From Naked Ape to Superspecies by David Suzuki & Holly Dressel

Author:David Suzuki & Holly Dressel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: NAT011000
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2004-02-12T21:00:00+00:00

If You Don’t Look, You Don’t Find

The fusarium fungus can produce a range of toxins that are not destroyed in the cooking process, such as vomitoxin .... More lethal compounds include fumonisin, which can cause cancer and birth defects, and the very lethal chemical warfare agent fusariotoxin.

— JEREMY BIGWOOD, FUNGI EXPERT

As Michael Sligh of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), the NGO headquartered in North Carolina, says, “it’s very easy for the industry to claim, as it does regularly and loudly, that there has been no harm proven to be caused by agro-biotech crops. That’s largely because in the main originating country for this technology, the United States, there has been no risk assessment done on this stuff at all. That makes it possible for them to report that there’s no evidence of harm from their products; from a public point of view especially, no money or effort has gone into looking for any. Only very recently are they allocating a whole 1 to 3 percent of an enormous biotech promotion budget to go into risk assessment. But I haven’t heard if even that is going into real double-blind, animal-use critical trials.”

What scandals have hit the news — allergens in StarLink corn, the death of beneficial insects like lacewings and monarch butterflies because their food sources are being killed or contaminated by genetically engineered plant pesticides, the contamination of Mexican land race corn with GM traits, Arpad Pusztai’s news of brain and organ shrinkage in rats fed GM potatoes — have all come from independent and even accidental studies, most of them underfunded and often suddenly curtailed after their first announcements. All of them have been vigorously attacked by the biotech industry and even by their own publishers and funders. Only the StarLink corn allergen and the contamination in 2003 of food crops with dangerous GE pharmaceutical crops have resulted in regulatory action by any government. In the case of the latter, as we described earlier, once the infected material was disposed of, the FDA turned around and dumped any future responsibilities on universities and academics. So whenever reports of harm do surface, it’s always interesting to see if they can survive the combined pressure from government and industry sources that will be arrayed against them. The latest one to make the news, however, will be very hard to ignore.

Andy Coghlan, a reporter for one of the world’s leading sources of scientific information, The New Scientist, excited media outlets in August 2003 with a story entitled “Weedkiller May Boost Toxic Fungi.” In it he describes a five-year study of plant diseases headed by Myriam Fernandez of the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre, run by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Fernandez was quoted as saying that “in some fields where glyphosate (Monsanto’s patented Roundup, used in combination with their genetically engineered crops) had been applied in spring just before planting, wheat appeared to be worse affected by fusarium head blight.” This disease, which turns the grain heads pink,

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