Singh. HT

GM crops: The Great Debate

Reuters: The Great Debate
The endless debate over genetic engineering


A scientist shows Golden Rice (L) and ordinary rice at the laboratory of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna south of Manila, August 14, 2013. REUTERS/Erik De Castro

Last month a popular do-gooder website featured a curious headline: “400 Farmers Destroy Life-Saving Rice Crops, and That’s a Good Thing.”

The story went on to describe how a mob in the Philippines — not farmers, as the headline wrongly claimed, but a motley group of city kids and political activists — trampled a test plot of Golden Rice, a blazingly yellow, genetically modified variety that contains snippets of DNA extracted from maize and a bacterium. Golden Rice was designed to be high in beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A that is lacking in the diet of many in Asia and beyond. Upwards of a million deaths and perhaps as many as half a million cases of childhood blindness annually are caused by a deficiency of Vitamin A.

The incident in the Philippines wasn’t the first time that protestors have destroyed fields of genetically modified (GM) crops. Others trampled include grape vines in France, sugar beets in Oregon, potatoes in Belgium, wheat in Australia — the list goes on.

But the attack on the potentially lifesaving rice seems especially cruel. And it has reignited the interminable debate over genetic engineering.

These crops were originally talked about as an answer to world hunger. By combining genetic materials from different species, wheat, for example, could be made to withstand high temperatures or drought; or bananas could be crossed with a virus to function as a vaccine for those who consumed it.

A corn farmer holds corncobs during a protest against genetically modified corn in Mexico City, January 23, 2013. REUTERS/Bernardo Montoya

Critics of this technology, however, warn that it potentially produces new proteins that may be allergenic, or otherwise harmful to human health. Supporters counter that this is also true of conventional cross-breeding, which has been going on for centuries.

Scientific opinion remains divided on the degree of risk, but the majority of U.S. researchers say there is as yet no convincing evidence of adverse health effects. Because of the relative newness of the technology, however, most scientists agree that rigorous tests need to be conducted on a case by case basis to insure safety.

The key problem, though, is that the Food and Drug Administration depends on producers of GM foods to evaluate the safety of their own products. There is no independent scientific verification of these industry assessments.

So some public interest groups, not surprisingly, are skeptical of this self-regulation and have proposed more stringent rules. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine is now calling for a moratorium on genetically modified foods pending long-term independent studies to assess their effect on human health.

But for many, this controversy over genetic engineering transcends scientific questions and touches on fundamental beliefs about the integrity of nature and the limits of human technology. Some, like the protestors in the Philippines, appear to have an almost religious conviction that messing with building blocks of life is just plain wrong — even when it creates a potential lifesaver like Golden Rice.

The basic research on Golden Rice goes back a decade and a half and has been fostered by a virtual who’s who of multinational agro-giants like Monsanto and Syngenta and global NGOs including the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Nonetheless, the project remains highly controversial. Now, more than 10 years after it was touted as a quantum leap in agriculture in a Time magazine cover story, Golden Rice has not yet made it into the dinner bowls of those who need it.

The technological as well as patent and regulatory barriers to its development and use have proven thornier than expected. Public resistance has also been stiffer. The activist group Greenpeace battled successfully to block the world’s biggest rice producer, China, from adopting the genetically modified grain. Even moderate critics like natural food guru Michael Pollan have questioned its efficacy.

Pollan recently wrote in the New York Times that Golden Rice is not the “killer app that everyone thinks it is.” He argues, sensibly, that without efforts to improve overall diet and tackle Third World poverty, simply adding beta-carotene to rice won’t go very far toward ending malnutrition. He also points out that brown rice, nutritionally superior to Golden Rice, is largely shunned in rice-eating lands, and there is little reason to think that a bizarrely colored, genetically modified variety will fare any better.

Scientist Tony Evangelista speaks next to two-month old Golden Rice plants at a laboratory of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna south of Manila, August 14, 2013. REUTERS/Erik De Castro

“I’m not afraid of it,” says Pollan. “I just think it’s another glittering Western techno fix.” Better to encourage people to eat a variety of vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables, he concludes, than to manipulate rice into producing a single micronutrient that nature never intended it to carry.

The fact remains, however, that lots of people in the Global South can’t afford a balanced diet, or don’t have access to markets where good-quality produce can be purchased. Vitamin A supplementation has already been shown to lower child mortality by a quarter to a third. So isn’t it time to give Golden Rice a chance?

Yet this may not happen any time soon. Opposition to genetically modified foods has been mounting. More than 60 nations, including the European Union, China, Russia and Brazil, have either banned or restricted their sale. Here in the United States, the state legislatures in Connecticut and Vermont have called for the labeling of all GM foods, and 28 other states are now considering similar legislation.

Ironically, much of the fiercest opposition to this technology is in the Third World — which could benefit the most from it. Indian biologist Vandana Shiva called Golden Rice “a Trojan horse,” whose real aim is to win public support for genetic engineering. She calls it a “hoax” perpetrated by Western corporations to rip off poor farmers and consolidate their control over global agriculture by replacing native varieties with patented genetically engineered seeds, which could not be saved from the harvest but needed to be repurchased from the company every year.

But others are not so cynical. “The guys who developed it did it for the right reasons,” says geneticist Richard Jefferson in Grist. “They really were outraged by micronutrient deficiencies. They were out there in the rice paddies and in the villages. Every one of the Rockefeller Foundation meetings was in the developing world, and we were out there, learning things with these people.”

So no, Golden Rice is not a hoax. But it is a disappointment. Disappointing because it promised a lot, but has so far failed to deliver.

This is also true of all genetic engineering. The “miraculous” technology that Big Ag promised was going to increase agricultural yields, boost nutrition and taste, cut pesticide use, create drought-resistant crops and feed the hungry world has not yet managed to convincingly pull any of these rabbits out of its magician’s hat.

Genetic engineering has been a runaway commercial success in the United States — 60 percent to 70 percent of processed foods on American supermarket shelves contain GM ingredients — but it remains a conspicuous public relations failure. It has also been an agricultural failure — accelerating the proliferation of precisely the kind of large-scale chemical-intensive monocultures that many agronomists warn will be unsustainable in the long run.

Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, biotechnology has failed to significantly increase U.S. agricultural yields, according to a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which says that organic agriculture often tops the productivity of GM crops on a per acre basis. Nor has genetic engineering cut the use of agro-chemicals, as promised. Reuters reports that popular genetically modified varieties like Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn and soybeans actually require more herbicide than their conventional cousins, due in part to the development of resistant “superweeds” that need ever-more-toxic dousings to kill them.

But if genetic engineering has not lived up to its own hype, it has accomplished what it set out to do: created virtually indestructible crops designed to withstand the insults of industrial agriculture, and last forever on supermarket shelves.

The technology has been a wildly lucrative profit center for biotech companies like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta — and their shareholders. Whether it can profit the rest of us with more abundant, safe and nutritious food remains to be demonstrated. Reuters

EU 'failing agriculture' with crop protection regulation - NFU

EU 'failing agriculture' with crop protection regulation - NFU

THE NFU has accused EU institutions of ‘failing agriculture’ through its regulatory approach to issues neonicotinoid seed treatments and genetically modified crops.

Speaking in Brussels of Friday, NFU crops board vice-chairman Mike Hambly told European Commission officials, member state experts and industry stakeholders that EU regulation in these areas was threatening to reduce yields and affect the quality of EU crop production.

He warned this could lead to an increased reliance on imports from areas of the world where standards of production cannot be guaranteed.

The European Commission pushed through suspension of three neonicotinoid seed treatments on flowering crops earlier this year. Mr Hambly also highlighted the decision of biotech giant Monsanto to move away from developing biotechnology in crops in the EU in the face of opposition to the technology.

He said denying farmers key crop protection products could have the unwanted side effect of increasing the risk of mycotoxins in crops – an issue the Commission is also trying to address.

“Where technology is denied to European farmers, waste will increase because we cannot protect our crops, yields will fall and we won’t be able to compete with imports,” he said.

“The impact will be that Europe will have less influence on how its food is produced and the EU’s already substantial net imports will grow.”

He cited a recent German study estimating the EU net imports of food would take an area the size of the entire territory of Germany to produce.

Mr Hambly said the Commission was putting science first in developing new regulation on mycotoxins, particularly the presence of T-2 and HT-2 mycotoxins in food and feed.

 “Investments in understanding and controlling mycotoxins are being made through improved understanding of fusarium and other plant diseases, but not as fast as crop protection products are being removed by regulators.

“We remain concerned that with restricted plant genetics and the loss of active ingredients against disease, control of mycotoxins will be compromised and then the threat of regulation could return.”

He said farmers have an ‘excellent record’ of managing the risk of crop contaminants and keeping them out of the supply chain.

But he said the Commission was ‘not making our lives any easier when tools in use elsewhere are denied to us here’. FarmersGuardian

Ghana, Uganda research into GM crops

Ghana, Uganda research into GM crops
Ghana and Uganda are making progress towards the quick adoption of genetically-modified (GM) crops as a means of fighting poverty and ensuring food security among people.
While Uganda is neck-deep into researching on the viability of a good number of crops, Ghana can be said to be making a remarkable headway too.
This can be evidenced by the recent clearance at the ports of the seeds of some three genetically-modified crops – cowpea, rice and cotton – by Ghana’s National Bio-safety Committee. And these have been given to some research institutions for field trials. The two countries have not yet passed their Bio-safety Laws.
Banana
Recently, Ghana and the EU signed an agreement that will see the former receive 7.2 million Euros from the European Union to help with the production and export of bananas.
According to Finance Minister Seth Terkper, who signed the financing agreement on behalf of the government, the money will be used for the Banana Accompanying Measures Project (BAM). Research by Ugandan scientists on bananas enriched with vitamin A and iron is beginning to show promising signs.
The ongoing experiment known as bio-fortification at the Kawanda-based National Agricultural Research Laboratories (NARL) is the first of its kind in a developing country.
Dr. Geoffrey Arinaitwe, a member of the research team, explained to some four Ghanaian journalists who were sponsored by Biosciences for Farming in Africa (B4FA) to Kampala recently that the exciting development first appeared in late 2010 when the bananas were planted in a confined field trial at NARL, which is part of the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO).
The Vitamin A genes inserted in apple and nakinyika bananas were extracted from maize and asupina – an Asian banana cultivar – while the iron-promoting genes were got from soya beans.
Dr. Andrew Kiggundu, head of the National Agro-Biotechnology Centre (NABC) who took the journalists on a tour of some banana farms under confined trials, said the ongoing biotechnology-based research had prioritized saving staple crops from virulent pests such as weevils, nematodes and diseases like banana bacterial wilt (BBW, and fungal black ‘sigatoka’, also in bananas, cassava mosaic and cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) in cassava; and the sweet potatoes virus disease.
“In Uganda, for example, 10 million tonnes of bananas are produced each year, but up to 40 per cent rots and goes to waste. It is for this reason that we’re determined to provide resistant lines against these serious constraints using biotechnology. But unless the draft bill is passed into law, technology from this useful research cannot get to would-be beneficiaries,” Dr Kiggundu noted.
The journalists also toured the NABC laboratory, the Bio-safety Level II greenhouses and the confined field trials (CFT) site for genetically-modified bananas: sukali ndizi (apple banana) which is a dessert and nakyinyika (a cooking banana) – both bearing Vitamin A and Iron micronutrients, which are already expressing signs of integration of the two micronutrients.
Are the bananas edible?
Dr Kiggundu indicated: “We’ve asked government for permission to eat the first GM bananas from here, before anybody else eats them. We want to demonstrate to the world, the high level of confidence we have in the food from crops we have genetically-modified here, that it is as safe as any other banana.”
Ghana’s story
From a paltry 5,000 tonnes in 2005, Ghana now exports 65,000 metric tonnes of banana annually. Ghana exported 62,000 tonnes of bananas to the Eurozone last year.
Ghana’s exotic banana production industry directly employs 2,400 workers and indirectly benefits 40,000 people in the Volta Region alone. Bananas are the most exported fruits in terms of volume and they rank second after citrus fruit in terms of value.
In 2010, Ghana exported 52,000 tonnes of banana to mostly European countries, representing just one percent of the total export from around the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics, total export of bananas accounted for 15 million tonnes in 2010 valued at over US$7 billion.
The European banana market is the largest in the world, with about 5.5 million tonnes imported per year.
Since 2006 when the European Union (EU) opened its market, there has been a rise in exports of between 2 and 5 percent annually from Ghana and the Cavendish variety, the most preferred, is cultivated by both small holder farmers and large companies. Ghanaweb

Certified BT cotton seed: unavailability likely to hit commodity production

Certified BT cotton seed: unavailability likely to hit commodity production

Certified cotton seed is becoming a serious issue, as no certified BT cotton seed would be available for cultivation for the upcoming season due to non-approval of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) cotton seed varieties by National Bio-safety Committee which may encourage seed-mafia, besides negatively affecting the commodity production, it is learnt. 
Official sources revealed that Pakistan being a signatory to the international Cartagena Protocol on Bio-Safety had to regulate GMO by setting up a Bio-safety System. National Bio-safety Committee (NBC) and Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) of Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (PEPA) had the responsibility to evaluate, regulate and monitor GMO for lab/field research and recommended their production on commercial scale for marketing. 
Official revealed that the NBC had not held its meeting since February 2011, which had delayed the regulatory process required to test and approve GMOs crops, adding that applications submitted by various public and private sectors organisations seeking approval of different GMO crops were yet to be reviewed by the NBC. 
"Currently only transgenic crop commercially cultivated in Pakistan is cotton and eight BT cotton varieties and one Hybrid were approved by Punjab Seed Council (PSC) in April 2010 and their commercialisation certificate was granted by the NBC. In February 2012, the PSC provisionally approved eight BT varieties (Tarzen-1, MNH-886, NS-141, FH-114, IR-NIBGE-3, CIM-598, Sitara-009 and A-One) subject to the grant of commercialisation certificate from the NBC and TAC to clear cases before consideration by the NBC," sources maintained. 
Secretary Textile Ministry wrote a letter to Secretary Ministry of Climate Change to hold a special meeting of the TAC and NBC for commercialisation of cotton varieties. The TAC fixed its 17th meeting for December 13, 2012, but the cases of commercialisation of cotton varieties were not included. After taking the Secretary on board, Cotton Commissioner pointed out the issue to JS Ministry of Climate Change and requested to include the cases in the agenda. Ministry of Climate Change took the position that the application of commercialisation of cotton varieties had been misplaced from the office and might be re-submitted, by co-ordinating with the breeders/institutes concerned, sources added. 
According to an official, the TAC postponed its meeting and set it on January 22, 2013, but again the cotton commercialisation cases were not on the agenda. After discussing the matter with Secretary Textile, Cotton Commissioner wrote to DG (PEPA) requesting to include the cotton cases in the agenda. The Secretary Textile called Minister for Climate Change requesting him for early convening of meeting and the TAC in response postponed its meeting and took the position that after allowing GM cultivation in the country, Pakistan will be declared GM crop growing country and it may have impact on its exports and sought textile ministry''s views. 
Sources further said that textile ministry conveyed its views on GM cotton cultivation in Pakistan on February 11, 2013. The TAC set its 17th meeting on April 03, 2013, without the commercialisation cases on the agenda. Cotton Commissioner again wrote a letter to DG (PEPA) requesting him to include the commercialisation certificate cases in the agenda, which was honoured. The TAC constituted a TAC Sub-committee to evaluate the cases, however it was also decided the decisions of sub-committee would be placed before NBC directly. First meeting of the sub-committee was held on April 26, 2013 at Faisalabad. The sub-committee recommended the approval of commercialisation for two years. It was also proposed that complete cases might be submitted to the NBC for consideration. The NBC has not been convened, to grant commercialisation certificate to the varieties approved in 2012. The commercialisation certificates granted to varieties approved in 2010 were for three years, which have expired. 
Punjab Seed Council in its meeting held on May 23, 2013 rejected the conditional approval of 15 new Bt cotton varieties and desired the BT varieties must be cleared from the NBC before submitting them to the PSC. Secretary Agriculture, Government of Punjab also constituted a committee to hold a meeting with Climate Change Division on the issue. Without commercialisation certificate and approval of Punjab Seed Council, Federal Seed Certification and Registration Department cannot certify seed for general cultivation and for this reason; availability of certified seed remained a serious issue. 
BT Cotton varieties in Pakistan which were granted certificate for three years (now expired) included IR-3701, Neelum-121, FH-113, Sitara-008, MG-6, Ali Akbar-703, Ali Akbar 802, IR-1524 and GN Hybrid-2085. BT cotton varieties waiting for commercialisation certificate included; Tarzen-1, VH-259, MNH-886, BH-178, NS-141, CIM-599, FH-114, CIM-602, IR-NIBGE-3 FH-118, CIM-598, FH-142, Sitara 009,IR-NIBGE-824, A-One IUB-222, Sayaban-201, Sitara-11M, A-555, KZ-181, Tarzan-2 and CA-12. This correspondent repeatedly contacted JS Ministry of Climate Change (With Additional charge of Secretary) Raja Hassan Abbas, who is the chairman of the NBC, but was informed by his office that he is not available. Brecoder

Genetic modification can be an all-consuming idea

Genetic modification can be an all-consuming idea

Modifying the DNA of nature is certainly adding a science fiction twist to one of the oldest psychological debates: nature versus nurture. The product of such modification comes today in the form of genetically engineered crops. Food, it seems, is growing in size.

The issue with genetically modified (GM) food is two-fold. First, what exactly are we “nurturing” when we consume GM foods, in terms of their effect on our health? And secondly, seeing as an apple is no longer just an apple and potentially not keeping the doctor away, shouldn’t the nature of all food be clearly labelled so we can make a conscious choice between eating natural foods or genetically “nurtured” food products?

Fierce debate rages on both sides of the fence but leaving the agricultural supply, business, moral, ethical, environmental and purist arguments aside, the question remains: to what extent are we what we eat?

It is a deeper understanding of this relationship between food consumed and our biology that is necessary to accurately evaluate the GM effect, if any. Are we merely digesting proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals present in food, or are we digesting at a deeper cellular level, inclusive of the information encoded within DNA and subsequent RNA of food?

A study published in the journal Cell Research (September, 2011), conducted by the Jiangsu Engineering Research Centre for -microRNA Biology and Biotechnology at Nanjing University in China provides us with a surprising discovery. Scientists found that not only nutrients but actual “plant microRNAs were present in the sera and tissues” of the animals they were studying, all of which have consumed GM foods.

Crucially, microRNAs, or miRNAs, are responsible for turning on or shutting down certain genes. They have also been identified as key components in several major diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

The study demonstrated that miRNAs in crops bind to a subject’s organs, tangibly changing the behaviour of cells in the organ.

It appears we are what we eat, literally, digesting and downloading information from our food. If these findings are accurate, then engineering plant DNA essentially implies that through its consumption, we are also recoding our own DNA and changing our biology, the effects of which have been linked to diabetes and cancer to name but a few less than desirable effects.

Given this research, it seems unthinkable that there are no legal requirements for all GM foods to be labelled as such. The EU does impose more stringent labelling than the rest of the world; however, this does not include meat or dairy that has been fed GM crops. Foods from the US fall even shorter and at present there are no standard legal requirements that a food must state whether it is derived from GM crops.

This leaves consumers here in the UAE particularly vulnerable, given the vast importing of food and food products. Currently, the only way to be absolutely sure that you are not eating food products containing a GM ingredient is to choose certified organic.

However, for fresh produce, a little investigation in the supermarket will uncover vital information as Dr Frank Lipman, an author and internationally recognised expert in integrative and functional medicine, explains. The stickers attached to fruit and vegetables show how it was grown and from this code you can determine whether the fruit was genetically modified, organically grown or produced with chemical fertilisers, fungicides or herbicides.

Here is what you need to know

If there are only four numbers in the code, the item was grown conventionally or traditionally, with the use of pesticides. The last four letters of the code are simply what kind of vegetable or fruit you are holding. An example: all bananas are labelled with the code 4011.

If there are five numbers in the PLU code, and the number starts with 8, then the item is a genetically modified fruit or vegetable. A genetically engineered banana would be 84011.

If there are five numbers in the PLU code, and the number starts with 9, then the item was grown organically and is not genetically modified. An organic banana would be 94011.

If you want to decipher the origin of processed foods such as cereals and other products, there’s an app for that! They are usually US-focused but as we have so many American brands in our shops here, they prove very informative.  thenational.ae