Threat of Genetic Contamination

SUPREME COURT PANEL CALLS FOR BAN ON FIELD TRIALS

It is being widely and increasingly realised that the commercial spread of GM crops or even other GM crops (such as Bt cotton) can be extremely hazardous. What is less widely recognised is that even limited field trials of GM crops can be very risky because of the inherent threat of genetic pollution associated with the use of GM technology in agriculture.

Fortunately a panel of technical experts, appointed by the Supreme Court, has given a timely warning in its interim report submitted in early October regarding the hazards associated with field trials of genetically modified organisms. These hazards increase in a situation (which exists in India and many other countries) where the regulatary process is weak. In India these weaknesses are further marred by conflict of interest among the regulators, several of whom are GM scientists themselves. At present one arm of the regulatory process is located within the Department of Biotecnology (DBT) whose mandate it is to promote this technology. Therefore the Supreme Court-appointed panel recommends that this regulatory body should be located instead in the Ministry of Environment and/or Ministry of Health.

This committee has stated in its report: “Keeping all these in view the (committee) is unanimously of the view that all field trials should be stopped” until significant improvements in the regulatory system have been made. This panel has also called for a ten-year moratarium on field trials of Bt food crops and a complete ban on the field trials of transgenics in crops which originate in India or in the case of which India is a main centre of diversity as the transgenic/GM crops can contaminate and adversely affect this biodiversity.

These observations need to be understood in the context of the very serious and irreversible nature of the threat of genetic pollution. An eminent group of scientists from various countries, who constitute the Independent Science Panel, have said in their conclusion after examining all aspects of GM crops: “GM crops have failed to deliver the promised benefits and are posing escalating problems on the farm. Transgenic contamination is now widely acknowledged to be unavoidable, and hence there can be no co-existence of GM and non-GM agriculture. Most important of all, GM crops have not been proven safe. On the contrary, sufficient evidence has emerged to raise serious safety concerns that, if ignored, could result in irreversible damage to health and the environ-ment. GM crops should be firmly rejected now.”

This threat becomes very serious and of a permanent nature when we remember that it is almost impossible to fully recall GM crops which have been released once. As Professor Susan Bardocz has noted, “GM is the first irreversible technology in human history. When a GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) is released it is out of our control; we have no means to call it back....”

Earlier Dr Pushpa M. Bhargava, former Vice-Chairman of the National Knowledge Commi-ssion, had written: “Eightyfour per cent of our farmer community consists of small or marginal farmers with a holding of less than four hectares land. According to Monsanto data, Bt brinjal pollen can travel for 30 metres and could thus easily contaminate the neighbouring non-Bt brinjal field. In course of time, we would be left with no non-Bt yield even if the farmers do not want the transgenic crop.”

Prominent environmentalist Sailendra Nath Ghosh has written: “In view of the virtual im-possibility of preventing contamination, even the open-field trials ought not to have been permitted. According to independent geneticists, the isolation distance needed to be both in time and space. The land on which the GM crop is to be grown should not sow a crop in the pre-vious or the succeeding year. Cross-pollinating crops, unlike the self-pollinating ones, require an isolation distance of three to four kms. The implementation of these requirements is impossible under Indian conditions. Farmers would not keep their lands fallow. Crops in adjoining fields are almost always planted up-to the boundaries.”

Due to the threat of contamination, it is difficult for normal crops or organic crops to remain free from the impact of GM crops once these have been released. As worldwide concern for food safety grows, it is likely that there will be increasing demand for organically grown crops and crops which are not contaminated by GM crops. Therefore we will be surrendering premium world markets if we allow our crops to be contaminated. Star Link (corn engineered to contain a Bt toxin pesticide) was planted on less than 0.5 per cent of the US corn acereage, but its recall cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and even then the recall was not entirely successful.

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SEVERAL of these threats were examined at an international conference of scientists involved in studying the implication and impacts of gen-etic engineering. This conference on ‘Redefining the Life Sciences’ was organised at Penang, Malaysia, by the Third World Network. These scientists and experts issued a statement called the Penang Statement.

This Statement listed a wide range of potential adverse effects of genetic engineering. Of parti-cular concern is the difficulty or impossibility of recalling GEOs which have been released into the environment, or which have escaped from containment and later found to have adverse effects.

The potential ecological risks of applying genetic engineering to agriculture include the possibility that some transgenic crops could become noxious weeds, and others could become a conduit through which new genes may move to wild plants which themselves could then become weeds. The new weeds could adversely affect farm crops as well as wild ecosystems.

Plants are being engineered to contain parts of a virus in order to become virus-resistant. Some scientists have raised the possibility that widespread use of transgenic virus-resistant plants in agriculture may lead to new strains of viruses or allow a virus to infect a new host. There are concerns that the creation of new viral strains and the broadening of the virus’ host may increase the risks of new viral diseases that adversely affect crops and other plants. Mechanisms have been described whereby genetically engineered plants could plausibly give rise to new plant diseases.

In addition, this statement warns that the rapid spread of transgenic crops poses a threat to traditional crop varieties and wild plants that are the major sources of crop genetic diversity.

Another ecological risk is the possibility that field or forestry plants engineered to express toxic substances like pesticides and pharmaceu-tical drugs may poison certain non-target orga-nisms. Transgenes for insecticidal or fungicidal compounds that are introduced into crops to inhibit pests may unintentionally kill non-target and beneficial insects and fungi. Transgenic crops used to manufacture drugs or industrial oils and chemicals could potentially harm animals, insects and soil micro-organisms.

The possible chemical contamination of surface-water and ground-water by micro-organisms or plants with unusual or accelerated metabolic processes is a special concern because of the crucial importance of water for all life. It may be impossible to recall and difficult to control harmful GMOs, especially those that may contaminate ground-water.

This Statement adds that developing countries in particular face special risks: “Third World countries face even greater environmental risks than countries of the North because, in contrast, they have many wild relatives of many crops and thus there are more opportunities for various kinds of rogue species to be created.”
Moreover, most Third World countries currently have less scientific expertise and legal or regulatory capacity to monitor, assess and control activities involving genetically engineered organisms, and are thus even more vulnerable to adverse impacts.

This issue should also be examined in the context of what has been called the ’terminator technology’. In a widely discussed paper (published in the Ecologist, September/October 1998) Ricarda A. Steinbrecker (Science Director of the Genetics Forum UK) and Pat Roy Mooney (widely acclaimed winner of the Right to Livelihood Award) summarise the implications of this most controversial use of generic engineering,

“On March 3rd, 1998 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a little-known cotton-seed enterprise called Delta and Pine Land Company, acquired US patent 5,723,765—or the Technology Protection System (TPS). Within days, the rest of the world knew TPS as Termi-nator Technology. Its declared goal is to promul-gate plants that will produce self-terminating offspring—suicide seeds. Terminator Technology epitomises what the genetic engineering of food crops is all about and gives an insight into the driving forces behind the corporate campaign to control and own life.”

Further this paper says: “Most alarming though is the possibility that the Terminator genes themselves could infect the agricultural gene pool of the neighbour’s crops and of wild and weedy relatives, placing a time bomb. Temporary ‘gene silencing’ of the poison gene or failed activation of the Terminator countdown enables such infection.”

In another widely quoted paper, titled ‘The Biotechnology Bubble’, Dr Mae-Wan Ho (of the Bio-Electrodynamics lab of the Open University in the UK), Joe Cummins (Professor Emeritus of Genetics in Canada) and Hartmut Meyer write: “A number of different viral-resistant transgenic plants engineered with a viral gene actually showed increased propensity to generate new, often super-infectious viruses by recombina-tion.” Further, this paper tells us that in a field trial of Bt cotton in Thailand, 30 per cent of the bees around the test-fields died.

The risks of GM crops and their field trials are considerably increased when industry-based trials try to exaggerate benefits and subdue hazards and adverse effects, or else the regulatory framework is very inadequate and/or biased.
Jeffrey M. Smith has explained in his book, Genetic Roulette: “The industry-funded studies have become notorious for using creative ways to avoid finding problems. They feed older animals instead of more sensitive young ones, keep sample sizes too low to achieve the statis-tical significance needed for proof in scientific studies, dilute the GM component of the feed, overcook samples, compare results with irrele-vant controls, choose obsolete insensitive detec-tion methods, limit the duration of feeding trials, and even ignore animal deaths and sickness.”
Coming to the debate on Bt brinjal in India, Prof Bhargava, who was earlier nominated by the Supreme Court in the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), pointed out that when Monsanto’s dossier containing all the bio-safety tests that they had done was put in the public domain in year 2009, there were serious criticisms of it by many scientists from various parts of the world.
Prof Bhargava’s own criticism centred around the following points:

• A large body of concerned, knowledgeable and reputed scientists have agreed that some 30 or so tests need to be done before a GM plant is cleared for environmental release. Monsanto had done only less than 10 of these tests.
• Even these tests were done largely by Monsanto, and we have no facility in the country to even determine whether the tests were actually done.
• There were many scientific errors even in the tests that were done by Monsanto.

A group of 17 distinguished scientists from the USA, Canada, Europe and New Zealand wrote to India’s Prime Minister in 2009: “India’s regulators do not require independent bio-safety tests, but uncritically accept as evidence of safety, research conducted by the company who is applying for commercial clearance of the product. This raises serious questions regarding impartiality and conflicts of interest, which are clearly justified, based on published evidence of bias in the research conducted by industry that is contrary to accepted normal scientific conduct.

“The GM food compositional analysis is super-ficial and the minimum required to establish ‘substantial equivalence’, a scientifically con-ceptually flawed parameter that is virtually meaningless with respect to determining health risk.
“Experimental design used by the applicant is flawed, almost invariably containing irrelevant ‘control’ non-GM comparator crop varieties, which serve to mask rather than to isolate and reveal the effect of the GM transformation process.
“Experimental data is invariably not made publicly available for independent scientific scrutiny under the pretext of commercial confidentiality. This has required court action (both in Europe and India) in order to obtain the information needed to assess the quality of the research submitted by industry to be scrutinized
 by authoritative bio-safety experts. Such independent re-evaluation of submitted industry data has 
repeatedly found that this research and its interpretation thereof to be flawed, inadequate, biased and thus misleading.”

The author is a free-lance journalist who has been involved with several social initiatives and movements.