Dec '00 / Jan 2001
A
Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart
Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson
Modernizing Our Electoral Rules
&
Practices
By Rob Richie
Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier
Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers
Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague
Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger
Transforming Our Dreaming
By Josˇ Stevens
Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
The US Is Warned "Wake Up
To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service
U.S. Position Threatens to
Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff
Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore
A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling
Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain
(continued)
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
GE Threat to Health Ignored
The StarLink controversy has shined the spotlight once again on the hazards
of Bt-spliced crops in general, not just the Cry9C variety. In dramatic testimony
presented to the EPA on October 20, a highly regarded international expert,
Dr. Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union, pointed out that:
1. The EPA has ignored an EPA-funded study that shows that Bt toxins have
induced signs of allergenicity in agricultural field workers, as well as an
additional study indicating allergenicity in lab rats.
2. The EPA has failed to require tests of all Bt crops for allergenicity using
the blood serum and chemical reagents from these earlier studies-even though
these tests could be done quickly with little expense.
3. The EPA have failed to carry out adequate safety tests for StarLink or
any of the other Bt crops which they have approved.
4. Government "acute toxicity" protocols are based on the erroneous
scientific assumption that Bt toxins generated by gene-spliced plants in the
field are identical to Bt toxins produced by bacteria in the laboratory
5. The government continues to downplay the potential hazards of antibiotic
resistant marker (ARM) genes-found in Bt crops and all genetically engineered
foods-even though recent studies underline that ARM genes have the ability
to transfer antibiotic resistance to soil bacteria, bees, mammals, and other
organisms, including humans. As Hansen reminded the EPA in May 1999, the British
Medical Association, which represents some 85% of the doctors in Britain,
released a report calling, in part, for a prohibition on the use of antibiotic
resistance marker genes in genetically engineered plants.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that Bt corn does indeed
pose a major hazard to Monarch butterflies, since Monarchs are found in concentrated
numbers in and around milkweed plants in cornfields throughout the corn growing
season. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times "just as many"
Monarchs were breeding and feeding within cornfields as in nonagricultural
sites. In other words millions of Monarch butterflies throughout the Midwest
corn belt are feeding on their only food source, milkweed plants, just at
the same time that Bt corn plants are shedding their toxic pollen, pollen
which lab and field tests have conclusively shown are poisonous to the butterflies.
The biotech industry has worked overtime in the past year trying to maintain
that Bt pollen poses insignificant risks to Monarch butterflies.
Critics have pointed out that not only is Bt killing Monarchs, but that it
is also killing beneficial soil microorganisms and thereby damaging the entire
soil food web, as well as killing beneficial insects such as lacewings and
ladybugs. Scientists also warn that bees and birds are likely being harmed
by eating insects that have ingested the Bt toxin. In addition, organic farmers,
2/3 of whom in the United States use a non-genetically engineered form of
Bt spray as an emergency pest management tool, have pointed out that crop
pests (beetles, boll worms, corn borers) will inevitably develop resistance
to widely cultivated Bt-spliced crops, creating superpests that will overwhelm
organic farmers and make organic agriculture more difficult, if not impossible.
For all of these reasons, Greenpeace, the Center for Food Safety, and a broad
coalition of public interest groups-including the Organic Consumers Association-are
preparing litigation to have all genetically engineered Bt crops taken off
the market.
Even the pro-biotech New Scientist magazine (UK) pointed out what has now
become painfully obvious: If biotech companies and the FDA are unable to keep
an unapproved variety like StarLink out of the human food chain and contained
in restricted farm plots, what are they going to do once the next generation
of bio-pharm plants begin to be commercialized, plants containing vaccines
and pharmaceutical drugs, crops that could harm and poison unsuspecting consumers?
As the magazine concluded, "We can't ignore the taco fiasco · Why was
it left to Friends of the Earth to commission the tests that found StarLink
in taco shells? The food industry needs to get its act together before the
new generation of modified plants arrives. Next time, the consequences could
be serious."
For the moment the proponents of the Biotech Century seem to have survived
the latest storm. Unlike the FDA's last recall of a genetically engineered
product, the nutritional supplement l-Tryptophan, in 1989, which left in its
wake 37 deaths and 5,000 injuries, there are no dead bodies of StarLink victims
visible on the TV news, but the Frankenfoods controversy continues to grow.
The question seems to be no longer, if there will be a biotech Chernobyl,
but only when.
From the BioDemocracy News, a publication of the Organic Consumers Association,
www.purefood.org; Organic Consumers Association, 6101Cliff Estate Road
Little Marais, MN 55614; (218) 226-4164; ronnie@organicconsumers.org
