Resistance to GMOs works against the hungry and poor

Actually, it is about Science... Has "Due Diligence" been performed on the GMO species? How do we know that there will be no "unintended consequences" to the human population or to the environment? There have been cases of allergic reactions to GMO plants as well as some new diseases.
Not against GMO per se, just take a little longer in studying the effects, and avoid the Monsanto syndrome of being ham-handed in the approach.

"The Church" and its Pontifical Science Academy need to spend more time re-visiting the fact that they have helped to create the world hunger problem by encouraging unbridled population growth in continually saying no to condoms and contraception, especially in developing Third World Catholic countries. How many ABORTIONS might have been prevented since Humanae Vitae got it wrong in 1968?
As far as GMO's go, both Europe and North America are gonna wake up and smell the coffee when it's too late because China is currently "re-colonizing" Africa as we speak.

Prof. Chassy says nothing about the grain from one GMO crop being saved and used to plant in the coming year. Where I worked in Burkina Faso it seems that every year the native farmers now have to buy again from GMO producers, thereby changing radically the traditional method of planting/conserving/replanting which such folk have done for untold generations. Seeing that conventional farming is not the only preoccupation of these farmers (there is also education for their children, their debts, social obligations etc), they would obviously be losing a considerable amount of necessary money were they obliged to buy from the GMO producers every year to continue their traditioal lifestyle.

With rising rates of cancer, asthma and food allergies in the U.S. as compared to Europe, I'd say our rotten food supply already has something to do with it. And now they want to modify it even more? Organic foods don't use pesticides, don't change the molecular structure of our foods. I really hope the church doesn't buy into the GMO's.

AGAIN, THE CAPTCHA IS ONLY ALLOWING THE SECOND ANSWER THROUGH. PLEASE FIX THIS.

[q]Second, conceptually, making a GM food is actually less invasive than conventional breeding. It's less likely to produce unintended effects.[/q]

This is patently absurd -- or an outright lie.

MONSANTO'S GAIN IS AFRICA'S LOSS

Cause For Concern
Jeffrey M Smith 17/02/2009

http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2318

The European Commission has just cleared Monsanto's GM maize for use in the EU. Yet, as Jeffrey M Smith reveals, proper analysis of tests done to gain that approval suggest it should never have been given

When rats were fed Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) maize Mon 863, they didn’t fare too well. In fact, Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini says they likely suffered a toxic reaction. It was difficult to pinpoint. Their increased basophils could mean allergies. Increased lymphocytes and white blood cells suggest infections, toxins or disease. The drop in immature red blood cells can occur with anaemia; and lower kidney weights may mean blood pressure problems. The rats also had increased blood sugar levels, kidney inflammation, liver and kidney lesions – they were a mess. What Seralini and other scientists wanted were further tests. What they got instead was approval of the maize on 8 August by the European Commission.

Mon 863 was not the first EU approved GM food to have shown significant health effects in rats. According to Seralini, a molecular endocrinologist and member of two French government commissions that evaluate GM food, an oilseed rape (GT 73), Roundup Ready maize (NK 603), and two Bt maize varieties (Bt11 and Mon 810) all showed statistically significant problems such as inflammation disorders and liver and kidney problems. Seralini said the effects of the GM crops were similar to pesticides.

But Mon 863 is unique. Not for the number of rat anomalies – others had more. Rather, its rat study is not secret. Biotech companies usually hide their research from the public claiming it is confidential business information. Seralini says, ‘No one can understand, even among EU regulators, why the composition of the blood of rats that have eaten the GM is secret.’ But on 20 June, 2005, a German court ruled in favour of Greenpeace, forcing Monsanto to release the Mon 863 study. With data in hand, we can understand why Seralini was so concerned. Moreover, we now know how much the pro-GM European Food Standards Agency (EFSA) and European Commission were willing to overlook in order to keep GMO approvals on track.

In the study commissioned by Monsanto, test rats ate Mon 863 maize, which produces Bt-toxin to kill the corn rootworm. The control group ate non-GM maize from the same ‘parent line’, ie corn whose genetics were the same before the Bt gene was inserted. Using the parent line is important. It minimises differences in the diet so that the impact of genetic modification stands out. And it did. According to the experimental design, the health effects in the GM-fed group were not due to chance. Nonetheless, Monsanto convinced EFSA to disregard the statistical significance and declare the maize safe. Here’s how.

1. Researchers used six additional control groups, each fed commercial maize varieties with varying genetics. Some changes in the test rats were no longer significant when compared to this much larger combined group. But according to Arpad Pusztai, an authority in animal nutrition studies and leading expert on GM research, comparisons with rats fed mixed genetic varieties are inappropriate and irrelevant for safety assessments.

2. Many health effects, nonetheless, remained significant even compared to these ‘artificial’ controls. So Monsanto claimed that they were biologically irrelevant if they fell within a wide range considered ‘normal’ for rats. To put this into perspective, suppose that a group of women who were fed a carefully controlled diet developed 50 per cent more breast cancer than women on another diet. Using Monsanto’s logic, the findings can be dismissed because the increase was still within the normal variability of breast cancer for the whole population. Thus, Monsanto dismissed a 52 per cent decrease in immature blood cells as ‘attributable to normal biological variability’. According to Pusztai, an allowance of five per cent variability is the norm in food experiments. Similarly, he says that the increase in blood sugar levels by 10 per cent ‘cannot be written off as biologically insignificant, given the epidemic of diabetes’.

3. In spite of the statistical slight-of-hand, several results were still outside Monsanto’s ‘normal’ range. They offered another excuse. Since the reaction among the rats was not consistent between males and females, it was not significant. ‘This is really ridiculous,’ says Seralini, who points out that everyone studying cancer and endocrinology knows that there are reaction differences between genders.

4. And when the gender defence did not apply, Monsanto dismissed results claiming the reactions were not dose specific. Specifically, changes in rats whose diet was 11 per cent Mon 863 were sometimes more pronounced than those fed a 33 per cent diet. Here again, Seralini says Monsanto’s claims conflict with scientific understanding. In endocrinology and toxicology research, differences are not always proportional to their effects. A small dose of a hormone, for example, can cause a woman to ovulate, while a larger dose can make her infertile.

5. When all other excuses failed, Monsanto claimed that with such a large study, one would expect lots of results to fall in the statistically significant category purely by chance. Thus, no follow-up is required. Pusztai, commissioned by the German government to evaluate the study in 2004, wrote, ‘It is almost impossible to imagine that major lesions in important organs (kidneys, liver, etc) or changes in blood parameters (lymphocytes, granulocytes, glucose, etc) that occurred in GM Maize-fed rats, is incidental and due to simple biological variability.’

Rigged and shoddy research

Several features of the study appear to have been rigged to avoid finding problems. Nutritional studies, for example, typically use young, fast-growing animals, which are sensitive to toxic and nutritional effects. Monsanto used a mix of young and old animals, which may have hidden serious problems. Similarly, they used rats with a huge range of starting weights. Male rats ranged from 198.4 to 259.8 grams (or 143 to 186 grams according to conflicting data in the study’s appendix). According to Pusztai, starting weights should not vary more than two per cent from average. The wide range ‘can make it impossible to find significant differences… at the end of the experiment.’

African aid recipients rely on maize for about 90 per cent of their calorie intake. Rats are stand-ins for humans. According to Pusztai, researchers should have started with the maximum amount of corn possible (while maintaining a balanced diet), and then used lower concentrations to evaluate dose effects. The maximum amount of GM maize fed to the rats was 33 per cent of their diet, constituting only about 15 per cent of their protein.

According to Seralini, Mon 863 is new and unique; it differs from natural Bt toxin in seven ways. It should require at least the level of evaluation used for chemical pesticides. In the EU, that requires research on three types of mammals, with studies ranging from 90 days to two years. Mon 863, however, was approved after only a short 90-day rat study. Chronic and reproductive problems, and impacts on the next generation would all be missed. And the study had just two observation times (week five and week 14) using analytical methods that are half a century old. They ignored powerful new methods, such as profiling techniques, DNA chips, proteomics, and others.

Some of the reported weight measurements were also bizarre. One rat dropped 53 grams in one week and gained 102 grams in the next. Some that were heaviest at the beginning of the experiment were the lightest at the end. And the rats hardly grew at all during the last four weeks.

Overall, the research paper was confusing, conflicting, poorly reported and at a whopping 1,139 pages, seemed to try and hide results in a mountain of irrelevant material. It failed to disclose the methods used to measure changes and therefore the research cannot be repeated and the results remain suspect.

Referring to the study as a whole, Pusztai says: ‘Nutritional scientists and leading journals would not accept these blatant inadequacies and misinterpretations.’ He adds, ‘It is odd, therefore, that it remains the central document considered by government regulatory authorities upon which to make a decision to protect the health of European citizens.’

The German court’s decision to make the Mon 863 study public may open the door for more such revelations. Without disclosure, says Seralini, just a few toxicologists can make the decision without public evaluation. And too often, the decision-making body is heavily influenced by the applying company. This appears to be the case with his French Commission for Biomolecular Genetics (CBG), which originally refused to approve Mon 863 based on the evidence. The CBG’s president, a geneticist who works very closely with industry, asked a consultant to re-evaluate just one significant difference and then forced a second vote without a quorum. With only five of 18 members present, Mon 863 passed three to two. According to Seralini, one of the scientists who voted in favour is a toxicologist who, oddly enough, is ‘always against long animal toxicity tests’. In fact, he had been part of the French committee that approved Novartis (now Syngenta) E 176 corn after it had been tested for only two weeks with three cows. Actually, there were four cows at the start of the study, but one died and was removed.

That toxicologist is also on EFSA, which has come under attack for including primarily pro-GM scientists. ‘One member has direct financial links with the biotech industry and others have indirect links,’ according to a November 2004 report by Friends of the Earth. Several members, including the chairman, have been part of an EU-funded project with the stated goal to ‘facilitate market introduction of GMO’s in Europe’. And ‘two members have even appeared in promotional videos produced by the biotech industry.’

It is no surprise, therefore, that EFSA endorsed and even repeated each of Monsanto’s excuses why the statistically significant health effects of rats fed Mon 863 were not relevant. The majority of EU Council of Ministers, however, ignored EFSA’s recommendation and on 24 July voted not to approve the Mon 863. But since EU law requires a ‘qualified majority’, it was passed onto the Commission who gave its approval for consumption by European citizens.

Perhaps EFSA and the European Commission will be more careful to require truly scientific arguments and rigorous research, now that industry studies may be made public. In the meantime, we still don’t know how sick the rats were that ate Mon 863. And we have no idea of the impact on humans.

This piece first appeared in the Ecologist October 2005

The real international spokepersons of GMO safety
No evidence of harm
-1999 Nuffields Council on Bioethics "We have not been able to find evidence of any harm. We are satisfied that all products currently on the market have been rigorously screened by regulatory authorities, that they continue to be monitored, and that no evidence of harm has been detected."
-2001 Research Directorate of EU: "Research on GM plants and derived products so far developed and marketed, following usual risk assessment procedures, has not shown any new risk on human health or the environment"
-2002 French academy of Science: "all the criticisms against GMO's can be set aside based for the most part on strictly scientific criteria"
-2002 French Academy of Medicine found no evidence of health problems in countries where GMO's have been eaten for several years.
-2003 Royal Society UK: "We conducted a major review of the evidence about GM plants and human health last year, and we have not seen any evidence since then that changes our original conclusions. If credible evidence does exist that GM foods are more harmful to people than non-GM foods, we should like to know why it has not been made public"
-2004 British Medical Association endorsed Royal Society conclusions 2003
-2004 German Academies of Science and Humanities: " according to present scientific knowledge it is most unlikely that the consumption of the well characterized transgenic DNA from approved GMO food harbours any recognizable health risk. This report also found insect resistant corn was probably safer than non-GM corn due to reduced fungal toxins. (can be read on my website)
-2002 WHO; "WHO is not aware of scientifically documented cases in which the consumption of these foods[GM food] has negative human health effects."
-2003 International Council for Science (most National Academies of Science are members): "There is no evidence of any deleterious environmental effects having occurred from the trait/species combinations currently available."
-2004 UN-FAO: "to date, no verifiable untoward toxic or nutritionally deleterious effects resulting from the consumption of foods derived from genetically modified foods have been discovered anywhere in the world."
-2007 Advanced Biochemical Engineering/Biotechology surveyed ten years of research publications and stated: "The data available so far provide no scientific evidence that the cultivation of the presently commercialized GM crops has caused environmental harm."

And finally from the 2000 AMA report on GM Food(also on my website):"Genetically modified foods "raise many issues--scientific, technological, environmental, social, ethical, economic, and political."132 Controversy over GM food exposes larger issues about public trust in science and the role of science in policymaking. In an increasingly complex world, trust functions as a substitute for knowledge. Interference with our systems of food production has always aroused public concern, occasionally with justification. Attempts to introduce GM foods have stimulated not a reasoned debate, but a potent negative campaign by people with other agendas. Opponents ignore common farming practices and well investigated facts about plants, or inaccurately present general problems as being unique to GM plants"

Bruce Chassy asserts: "The clever part about the anti-GMO movement is that they managed to get the 'Monsanto and the U.S.' label put on GMOs." That's not 'clever', it's just a fair description of how things stand! Last year, the USA grew 50% of all GM crops. Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Paraguay grew 80% of the rest - mainly for animal feed and biofuels. GM crops were grown on just 1.5% of the world's productive land area in twenty-five nations - most on a trial scale. Another 170 countries (plus 60 occupied territories) remain GM-free. And less than 1% of the world’s 1.3 billion farmers grow GM crops as they yield less (See: Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucs.org) than the best conventional varieties. GM soy, corn, canola and cotton are the only commercial GM crops and they contain just two traits, mostly Roundup tolerance so farmers can spray this Monsanto herbicide more often and at higher doses to kill weeds 'better'. GM crops are not a global industry and the vast majority of the world's food supply is still not Genetically Manipulated. However, Monsanto is the world's biggest commercial seed company, owning the patents on over 90% of all commercial GM crop varieties. The GM industry - led by Monsanto - plans to own and control the global food supply. That's reason enough that we should all advocate and buy only GM-free foods, preferably organic! We owe it to future generations.

You cannot even imagine how helpful your article has been to me! I have read the book, suggested by a ebooks search engine, and felt completely confused. But thanks to your article I have finally understood everything. Thank you!!!