GM FOODS - US-Europe trade talks

Divisive debate on genetically modified foods a battleground in US-Europe trade talks

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to securing a massive free trade agreement between the United States and Europe is a sharp disagreement on genetically modified foods. Much of the corn, soybean, sugar beets and cotton cultivated in the United States today contains plants whose DNA was manipulated in labs to resist disease and drought, ward off insects and boost the food supply. Though common in the U.S., they are largely banned in the 28-nation European Union. Washington wants Europe to ease restrictions on imports of GMO foods, but the EU is skeptical they are safe. Intense emotions on both sides of the divide make it difficult to separate between strongly held belief and science. Here is a look at key points in the debate.

SAFE OR UNSAFE?

Most studies show GM foods are safe for human consumption, though it is widely acknowledged that the long-term health effects are unknown. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has generally recognized GM crops as safe and the World Health Organization (WHO) has said no ill health effects have resulted on the international market.

Opponents on both sides of the Atlantic say there has been inadequate testing and regulation. They worry that people who eat GM foods may be more prone to allergies or diseases resistant to antibiotics. But they have been hard pressed to show scientific studies to back up those fears.

GM foods have been a mainstay in the U.S. for more than a decade. Most of the crops are used for animal feed or in common processed foods such as cookies, cereal, potato chips and salad dressing.

Europe largely bans genetically engineered foods and has strict requirements on labeling them. They do allow the import of a number of GM crops such as soy, mostly for animal feed and individual European countries have opted to plant GM crops. Genetically engineered corn is grown in Spain, though it amounts to only a fraction of European farmland.

The American Medical Association favours mandatory, pre-market safety testing, something that has not been required by U.S. regulators. The WHO and the U.N. food agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, say the safety of GM foods must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

CAN GM FOOD HELP COMBAT WORLD HUNGER?

By 2050, the world's population is projected to rise to 9 billion from just over 7 billion currently. Proponents of GM foods say they are safe and can boost harvests even in bad conditions by protecting against pests, weeds and drought. This, they argue, will be essential to meeting the needs of a booming population in decades to come and avoiding starvation.

However Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Food and Environment Program, an advocacy group, said genetic engineering for insect resistance has provided only a modest increase in yields since the 1990s and drought-resistant strains have only modestly reduced losses from drought.

Moreover, he said conventional crossbreeding or cross-pollinating different varieties for desirable traits, along with improved farming are getting better results boosting yields at a lower cost. In fact, much of the food Americans eat has been genetically modified by those conventional methods over thousands of years, before genetic engineering came into practice.

"Overall, genetic engineering does not get nearly the bang for the buck as conventional breeding" and improved agricultural practices, Gurian-Sherman said. UCS advises caution on GM foods and favours labeling, though it acknowledges the risks of genetic engineering have sometimes been exaggerated.

Andrea Roberto Sonnino, chief of research at the U.N. food agency, said total food production at present is enough to feed the entire global population. The problem is uneven distribution, leaving 870 million suffering from hunger. He said world food production will need to increase by 60 per cent to meet the demands of 9 billion by 2050. This must be achieved by increasing yields, he added, because there is little room to expand cultivated land used for agriculture.

GMOs, in some instances, can help if the individual product has been assessed as safe, he said. "It's an opportunity that we cannot just miss."

TO LABEL OR NOT TO LABEL?

Europe requires all GM food to be labeled unless GM ingredients amount to 0.9 per cent or less of the total. The U.S. does not mandate labels on the view that GM food is not materially different than non-modified food. Opponents of labeling say it would scare consumers away from safe foods, giving the appearance that there is something wrong with them.

U.S. activists insist consumers should have the right to choose whether to eat GM foods and labeling would offer them that choice, whether the foods are safe or not. They are pushing for labeling at the state and federal level. California voters last year rejected a ballot initiative that would have required GM food labeling. The legislatures of two other U.S. states, Connecticut and Maine, have passed laws to label GM foods and more than 20 states are contemplating labeling.

COULD GM FOOD TORPEDO THE TRADE DEAL?

Absolutely. The U.S is pressing for the restrictions on importing GM food to be eased but there is no sign that the EU's firm opposition is softening. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently that Europe will defend its restrictions in the trade negotiations. Some in the U.S. see the European resistance as just another form of protectionism that promotes domestic products over imported ones.

GM foods are not the only seemingly intractable issue standing in the way of a comprehensive free trade agreement. They are part of a broader set of restrictions on both sides related to agriculture and food safety. There are also significant differences on intellectual property and financial regulations, among other thorny issues. AP

GM CROP INDECISION WILL COST INDIA DEAR

The GM crop indecision will cost India dear

The majority recommendation of the Supreme Court-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) favouring an indefinite ban on the field trial of genetically modified (GM) crops has again revived an issue that has been hanging fire for about three and a half years.

With the jury still out on whether the ideological opponents or the scientific supporters are going to have the last laugh, researchers working in this field continue to be caught in uncertainty.

While state governments are not granting them permission for field trials for further research, the Centre has not told them to give up either.

The fact that judiciary will take a decision on this complex scientific issue based on the advice of a clutch of scientists is an outcome of the abdication of its duty by the political executive to steer the direction of GM crop research in India.

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is to blame for failing to take a decision, this way or the other, since February 2010 when then environment minister Jairam Ramesh put Bt brinjal commercialisation in deep freeze despite regulatory approvals, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has done little apart from crying foul and pleading helplessly with state governments to allow field trials in their states.

The ministers who have held Science and Technology portfolios in this time — and there have been a few — have not indicated much interest.

Neither has current Environment Minister Jayanthi Natrajan shown any urgency in following up on the unilateral requirements stipulated by her predecessor from the government on this issue.

Forget a decision, the government has not demonstrated initiative to even reach a consensus on the least common ground for researchers to continue or discontinue their work.

GM crop research, consequently, has been left hostage to activists who have forged a united front against it, with its fate resting on the argumentative skills of lawyers based on suggestions of a few scientists.

This indecision may not cost immediately, as much as the uncertainty over regulatory clearances for roads, power, mining and other infratstructure sector has hurt the country in the past few years of the UPA-II government. However, India will certainly lose out in the long term. 

Ravish Tiwari 

Ravish is a senior assistant editor based in Delhi

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

J Natarajan opposes Pawar's View on GM crops

Jayanthi Natarajan opposes Pawar’s views on GM crops, wants field trials put on hold

Opposes Pawar’s views favouring GM crops, wants field trials put on hold till regulator is established

Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jayanthi Natarajan has asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to let her ministry take an independent view on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the Supreme Court, which is hearing a public interest litigation petition.

She has opposed Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s views in favour of these organisms, which have so far dictated the government’s arguments in the case.

In a letter to Dr. Singh, she said the Agriculture Ministry’s mandate was to promote GM crops; in contrast, her ministry’s role was to regulate their use. So, it should have an independent view. She also asked that field trials of GM crops be kept in abeyance till Parliament passed the Bill to establish the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India. Her letter was sent days before the Supreme Court-appointed Technical Expert Committee submitted its final report, which recommended a moratorium on the field trials of select GM crops till the regulatory mechanism was reformed. The government’s case has so far been rooted in a joint position taken by the two ministries, an arrangement which the PMO facilitated, asking the ministries not to take a contradictory view.

The government consequently opposed the Technical Expert Committee’s interim report, which recommended a 10-year moratorium on the field trials of select GM crops and come out in support of the deployment of GM technology. The government also asked for a nominee of the Agriculture Ministry to be represented on the committee. R.S. Paroda, who was taken into the panel as the Agriculture Ministry’s representative, has not signed the final report.

But Ms. Natarajan’s plea has explicitly laid out her opposition to the views of Mr. Sharad Pawar and the GM crop developer industry, which lobbied for clearances for field trials during the Kharif 2013 cropping cycle, pre-empting a decision by the Supreme Court.

Earlier, Ms. Natarajan put on hold the clearances given by her ministry’s statutory technical body, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), citing the ongoing case in the Supreme Court. This led Mr. Pawar to write to the Prime Minister, asking for Ms. Natarajan’s order to be reversed, arguing that withholding the clearances would jeopardise food security and lower the morale of scientists working on GM technology. He noted that he had also written to several States that opposed or banned the field trials of GM crops, asking them to change their decision. Dr. Singh marked Mr. Pawar’s letter to Ms. Natarajan for her views.

In her reply, Ms. Natarajan said: “The scientific community is, in fact, split vertically down the centre in its views on these issues, and robust, proven failsafe scientific protocols to prevent damage from GM crops are yet to be developed in our country.”

“It is also appreciated that the regulatory mechanism for GMOs, including food crops, in our country is still evolving… I feel that until the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India is in place, it would be prudent for us to proceed cautiously,” she said.

Ms. Natarajan also disagreed with Mr. Pawar’s view that immediate clearance for trials was necessary for food security as well as the morale of scientists. “Food security is not a function alone of food production and crop yield growth but also about poverty/development and access to food etc.”

Citing the example of the increased agricultural productivity in the eastern States, she said there was need to increase food security through less controversial, and better-tested, technologies.

In contrast to Mr. Pawar’s position, Ms. Natarajan warned that as the GM technology could impact millions of farmers and alter food supply chains permanently, the government must take an “extremely well calibrated and judicious approach.” Warning that India was the centre of origin for some of the 53 GM crops awaiting clearance, she said: “The decision on adoption and consequent commercialisation of these new technologies must be done on the basis of [a] sound scientific and social review. This review must assess not only the risks associated with the use of the technologies but also the social costs and benefits that would be borne if the government is to take those risks on behalf of the citizens.”

“It is widely accepted that the question about the safety, efficacy and value of the said technologies to ensure greater food security…, benefitting farmers and safeguarding public health and biodiversity in India is not adequately settled,” she said.

Countering the charge of political interference in the technical decision taken by the GEAC, she said: “It is not only the prerogative but the duty of the Ministry of Environment and Forests to evaluate the larger risks and social parameters of adoption of the new technology. A positive evaluation has to be based on adequate evidence that the adoption or commercialisation of these technologies remains with the safe parameters of the precautionary principle.”

The PMO has not yet responded to her letter or permitted her to take a stance different from that of the Agriculture Ministry. THE HINDU

DuPont to Spread GM Corn Further in Africa

After a three-year long battle, chemicals and seed giant DuPont won control of South Africa's largest seed company, and can now more effectively challenge Monsanto's dominance of the dark continent.

DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred division acquired an 80% stake in South Africa's Pannar, which has a large store of maize germplasm, one of the most important crops on the continent. By acquiring the seed company, DuPont now has access to one of the largest collections of genetic resources for the crop, which gives it a powerful wedge to pry loose more of its rival's market share. Monsanto, having bought two South African seed companies years ago, Sensako and Carnia, estimates it owns half of the South African maize market.

Genetically modified maize already accounts for 75% of the crop grown there, with hybrid corn seed sales totaling about $350 million annually. Pannar is steeped in selling GM seeds licensed from Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, and the acquisition was opposed by many on the grounds that it would consolidate control of a domestic food staple into the hands of just two foreign multinational corporations. That's not unlike the uproar over U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods selling itself to a Chinese company.

Unlike the Smithfield saga, however, pork's prominence in U.S. diets is nowhere near as universal as maize is in Africa. Mealie meal, a course flour made from maize, is a food staple in South Africa,  Zambia, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

Moreover, because Pannar controls important stores of organic and hybrid traits that have been grown and developed in Africa over long periods of time, opponents worry that seed diversity will be threatened when two companies that have an interest in spreading GM seed control what seed is available on the market. 

Yet, DuPont points to the low yields farmers in Africa have achieved thus far, where 86 million acres are available for corn production, but average yields fall short from what's achieved elsewhere. Where African farmers can achieve yields averaging two tons per hectare, Brazil gets nearly seven tons, and the U.S., where 86% of the corn crop is genetically modified, boasts nearly 10 tons.

Of course, since GM maize seed has such a preponderance of the market, it's easy to question whether even more such seed will be beneficial.

It's not just South Africa where DuPont is seeking to exert its influence, because that market already enjoys an advanced network of farms; rather, it's in the developing nations such as Mozambique and Tanzania where farmers are only just starting to develop commercial agriculture that DuPont will use Pannar's reach to leapfrog over Monsanto. It will use not just maize to do so, but also sunflower, sorghum, wheat, and soybeans.

Over the past two decades, Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow Chemical, and DuPont -- call them the five fingers of death to non-genetically modified seed -- have together purchased more than 200 seed companies, and now completely dominate the seed market.

Terms for the latest deal were not disclosed, but DuPont says it's one of the biggest such deals its Pioneer unit has ever made, and is the largest for the company in Africa. The lights for non-genetically modified seed, however, just dimmed darker on the dark continent. Motley Fool

Genetically Modified Cotton

What Does the Future Hold for Genetically Modified Cotton?

By Roger East

Two decades into cotton’s genetic modification (GM) revolution, J. Berrye Worsham, President and CEO of the U.S. industry association Cotton Incorporated, exudes complete confidence in the GM route. “Employing biotechnology to its fullest extent, now and far into the future,” he says, “we anticipate dramatically increasing our yields of cotton fiber and using cottonseed as a food source for humans. We fully expect that this expanded use of the cotton plant will require less water and soil, greatly reducing strain on the environment.” Accompanying Worsham’s ringing endorsement, the association’s website Cotton Today speaks of “scientific advances in biotechnology … portending a future of full cotton sustainability.” In short, it asserts, biotech is “the present and future of cotton.”

Certainly it’s a big story in cotton’s recent past. When scientists spliced genes from the soil bacterium bacillus thuriniensis (Bt) into cotton plants, they created a modified strain that makes proteins which are toxic when eaten by the bollworm caterpillar. Approved for use in the US in the 1990s, this Bt cotton thus offered growers a way to tackle their most feared pest, and benefit from the resultant increase in yields, while cutting back or even eliminating the chemical pesticides they had hitherto used for the job. Soon it was taken up in Australia, China, Brazil and other big producers.  When Bt cotton swept India too, following approval there in 2002, the country’s cotton output soared. By the end of that decade, around half of the world’s cotton acreage was planted with transgenic strains – including new varieties engineered to tolerate Monsanto’s much-vaunted RoundUp herbicide (and so cut other herbicide use and the need for tillage).

However in some countries, including many EU member states, GM cotton isn’t allowed to be grown. Farmers who buy into GM need fresh supplies of seeds each year, they point out, which makes them dependent on the merchants; they can’t be self-sufficient by saving seeds from last year’s crop because the seeds from GM plants have much-diminished fertility and aren’t authorized for replanting. The hoped-for reductions in pesticide use can backfire too; relying on Bt cotton’s toxicity to bollworms, rather than chemical pesticides, may invite plagues of aphids and other secondary pests which aren’t susceptible to the Bt toxin. In such cases, a lack of natural predators compounds what Emma Hockridge of the Soil Association calls “spill-over problems rather than spill-over benefits” – and farmers may end up spraying even more chemicals to deal with them.

Then there’s the threat of bollworms developing resistance to the Bt toxins. Typically, biotechnology sees itself not as the problem but as part of the solution. While good farming practices are acknowledged as vital in resistance management, a second generation of Bt cotton has also been engineered to deliver a double punch of toxin. And it doesn’t stop there. Monsanto, whose Bollgard II trademark cotton is the industry leader, is working on a third generation Bt strain. Other biotech research aims to boost everything from cotton fibre quality to disease resistance, or to cut down the gossypol content of cottonseeds, the biggest barrier to their use as food (see ‘Could cotton become a global food source?’). GM’s opponents may not be won over, and GM remains excluded from those ‘niche’ markets where organic and Fairtrade standards hold sway.

Significantly, however, the CottonConnect sustainable supply chain initiative, working with farmers in South Asia and China, does not allow itself this luxury. “We take a ‘GM neutral’ position in order to have a greater impact,” says CottonConnect, pointing out that over 90 percent of cotton produced in India is GM. Similarly, CottonConnect’s education project for the John Lewis Foundation with Gujarati farmers in Morbi “recognises their reasons for using the GM seed, owing to benefits it brings” to their often precarious livelihoods.

The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), designed specifically to build a channel for sustainable sourcing in the commercial mainstream, is also ‘technology neutral’ when it comes to GM. “We don’t look at seed at all in our standard”, says BCI’s Lena Stafgaard: “The key priorities are water management and integrated pest management.”

Water management, indeed, looms increasingly large (see ‘Irrigation innovation: protecting cotton from drought’). And the biotech industry is hoping that successes on the water front can add more feathers to its sustainability cap, alongside the reduction of pesticides, herbicides and the need for tillage. Intriguingly, this looks likely to include the development of less-thirsty commercial cotton strains that don’t depend directly on GM.

As Cotton Incorporated’s Vice-President for Agricultural Research, Kater Hake, explains, “some of the benefit from GM research in stress tolerance will be indirect. GM tools can help identify useful native traits in wild or weedy cottons that have ultra-high heat, drought or salt tolerance. These traits can then be moved into commercial varieties using genetic markers and conventional breeding.”

Up to now this has been a slow process, but the recent breakthrough in sequencing a cotton genome, with a ‘gold standard’ genome sequence published last December, provides a reference blueprint that is set to revolutionize cotton genetic improvement in the next five to ten years.

Roger East is a regular contributor to Green Futures.

SUPER PLANTS BY ISRAELI RESEARCHERS

Israelis create 'super plants' that resist drought

A group of researchers in ISRAEL have reportedly grown genetically engineered plants that can live longer and resist long periods without water and can yield more produce.

In what could be the solution to world food crisis, scientists from the Faculty of Biology at Technion University in Haifa have created what they call "super plants" by modifying a longevity hormone in the genes known as zytokinin.

The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, Xinhua reported.

"Let's take a staple food, for example rice, when the photosynthesis ends, the rice stops growing, it's a natural process with every plant," said Technion University Biology professor and president of the Kinneret College Simon Gepstein, who led the research.

"But by extending the juvenile hormone, we have managed to extend the life of the plant, therefore producing more crops."

In plants, ageing comes about when zytokinin levels drops, so the researchers prevented the breakdown of the juvenile hormone and made it stay higher for a longer period, preventing the ageing.

"We not only extended the plant's life and managed to make it yield more, but we have also extended the shelf life of the vegetables and fruits it gives," Gepstein said.

"The vegetables and fruits now last double and sometimes three times more after they are cut if they come from the genetically modified plants. I took a modified lettuce home and it took 21 days for it to start getting brown, whereas normal lettuces go bad in five or six days," he said.

Gepstein believes the super plants can be the solution for food shortage in the world, not only because the plants live longer and give more vegetables that can last more on the shelf, but also because they hardly need any water.

"These plants can survive droughts, they can go on for a month without water and even if you water them, they only need 30 percent the amount of liquid normal plants do," he said.

Gepstein discovered this feature of his genetically modified plants by sheer chance, when he forgot to water them for a few weeks.

"We found out that after a month of not getting any water they were as good as when they do get it, so we could take their seeds to arid zones or areas where there is severe drought risks and feed the population with them," the researcher said.

His team is now exploring other possible features these "super plants" may have, like their resilience to pests and parasites and heat as well as cold.

"Despite all the bad the word 'genetically modified' has, I can tell our plants are not dangerous for human health, because we have altered them using their own components, they have nothing added to them," Gepstein said.

Currently, the researcher said, seed companies from all over the world are running field tests with the seeds to verify that these plants can grow outdoors as well, as they did in the greenhouses of Technion University.

"If all goes well, we may be able to see these super plants growing in fields worldwide," Gepstein said. IANS

JAPAN US WHEAT IMPORTS

Japan lifts GM-linked ban on US wheat imports 

Japan resumed imports of some US wheat Thursday, ending a two-month suspension that came after genetically engineered crops were found on an Oregon farm.

The agriculture ministry purchased 89,579 tonnes of Western White on Thursday, an official with the ministry's trade division said.

The suspension on some imports of US wheat was imposed in late May as Japan cancelled a bid for 25,000 tonnes of Western White, a soft white wheat produced in the Pacific Northwest.

Japan imports about 800,000 tonnes of that wheat brand a year, but does not allow genetically-modified wheat.

In all, Japan imports around five million tonnes of wheat a year, 60 percent of which is from the United States, making it one of the largest importers of the crop.

Farm Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said earlier that ban would be lifted on condition that all incoming US wheat be tested.

The Japanese suspension came as South Korea also followed suit, while the European Union told its member states to test imports from the area, saying any genetically modified wheat would not be sold to consumers.

South Korea lifted the ban a month ago after the local food safety regulator found no unapproved genetically modified grain in recent US shipments to the Asian country.

The US Agriculture Department initially announced the discovery of the modified wheat. No genetically engineered wheat has been approved in the United States for commercial production.

The US department said it was the same breed as a genetically modified herbicide-resistant wheat tested by seed giant Monsanto between 1998 and 2005, but never approved.

Altering the wheat allows it to survive when a popular weed killer made by Monsanto, called Roundup, is sprayed on fields. AFP