International herald Tribune, December 15, 2007

FEAR VERSUS SCIENCE

[Rachel's introduction: "If civilization had embraced this principle in the 1800s, our lives today would be almost as nasty, brutish and short as they were 200 years ago." What were we just saying about precaution being the enemy of those who profit from disasters?]

By Mark Schwartz

The European Union's environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, recently indicated that two genetically engineered varieties of corn might soon be banned in Europe because they could possibly harm certain beneficial insects. The European biotechnology industry countered that the very scientific studies cited by Dimas actually bolstered the already overwhelming evidence of the safety of these corn varieties.

This is only the most recent in a long line of EU claims about the supposed harms of biotech. At the core of this dispute is the "precautionary principle" -- the idea that regulatory measures should be taken to prevent or limit actions that raise even conjectural risks, even when the scientific evidence of the existence, magnitude or potential impact of a risk may be incomplete or inconclusive. This principle, incorporated into EU law, has effectively precluded the cultivation or sale of biotech crops or foods in the EU.

In the United States, by contrast, dozens of new crops and foods resulting from recombinant DNA technology have been marketed over the past decade, and they have been an overwhelming success.

Indeed, fully 90 percent of the soybeans currently planted in the U.S. are of a biotech variety, and close to 80 percent of cotton and 60 percent of corn are biotech varietals. Fully three-quarters of the processed foods in American supermarkets contain ingredients from recombinant DNA modified plants.

The integration of biotech foods into the U.S. economy has its origin in the Reagan administration's Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology, which laid the groundwork for establishing that the characteristics of the end product -- and not of the process by which the end-product is developed -- determine the risk level, and hence the level of federal regulation.

This approach is based on the fact that the genes of virtually all organisms consist of DNA, and, scientifically speaking, it's what the DNA produces, not where it comes from, that matters. The result is that biotech foods in the United States are effectively regulated no differently than conventional foods. Furthermore -- because the end- product, not the process, determines the level of risk -- biotech foods are generally not labeled any differently than conventional foods.

The relative importance of regulating the process (as in the EU) rather than the end-product is referred to as the "process-product paradigm." With 10 years of hindsight to guide us, which is the better regulatory framework?

Whether we compare these products on the basis of their production costs, diversity of new varietals or safety, the clear winner is end- product regulation of biotech crops and foods.

For example, farmers who have used crops containing genes enhancing resistance to pests have significantly reduced their reliance on pesticides, and simultaneously increased their yields. For cotton plants alone, the net financial gain to American farmers has been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the most promising areas of new crop development involves varieties genetically engineered to have an increased content of essential minerals and vitamins.

As for safety, by the end of this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will have evaluated approximately 70 biotech food products and found them all to be as safe as their conventional counterparts.

Furthermore, a large body of independent scientific evidence confirms that there is nothing about biotech foods that causes them to be inherently more dangerous than foods made from conventional crops. A study by the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the likelihood of unintended health effects as a result of various methods of developing new strains, and concluded that mutagen breeding, a century-old means of altering crops, was more likely to be genetically disruptive than any form of genetic engineering, and also produced the widest range of unintended effects.

What many opponents of bioengineering refuse to acknowledge is that many traditional plant-breeding techniques are simply imprecise forms of the very genetic engineering that they claim to reject. For instance, mutagen breeding involves bombarding plants with X-Rays, gamma rays, fast neutrons, or one of a variety of toxic chemicals in an attempt to induce favorable chromosomal changes and genetic mutations. These techniques are so imprecise that researchers never know which chromosomes they are disrupting, let alone the genes on these chromosomes that they are mutating.

Examples of products developed using these conventional methods include some of the most common varieties of grapefruit, watermelon, wheat, barley, rice, peanuts and lettuce, along with hundreds of other fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes that have found their way onto supermarket shelves around the world. None of the foods produced through mutagen breeding is labeled "mutagen bred" or "engineered using ionizing radiation or toxic chemicals."'

An increasing number of studies have concluded that biotech foods are actually healthier and safer in many respects than their conventional counterparts. Examples include the very products that Commissioner Dimas is considering banning, namely varieties of biotech engineered corn.

Minute quantities of the fungal toxin Fumonisin have been linked to cancer, liver toxicity and neural tube defects in newborns. The principal way these toxins enter the food supply is via insect-damaged plants. Biotech crops produce a protein that is toxic to many boring insects, but perfectly safe to mammals, thereby substantially reducing damage to crops, and the vehicle by which fungal toxins enter our food supply. Biotech corn has been shown to contain 900 percent fewer fungal toxins than the non-GM corn varieties grown by organic and traditional farmers.

These scientific conclusions have led to suggestions that health claims be allowed on biotech corn products or that warning labels be mandated on certain conventional corn products, turning on its head the argument that bioengineered foods be labeled as "genetically engineered" in order to enable consumers to seek out the "safer" conventional products.

The precautionary principle seriously impedes the further advancement of society by eroding science-based risk-management practices, leading to the banning of net-beneficial products as well as products for which no harm has been demonstrated.

If civilization had embraced this principle in the 1800s, our lives today would be almost as nasty, brutish and short as they were 200 years ago.