Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food

See We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents by Dr. Dutkiewicz and Dr. Rosenberg are the authors of the forthcoming book “Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better.” From The NY Times. Excerpts:

"But before you hurl that bagel into the trash, consider that it represents much that is good about our food system: It is affordable, convenient and nutritious. Virtually all the food we eat, junk and vegetables alike, is part of an industrial system. Acknowledging that fact and embracing the system’s scale, reliability, safety standards and abundance is a far better path to improving it than chasing a fantasy of Edenic premodern food that never existed.

Your morning bagel is, in fact, a small miracle made possible by conventional, mass-produced and enriched ingredients, like flour and salt. At the turn of the 20th century, when our great-great-grandparents had no choice but to eat “real food,” malnutrition was rampant. Anemia was common, as was iodine deficiency, which could cause a disfiguring swelling of the thyroid gland known as a goiter; in one Michigan county on the eve of World War I, nearly a third of potential Army recruits were rejected because of such thyroid problems. Enrichment — such as the addition of iron to wheat flour and iodine to salt — and easier access to grain and fresh produce, made possible by productive industrial farming, reduced anemia and virtually banished not only goiters but also illnesses like rickets, scurvy and pellagra.

Perhaps you want a slice of tomato on that bagel? If it’s January on the East Coast, it won’t be local. Your tomato will come from Florida or, more likely, Mexico, where it will have been grown on high-yield farms using conventional fertilizers and pesticides. Want it organic? It will still take industrial supply chains to get it to you. Shunning those globe-spanning supply chains in favor of sparse and often more expensive local and seasonal alternatives is likely to result in everyone eating less produce.

Adding fruit will make your breakfast even healthier. Here, too, modern food technology can help. Half a century of worry about the safety of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s, often derided as “frankenfoods,” has not yielded a shred of compelling evidence that they endanger human health. The genetically modified Rainbow papaya, which is resistant to the ringspot virus, saved Hawaii’s papaya crop. Arctic apples from Washington State, genetically modified to brown more slowly, reduce food waste."

"the idea that ultraprocessed foods are categorically unhealthy is an oversimplification." 

"many ultraprocessed foods, such as yogurt, whole-grain bread or ready-to-eat plant-based burgers, are not linked to worse health outcomes and may even be beneficial."

"dumping industrial food from your plate would do little to change things for the better and, in some cases, would actually make it worse. Food that is local, organic and low-tech is vastly more expensive than food grown through conventional methods. There is little evidence that it is healthier. And when it comes to environmental impact, it matters much more what is produced than how it is produced; tofu is going to have a smaller ecological footprint than beef. That holds true even if the tofu comes from soybeans grown on giant farms using pesticides, and the beef is grass-fed and organic."

"There are plenty of premade options you can grab that are just as nutritious as the fresh-cooked version, like Starbucks egg white bites, Trader Joe’s palak paneer or frozen microwavable vegetables." 

Greenpeace's Cruel War on Genetically Engineered Crops Grinds On

By Henry I. Miller, MS, MD and Kathleen Hefferon. They are with The American Council on Science and Health. Excerpts:

"Golden Rice varieties get their name from their color, which is imparted by the presence of beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A. Rice is a food staple for hundreds of millions, especially in Asia. Although it is an excellent source of calories, it lacks certain micronutrients necessary for a complete diet. In developing countries, 200 — 300 million children of preschool-age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency. That increases their susceptibility to infections such as measles and diarrheal diseases. Every year, about half a million children become blind because of VAD, and 70 percent of them die within a year of losing their sight."

"Greenpeace has ignored the broad and longstanding scientific consensus about the safety of genetically engineered crops, the result of thousands of risk-assessment experiments and extensive real-world experience. In the United States alone, more than 90 percent of all corn, soy, and sugar beets are genetically engineered, and in decades of consumption of trillions of servings of food from genetically engineered plants around the world, not a single health or environmental problem has been documented."

"feeding trials have shown the rice to be highly effective in preventing VAD [vitamin A deficiency], and toxicity is virtually impossible because the conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A in the body is regulated and ceases when vitamin A levels in the blood rise above normal."

"In 2014, agricultural economists Justus Wesseler and David Zilberman calculated the impact of the delays in the regulatory approval of Golden Rice. They reported that the absence of Golden Rice caused the loss of about 1.4 million life-years over the previous decade in India alone.  A decade later, the toll has continued to mount."

"even when technologies introduce new risks, many confer far superior net benefits — that is, their use reduces many other, often far more serious, hazards. Examples include blood transfusions, organ transplants, and automobile airbags, all of which offer immense benefits and only minimal risk."

Government Bans on GMOs Are Making Global Hunger Worse—and Do Serious Harm to the Planet

Those who want to improve standards of living and care for the environment should be appalled by GMO restrictions around the world.

By Jeffrey Miron & Sarah Eckhardt.

"The global controversy over genetically modified organisms is a classic bootleggers and Baptists story. Activists who mistakenly believe that GMOs are dangerous to consume have teamed up with pesticide and insecticide sellers to restrict the world’s poor from life-saving technologies.

This is a tragedy.

GMOs increase crop yields, improve the nutritional value of crops, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Those who want to improve standards of living and care for the environment should be appalled by GMO restrictions around the world.

Although the ‘Baptists’ are skeptical about GMO safety, an overwhelming consensus of scientists agree that GMOs are safe to eat. They do not damage organ health, cause genetic mutations in humans or animals, affect pregnancies, or transfer genes to those who consume them.

The ‘bootlegger’ allies—the pesticide and insecticide industries – are threatened by high-yielding and disease resistant crops that don’t require their products.

Unlike conventional plant or animal breeding, which combines all the genes from two sources, GMOs are created by tweaking an organism’s genetic code. This allows for more precise alterations, such as insertion of a disease-resistant gene or one that produces more vitamin C. Targeted alterations allow researchers to improve on conventional breeding practices and create organisms that are optimized for specific agriculture conditions.

This makes them well-suited to increase food security and lift farmers out of poverty. Farmers in poor countries lack access to the seed selection, farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation technologies that are widespread in wealthy countries. Without these products, their crops are more susceptible to weeds and pests and yield substantially less than crops in the developed world. When pesticides are available, farmers often apply them by hand, which contributes to pesticide poisoning.

The benefits of GMOs are well-known to farmers in these conditions. In Kenya, dairy farmers are petitioning their government to lift the ban on GMOs because the rising prices of non-GMO livestock feeds have put many out of business. Since plant improvements are more targeted, GMOs are higher yielding, require fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and are more disease resistant than conventional crops.

For example, genetically modified bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton increased Indian cotton yields between 50 and 70 percent between 1975 and 2009 and decreased insecticide poisoning by 2.4 million cases a year. Because farmers lost fewer crops to disease and pests, their profits rose by as much as 50 percent. For farmers who cannot afford tractors and fertilizer, these cost-reducing GMO seeds are an effective way to raise food production.

Yet only four African countries allow GMO crops, and much of southeast Asia restricts GMO access. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates that GMO restrictions could cost low and middle income nations up to $1.5 trillion in foregone income through 2050. In the Philippines, Bt eggplants were banned by the Supreme Court, even though several studies conducted in the country found numerous health and income benefits.

Beyond all these benefits, GMOs lower carbon emissions per unit produced. Adoption of genetically modified technology decreased greenhouse gas emissions by an equivalent of removing 15.27 million cars from the road in 2018 and saved the world approximately 16.1 million hectares in farmland. This is approximately 14 percent of the United States’ arable land.

Yet the European Union is moving away from GMOs and aims to have 25 percent of European farms producing organics by 2030.

The GMO debate continues to be controlled by non-scientific groups to the detriment of global hunger and efforts to lower emissions. Governments, particularly those of impoverished nations, should lift their bans and allow full access to GMOs."

Learning to Love G.M.O.s

Overblown fears have turned the public against genetically modified food. But the potential benefits have never been greater

By Jennifer Kahn of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"When cancer-prone mice were given Martin’s (plant biologist Cathie Martin) purple tomatoes as part of their diet, they lived 30 percent longer than mice fed the same quantity of ordinary tomatoes; they were also less susceptible to inflammatory bowel disease."

"because the plant contained a pair of genes from a snapdragon — that’s what spurs the tomatoes to produce more anthocyanin — it would be classified as a genetically modified organism: a G.M.O."

"That designation brings with it a host of obligations, not just in Britain but in the United States and many other countries. Martin had envisioned making the juice on a small scale, but just to go through the F.D.A. approval process would cost a million dollars. Adding U.S.D.A. approval could push that amount even higher. (Tomato juice is known as a “G.M. product” and is regulated by the F.D.A. Because a tomato has seeds that can germinate, it is regulated by both the F.D.A. and the U.S.D.A.) “I thought, This is ridiculous,” Martin told me.

Martin eventually did put together the required documentation, but the process, and subsequent revisions, took almost six years."

"Martin is perhaps onto something when she describes those most opposed to G.M.O.s as “the W.W.W.s”: the well, wealthy and worried, the same cohort of upper-middle-class shoppers who have turned organic food into a multibillion-dollar industry."

"Nearly half of all U.S. shoppers say that they try not to buy G.M.O. foods, while a study by Jennifer Kuzma, a biochemist who is a director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, found that consumers will pay up to 20 percent more to avoid them."

"“Probably the angriest I’ve ever felt was when anti-G.M.O. groups destroyed fields of Golden Rice growing in the Philippines,” says Lynas (Mark Lynas, an environmental writer and activist who protested against G.M.O.s for over a decade), who publicly disavowed his opposition to G.M.O.s in 2013. “To see a crop that had such obvious lifesaving potential ruined — it would be like anti-vaxxer groups invading a laboratory and destroying a million vials of Covid vaccine.”

In recent years, many environmental groups have also quietly walked back their opposition as evidence has mounted that existing G.M.O.s are both safe to eat and not inherently bad for the environment. The introduction of Bt corn, which contains a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally insect-resistant bacterium that organic farmers routinely spray on crops, dropped the crop’s insecticide use by 35 percent. A pest-resistant Bt eggplant has become similarly popular in Bangladesh, where farmers have also embraced flood-tolerant “scuba rice,” a variety engineered to survive being submerged for up to 14 days rather than just three. Each year, Bangladesh and India lose roughly four million tons of rice to flooding — enough to feed 30 million people — and waste a corresponding volume of pesticides and herbicides, which then enter the groundwater."

"plant geneticists tend not to be overly concerned about the risks of G.M.O.s, as long as the modifications are made with some care. As a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences found, G.M.O.s were generally safe, though it allowed that minor impacts were theoretically possible. Fred Gould, a professor of agriculture who was chairman of the committee that prepared the 600-page report"

"many genetic modifications to food are trivial and extremely unlikely to have any measurable effect on people."

"we’ve been changing all these things already with conventional breeding, and so far we’re doing all right,” he added. “Making the same change with genetic engineering — there’s really no difference.”"

"there are all kinds of unnatural things that nobody worries about, like Netflix and indoor plumbing — “but it’s become a kind of shorthand for this world we feel like we’ve lost.”"

"almost everything we grow and eat today has had its DNA altered extensively. For millenniums, farmers, discovering that one version of a plant — usually a random genetic mutant — was hardier, or sweeter, or had smaller seeds, would cross it with another that, say, produced more fruit, in hopes of getting both benefits."

"the way nature alters things is also profoundly haphazard. Sometimes a plant will acquire one trait at the expense of another. Sometimes it actually becomes worse. The same is true for agricultural crossbreeding. Not only is there no way to control which genes are kept and which are lost; the process also tends to introduce unwanted changes."

"Last year, the U.S.D.A. ruled that plants that had undergone simple cisgenic edits — changes to the plant’s own DNA, of the kind that could theoretically be created by years of traditional crossbreeding — would not be subject to the same regulation as other G.M.O.s."

"Grocery stores are afraid to carry something like a genetically modified tomato because they worry that consumers will reject it. Growers and businesses are afraid of investing in one for the same reason."

"it’s turned into this thing that only half a dozen companies in the world can afford to do, because they’ve got to go through all this regulatory stuff.”" (Martin)

"The activists that first objected to G.M.O.s did it because they didn’t trust big agribusiness. But the result now is that only big companies can afford to do it.”" (Martin)

"if we can use gene editing to make broccoli slightly less bitter, maybe people — and especially kids — will eat more of it, and therefore be getting more fiber and more vitamins. Which might make a difference in their long-term health.”" (Haven Baker, a founder of a company called Pairwise)

"before G.M.O.s were even introduced, we’d lost 93 percent of the genetic diversity in our fruits and vegetables. In the early 1900s, farmers in Iowa regularly grew pink-fleshed Chelsea watermelons, which were known for being intensely sweet but have now all but disappeared because they’re too delicate for shipping."

"Genetic engineering and G.M.O.s could help undo these losses, restoring rare and delicate heirloom varieties that were once abundant but have now all but disappeared."

GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save the Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"Most people think the precautionary principle simply says “better safe than sorry” and helps to prevent disasters like the release of Thalidomide for pregnant women. In fact, it goes much further and is often a barrier to innovation. As applied in practice, especially in the European Union, it requires regulators to take into account all possible hazards of a new technology, however implausible, to discount all possible benefits, however plausible, and to ignore all the hazards of existing technologies that might be replaced by the innovation. As Ed Regis puts it in his new book Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood: “The principle focuses on theoretical or potential risks, those that are only possible or hypothetical, while ignoring the specific and actual harms that restrictions or prohibitions are likely to produce.” In this way, it creates obstacles to anything new.

Bizarrely, the Cartagena Protocol applied this principle to crops bred by the precise insertion of specific genes from other plants but not to the older technique of random genetic scrambling with gamma rays, like Golden Promise barley, even though the potential unknown risk of the latter is clearly greater. The effect on Golden Rice was twofold. First, the requirement for greater regulation tarnished all biotech crops as risky (if they’re safe, how come they have to go through so much regulation?). Second, it made the testing of different varieties impossibly expensive and time-consuming, killing a key part of the innovation process: the trial and error that is always necessary to turn a good idea into a practical product. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different materials for the filament of a light bulb. Imagine if he had had to get separate regulatory approval for each one.

The European Union’s directive on the deliberate release of genetically modified crops includes the statement that “the precautionary principle has been taken into account in the drafting of this Directive and must be taken into account when implementing it.” This effectively killed off biotechnology on the continent, though Europe happily imports huge quantities of GM soybeans from the Americas today. Since 2005, Canada (which did not sign the Cartagena Protocol) has approved 70 different biotech crops, while the European Union has approved just one—and that took 13 years, by which time the crop was outdated.

 To illustrate just how impenetrable the EU’s regulatory thicket is, take the biotech potato developed by the German company BASF in 2005. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) initially approved it, but the European Commission then blocked it, citing the precautionary principle. BASF took the Commission to the European Court of Justice, which ordered another evaluation from the EFSA. This confirmed that the crop was safe and the EU was instructed by the Court to approve its use, which it did. But Hungary’s government then intervened on behalf of green pressure groups, pointing out (Kafka-like) that the EU had based its approval on the first EFSA ruling instead of the second one, even though the two rulings were practically identical. In 2013, eight years after the first approval, the EU General Court upheld Hungary’s complaint. By then BASF had lost interest in banging its head against this precautionary wall, so it withdrew the application, packed up its entire research into biotechnology and moved it to the U.S., which has never signed the Cartagena Protocol. Syngenta did the same."

"After a quarter of a century of growing biotech crops in North and South America, Asia and parts of Africa, the evidence is now clear: they have caused no human or animal illness, and have huge environmental benefit, such as greatly reduced pesticide use, less ploughing, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less land required to grow a given quantity of crop, lower costs and higher yields. This is the environmental bounty Europe has missed out on thanks to its over-zealous regulation of GM crops."

"By 2012, it was clear from studies in China that the latest version of Golden Rice, grown in secure greenhouses, gave children sufficient beta carotene to make them healthy but could not harm them, and did so far more effectively than feeding them spinach. However, the research caused a fuss. The US-based, Chinese-born researcher followed precisely the approved protocols for the research, which did not describe Golden Rice as a GMO-crop. Nevertheless, the same university which had approved the protocols, then found that not describing Golden Rice as a GMO-crop was an ethical omission. Overall, and without any credible analysis, the university found insufficient evidence that the principle of ‘prior informed consent’ from the subjects of the research had been properly applied, handing the opponents of GM foods a huge propaganda victory at a crucial time. Yet by this date, billions of meals of biotech crops had been eaten all around the world, and three independent reviews of the Chinese research concluded that the trial had been safe and effective. Nevertheless, the reputational harm lingered."

"The International Rice Research Institute developed numerous different Golden Rice strains back-crossed into commonly grown varieties, behind tough security barriers because of constant threats from activists encouraged by Greenpeace. Eventually, the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board chose one of the varieties for field testing. They would have liked to have chosen lots of different varieties, because in plant breeding it is always necessary to weed out sports that have for some reason acquired undesirable traits along the way. But the precautionary principle made this impossibly expensive and laborious since it required evaluation in advance of the potential risks of each separate variety. So they had to pick one.

Disastrously, that one variety turned out to have a genetic flaw that made it poor at yielding grain outside the greenhouse. Once again, the environmentalists crowed that the project was doomed."


"In 2015, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Patents and Trademark Office rewarded Golden Rice with their Patents For Humanity Award. In 2017, a group of 134 Nobel-prize winners (now expanded to 150) called on Greenpeace and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Program to “cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general.”"

"By 2017, a new variety of Golden Rice, GR2E, had been tested in the field in the Philippines and shown to be robust, true-breeding, high-yielding and strong in its expression of beta carotene. The IRRI submitted an application to release it to farmers, in the form of eight hefty documents, one more than 800 pages long and detailing the many tests of the physical, nutritional, allergenic, and toxicity done on the plant to show that it could not conceivably be anything other than safe to grow and eat."

E.U. Regulators Can't Detect the Gene-Edited Crops They Banned

The difference between two identical genes—one edited and the other a natural mutation—is entirely metaphysical

By Ronald Bailey of Reason.

"The European Court of Justice ruled last summer that the European Union's absurd regulatory scheme for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must be applied to gene-edited crops. Such regulations, however, are scientifically nonsensical. GMO crops (typically modified by adding genes from other organisms)and gene-edited crops (using techniques like CRISPR to modify genes already in the crop variety) are safe for people and for the environment. Such crops need no more regulation than do crops created via conventional techniques such as crossbreeding or random mutation by blasting them with ionizing radiation and harsh chemicals.

Now foods labs are telling would-be E.U. regulators that there are no tests that can reliably distinguish between gene-edited and conventional crop varieties. Why? Because many of the edited genes are indistinguishable from those in naturally occurring organisms. Consequently, E.U. regulators are worried that gene-edited horrors from the U.S., such as Calyxt's healthy high-oleic-acid oil or Intrexon's non-browning lettuce, might sneak into European supermarkets undetected.

Before gene-editing, plant breeders would first identify a useful gene in a landrace variety, e.g., mildew resistance, and then onerously crossbreed generation after generation to transfer the gene into a more productive commercial variety. Biotechnologists can now induce mildew resistance by simply editing a few DNA pairs in the corresponding gene in the commercial variety to match the ones found naturally in the landrace.

In contrast to the bioluddites in Europe, regulators in the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, and Australia have sensibly declared that they do not intend to regulate edited crops with mutations that could have occurred in nature.

Hermann Broll, a researcher in the Department of Food Safety at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin, according to Nature, noted that even if food testing labs could find the edits, regulators would still struggle to prove that the DNA variant they've identified is the result of gene editing, rather than a natural mutation. "I do not have a clue as to the solution—and I have not seen anywhere any clue yet," said Broll.

Here's a suggestion: Go back to the European Court of Justice and urge the judges to overturn their metaphysical ruling, which found that one of two identical genes must be regulated if it happens as a result of editing, while the other escapes administrative scrutiny if it is a natural or radiation-induced mutation."

New Research Shows the European Union's Anti-GMO Rules Are Ridiculously Bad

“Neither de facto [GMO] bans nor mandatory labeling can be justified.”

By Baylen Linnekin. He is a food lawyer, scholar, and adjunct law professor, as well as the author of Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable (Island Press 2016).

"An excellent new paper from a trio of Danish researchers, two of whom are based out of the University of Copenhagen, argues that the European Union's stance on farming with GMO crops is an untenable mess. The paper concludes that "neither de facto [GMO] bans nor mandatory labeling can be justified," and the researchers assert that current E.U. rules—which embrace both de facto bans and mandatory labeling of foods containing GMO ingredients—are backward and "hinder[] agricultural innovation."

In "Are current E.U. policies on GMOs justified?," published in the journal Transgenic Research, the researchers sought to determine whether the most common arguments for restricting GMOs justify the E.U.'s decidedly anti-GMO policies. The authors first explain the current E.U. GMO policies. They then turn to a discussion of the grounds for those policies, including risk mitigation and other stated non-risk justifications for restricting genetic modification or gene editing (such as their purported unnaturalness).

"It is… really difficult to construct a solid argument to the effect that the distinction between natural and unnatural can warrant stricter regulation of GMO's—even if we consider the best philosophical arguments for the value of nature and naturalness," says Andreas Christiansen, a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the paper. 

Farming with GMOs in Europe is a tough row to hoe, as the paper explains. The E.U.'s convoluted "pre-release authorization" process for getting a GMO crop (or food containing GMO ingredients) to market keeps those crops from ever getting there. Even if E.U. food-safety officials authorize a GMO crop as safe to market, the article details, another body, the European Commission, or E.C., can order up more research. If the E.C. ultimately likes what it sees, then it can, in turn, recommend to yet another body, made up of bureaucrats from the various E.U. member states, that they authorize the GMO crop.

That body, the article notes, "has never managed to… reject or approve" any GMO crop since the E.U. rules came into force in 2003. An appeals committee exists but, the paper notes, it too has never broken the deadlock. Though the E.C. ultimately can approve an application anyways, the paper says—and may even be "legally obliged" to do so—in practice that's only happened once.
Last year, the E.U.'s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, ruled that crops produced using a process known as gene editing should be subject to the same overly burdensome rules the E.U. already requires GMO crops to follow.

The gene-editing case involves technology known as CRISPR, which uses a process known as mutagenesis—turning on or off specific DNA that's present naturally in an organism. GMO crops are produced by genetic modification, also known as transgenesis, which involves inserting DNA from one organism into another.

Unlike the E.U., the USDA announced last year that it won't impose any additional regulations on gene-edited crops or foods.

It is against the backdrop of this USDA decision and the widely panned EU. .ruling that the authors of the Transgenic Research article sought to take a critical look at whether those E.U. rules are justified in the first place. They conclude that even "the most popular and cogent arguments for restricting GMOs do not, in general, justify the types of restrictive policies that govern GMOs within the E.U."

In a 2018 piece I wrote for Reason on an awful set of proposed USDA rules intended to regulate GMO food labeling here in the U.S., I blasted the plan and wrote that "even good regulations [are unlikely to] to fully resolve contentious" debates over GMO foods. The USDA's rules, like those in the E.U., are not good regulations.

So just what should regulators do with GMOs? Ideally, very little. As I've stated many times (e.g., here), I care not a lick about GMOs. I am neither pro-GMO nor anti-GMO. I hope that someday governments worldwide will, as a rule, share my indifference."

EU's Anti-GMO Crusade Is Unscientific and Harmful

By Matt Ridley.

"The European Court of Justice has just delivered a scientifically absurd ruling, in defiance of advice from its advocate general, but egged on by Jean-Claude Juncker’s allies. It will ensure that more pesticides are used in Britain, our farmers will be less competitive and researchers will leave for North America. Thanks a bunch, your honours.

By saying that genome-edited crops must be treated to expensive and uncertain regulation, it has pandered to the views of a handful of misguided extremists, who no longer have popular support in this country.

Let’s compare two plant varieties: golden promise barley and a wheat resistant to a fungal pest called powdery mildew. The barley was derived from seeds bombarded with gamma rays at a nuclear facility in the 1950s, scrambling some of their genes, which had the happy if accidental result of making better malting barley. It became (and remains) a popular variety for brewing beer among (wait for it!) organic farmers.

The wheat was produced by Calyxt, a US company, last year using a genome-editing technique to tweak one part of one gene, introducing no foreign DNA. It will need less fungicide sprayed on it than normal wheat. The US government says it needs no special regulation. The EU has effectively said it will take Calyxt many years and vast sums of money to find out whether it might or might not approve the wheat for growing.

Calyxt and others like it won’t bother applying, so we will be deprived of the chance to use less fungicide. We will miss out on a new genome-edited potato variety that needs 80 per cent less spray. We are already missing out on GM varieties of maize and other crops that use much less insecticide and are proven safe by 25 years of consumption.

 

A 2014 German survey found that the introduction of genetic modification elsewhere in the world had reduced pesticide use by 36.9 per cent on average, while increasing yields by 21.6 per cent. No wonder we are having to import more of our cattle feed from the Americas.

 

The ruling condemns Britain to the innovation slow lane, denying us greener crops. It will deter investment and drive our world-class scientists to move abroad. As one Canadian professor said: “Great news for Canadian and American farmers today. EU based environmental NGOs have politically manipulated their legal system to drive every last cent of ag R&D out of the EU, guaranteeing their farmers will no longer be competitive. Hope all Europeans enjoy their future higher food prices.”

Welcome to our continuing regulatory alignment with the EU."

Confession of an Anti-GMO Activist

Genetically modified crops have been vilified and banned, but the science is clear: They’re perfectly safe. And what’s more, the world desperately needs them.

By Mark Lynas. He is a visiting fellow at the Cornell Alliance for Science. Excerpts:

"I have since reversed my views on GMOs, as the evidence debunking almost all of these claims has accumulated over the years, but there’s no denying the remarkable world-wide success of our campaign."

"Though transparency in these matters is a good thing, it is often paired with campaigns of disinformation against GMOs, such as the claim that they might transfer allergenic proteins (they don’t)."

The problem isn’t just that almost all of the alarms about GMOs were false. It’s that the anti-GMO campaign has deprived much of the world of a crucial, life-improving technology—and has shown the readiness of many environmentalists to ignore science when it contradicts their prejudices. That’s not the example we need just now as the planet faces the very real threat of climate change.

Contrary to our initial fears, the overall impact of genetically modified crops has been to dramatically reduce the amount and toxicity of pesticides sprayed by farmers. Crops such as Bt corn, so called because it incorporates proteins toxic to insects from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, have enabled farmers to rely less on sprayed insecticides. A meta-analysis, combining the results of nearly 150 peer-reviewed studies, was published in 2014 in the highly regarded journal PLOS One. It concluded that GMO crops used 37% less chemical pesticide (that is, both insecticide and herbicide) than conventional versions of the same crops, thanks largely to the new crops’ internal biological protection against insects.

Pesticide reductions have been especially notable in developing countries. In Bangladesh, for instance, I have seen firsthand how smallholder farmers have benefited from Bt varieties of eggplant. In the past, they often sprayed their crop with toxic chemicals as many as 100 times in a season to fight off pests. The GMO eggplant has enabled them to dramatically reduce insecticide spraying, in some places almost to zero.

And the GMO seeds reproduce perfectly well. Those Bangladeshi farmers save and share their new Bt eggplant seeds, helping their neighbors and extended families also to reduce pesticide spraying. Many crops now in development in African countries, such as drought-tolerant corn and disease-resistant banana and cassava, will be sold royalty-free by local seed companies in an effort to improve the livelihoods of subsistence farmers and reduce poverty.

Nor is there any truth to the charge that GMO crops have driven Indian farmers to suicide. The Bt cotton introduced to India in 2002 has turned out to be a boon. It now accounts for over 90% of Indian cotton acreage, with 800 different competing Bt cotton varieties on the domestic market. Farmer suicide in India, while undoubtedly tragic in each individual case, occurs at a rate similar to that of such countries as Scotland or France, which don’t use GMOs. The German researcher Matin Qaim estimates that the reduced use of insecticides by Indian farmers, thanks to GMO cotton, may have avoided as many as 2.4 million cases of poisoning a year.

Perhaps the most egregious and now-exploded myth is that GMO foods are somehow bad for human health. Doctored graphs showing purported correlations between rates of autism and GMO crop adoption, or suggested links between genetic engineering and cancer rates, have become widespread internet memes. A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 37% of U.S. adults in the general public believe that it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, as compared with 88% of American scientists."

A massive 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that “the data do not support the assertion that cancer rates have increased because of consumption of products of [genetically engineered] crops.” Moreover, “patterns of change in cancer incidence in the U.S. are generally similar to those in the United Kingdom and Europe, where diets contain much lower amounts of food derived from [these] crops.” The NAS reached the same conclusion for obesity, diabetes, celiac disease, various allergies and autism, pointing to no evidence of higher rates in countries that use GMOs.

The view that GMO foods have no discernible impact on health is now the well-established consensus across the international scientific community. It includes not just the NAS but the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the French Academy of Science, the African Academy of Sciences and numerous others."

"Recently, the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the earliest groups opposing GMOs, revised its view on biotechnology after lengthy internal debate. EDF, to its credit, now “recognizes the use of biotechnology as a legitimate deployment of science in the search for effective solutions.”"

European studies disprove Seralini’s GMO maize tumor claims

By Joan Conrow of Alliance for Science.

"Three European studies have disproved Gilles-Éric Séralini’s widely circulated claims that genetically modified maize (corn) induces tumors in rats.

Séralini, a professor at the University of Caen, published his sensational claims in Food and Chemical Toxicology in September 2012, and used them to call for long-term GMO feeding studies. Though the publication later retracted his study, anti-GMO groups have continued to circulate Séralini’s conclusions in a bid to stoke fears about the safety of GM foods.

Now three studies — GRACE and G-TwYST, funded by the European Union, and GMO90+ in France — have refuted Séralini’s main conclusions about the toxicity of herbicide-tolerant (Roundup Ready) maize. The research — conducted to address concerns raised by the Seralini study and provide the EU with guidance on the need for long-term studies — identified no potential risk from the product.

“European consumers must be informed of the results of these studies, [which] should reassure them on the quality for their health of genetically modified plants authorized for commercialization and on the European evaluation procedure, already the most rigorous in the world,” the French Association of Plant Biotechnology (AFBV) stated. “In addition, these new studies contradict Seralini’s proposal on the need to carry out long-term studies.”

The EU requires applicants to conduct a 90-day feeding assessment study on whole GMO food/feed before it can be placed on the market. The original assessment conducted for herbicide-tolerant maize identified no potential risk to humans.

“The G-TwYST (GM Plant Two Year Safety Testing) data from 90-day and long-term rodent feeding studies did not identify potential risks as well, and therefore support the results from the initial analyses,” according to the study’s conclusions and recommendation’s document, which was presented at an April 29, 2018 conference in Bratislava, Slovaki.

“It was concluded that there were no adverse effects related to the administration of the GM maize NK603 cultivated with or without Roundup,” the report stated.

The research included a combined chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity study, and “no toxicologically relevant effects related to the GM maize NK603 or the GM maize NK603 treated with Roundup were observed,” the report stated.

The GRACE (GMO Risk Assessment and Communication of Evidence) study conducted two 90-day feeding trials on rats using two different varieties of maize genetically modified to resist insect pests and tolerate glyphosate. “The results showed that the two GM maize varieties tested did not trigger any negative effects in the trial animals,” according to a report on the findings.

Additionally, data showed the GM maize did not affect the immune functions tested in both of the 90-day studies.

The GRACE study was published in Archives of Toxicology.

The GMO90+ study also assessed the Bt maize, using a 180-day feeding trial, and found no negative effects on the rodents.

In addition to addressing concerns raised by the Séralini study, the research was intended to provide the EU with guidance whether it’s necessary to conduct a two-year carcinogenicity feeding trial on rats with whole food/feed. “The necessity to perform a feeding trial with whole food/feed should be carefully evaluated given the high number of animals needed,” the G-TwYST report concluded.

Due to the controversial nature of the research, “substantial efforts were made to ensure stakeholder engagement, transparency and data accessibility,” the G-TwYST report stated. “These included stakeholder engagement in both project plans and results; making available draft research plans and preliminary research results (all data produced) for stakeholder scrutiny; a procedure for discussing, systematically considering and responding to all stakeholder comments as well as tracking how the comments were considered in the project; detailed documentation and transparency of all steps; open access publications, and an open access repository for raw data to be available following academic publication of the results. The approach received high praising from the majority of stakeholder participants.”

The report further noted: “These challenges and the considerable resources and efforts needed do not suggest this approach to be used on a routine basis. Yet, in case of highly contested scientific-technical issues and polarized views, the approach remains an interesting option to improve the quality and social robustness of research.”

The results from the experiments are now published on envision.com."

Activist opposition to the deployment of "golden rice" resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India alone

Victor Frankenstein Is the Real Monster: Mary Shelley's misunderstood masterpiece turns 200 by Ronald Bailey. Excerpt:

"Despite scientifically absurd and mendacious activist campaigns targeting "Frankenfoods," agricultural researchers have created hundreds of safe biotech crop varieties that yield more food and fiber by resisting disease and pests. The adoption of bioengineered herbicide-resistant crops has enabled farmers to control weeds without having to plow their fields, contributing to a 40 percent reduction in topsoil erosion since the 1980s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Twenty-two years after commercial biotech crops were introduced, they are now grown on nearly 460 million acres in 26 countries. A 2014 review published in the journal PLOS One by a team of German researchers found that the global adoption of genetically modified (G.M.) crops has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37 percent, increased crop yields by 22 percent, and increased farmer profits by 68 percent. Every independent scientific organization that has evaluated these crops has found them safe to eat and safe for the environment.

But activist campaigns are still cowing regulators into denying poor farmers in developing countries access to modern G.M. crops. Activism is also slowing the introduction of a panoply of new enhanced plants and animals. These include crop varieties bioengineered to resist drought and pigs bioengineered to grow faster using less feed.

Opposition to these developments has cost lives numbering in the millions. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children living in poor countries each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization. To address this crisis, rice containing beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, was developed. A study by German researchers in 2014 estimated that activist opposition to the deployment of this "golden rice" had resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India alone.

An open letter signed by 100 Nobel laureates in June 2016 called upon Greenpeace "to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general." "How many poor people in the world must die," the laureates pointedly asked, "before we consider this a 'crime against humanity'?""

Scientists refute the scaremongering about GMOs

Washington Post editorial.

"THE NATIONAL Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine already examined genetically engineered (GE) crops once, concluding six years ago that the facts do not justify the fears about “Frankenfoods.” Overblown worries nevertheless continue to proliferate, prompting a movement to stigmatize genetically engineered crops by requiring labels on food packaging. Meanwhile, the technology also has advanced: New tools will allow scientists to more precisely cut and paste genetic code. So the National Academies have again tried to sort things out, releasing another authoritative report Tuesday that refutes the counterproductive scaremongering from the anti-genetically-engineered side. It also points to a bright future in which these crops help solve a range of problems — if governments get the policy right.

The National Academies experts reviewed the relevant studies and solicited huge amounts of feedback. The upshot? “No differences have been found that implicate a higher risk to human health safety from these GE foods than from their non-GE counterparts,” they concluded. They based their findings partially on a comparison of European countries, where genetically engineered crops generally are not used, and the United States, where they are plentiful. They could find no significant differences attributable to genetically engineered crops, across a range of diseases and disorders. Moreover, the experts concluded, “the committee found no conclusive evidence of cause-and-effect relationships between GE crops and environmental problems.” Among other things, the scientists found concerns that the crops are degrading plant and animal biodiversity to be insubstantial.

The major problem with insect- and herbicide-resistant genetically engineered plant varieties appears to be that, particularly if used irresponsibly, they can lead to resistant bugs and weeds, which would require more gene editing and new herbicides. The experts also found that, while small and large farms seem to be benefiting from the crops, there is mixed evidence — at best — that planting them has increased yields, which is a major goal of the research.

Rather than be discouraged by these findings, the experts argued that research and investment in genetically engineered technologies should increase. Crops could be modified to show “improved tolerance to abiotic stresses, such as drought and thermal extremes; increased efficiency in plant biological processes, such as photosynthesis and nitrogen use; and improved nutrient content,” the report noted. The experts concluded: “If deployed appropriately, those traits will almost certainly increase harvestable yields and decrease the probability of losing crop plantings to major insect or disease outbreaks.” Though not a silver bullet, genetic engineering could help feed a growing world population.

World governments must balance needed regulation with innovation. The report’s authors recommend that regulators spend less time worrying about how new crops are made and instead focus on how different they are from earlier ones. Strong rules should ensure that new crop varieties do not lead to unsustainable farming and environmental degradation on marginal lands. It will also be important to train farmers in how to prevent resistance among the bugs and weeds at which genetically engineered crops are targeted.

By contrast, giving in to extravagant and unfounded fears, as the Europeans have, would shut down fruitful research that could help feed many people, especially in poorer parts of the world."