By: Stephen Leahy

  During a beverage break while chopping wood last weekend my neighbour said: "You sure hear a lot about genetically modified food these days".
  "Yep," I said, "And most of it involves telling great big fibs."
 

Do we want our food produced like this?

  Here's a list of the top ten fibs from the biotech promoters. They roll right off the tongue. Agribusiness, government, and some farm organizations want you to swallow these lines. Straight Goods advises a dose of salt.

Fib # 1 Genetically Modified (GM) foods are the same as ordinary foods.
  They're not, otherwise why bother engineering them? Bt corn (corn that has been bred with an organic pesticide called "Bt"), is one genetically modified crop grown on tens of thousands of acres in Ontario and Quebec. It looks exactly like regular corn except that the tissues of the plant, including the corn kernels, produce a toxin that kills certain insects, including Monarch butterflies. The toxin, by the way, came from a soil bacteria.
  There are other less obvious and potentially more risky differences. In order to get corn plants to produce the soil bacteria toxin, a lot of foreign genetic material including antibiotic-resistance marker genes, bacterial promoters, vectors and other assorted bits of DNA - the nuts and bolts of biotech - had to be blasted into corn plants using a gene gun. It's actually more like a shotgun blasting thousands of tiny gene pellets into corn cells.
 

Millions of acres of farmland aren't being planted because crop prices are too low, while thousands more acres produce fuels and fibre, not food. GM foods aren't the answer to world hunger. Money for people to buy food is.

  All this extra genetic stuff may be acting in very subtle ways on the corn's biochemical processes.

Fib # 2 Genetically engineering plants is no different than traditional plant breeding.
  Genetic engineering allows genes from distant and unrelated organisms to be combined - genes from fish into tomatoes or soil bacteria into corn and potatoes. Species barriers can't be hot-wired in traditional plant breeding. Also, the actual nuts and bolts of doing genetic engineering (see #1) is completely different.

Fib # 3 We need GM technology to feed the world.
  Millions of acres of farmland in US, Europe and even Canada aren't being planted this year because crop prices are too low. Thousands of more acres are being used to produce biofuels and fibre instead of food. The world could easily be fed right now, and well into the future, if everyone had enough money to buy the food they need.
  Hunger is an economic issue, not an agricultural one.

Fib # 4 GM crops do not pose any risk to people.
  Unlike other risky stuff like pesticides, radiation and chemicals, GM crops are alive - they reproduce, disperse and evolve. That makes it very hard to figure what risk they pose. The recent international agreement on biosafety between more than 130 countries including Canada acknowledges that genetically modified organisms - plants, animals, fish and bacterias - may pose a risk to human health.
  There's been no long-term human health studies and for that reason the British Medical Association wants a moratorium on GM foods. One of the worries concerns bits of the transgenic material being transferred to the good bacteria in our bodies' digestive tract.

For the rest of the great big fibs including Canada's 'stringent' health and safety regulations, and no-worries about risks to the natural environment, visit Straight Goods on Monday, February 7, 2000.

Stephen Leahy is a freelance journalist covering biotechnology for the past three years who has visited labs and farm fields, and interviewed molecular biologists, ecologists, farmers, government officials, industry spin doctors and activists.