Unless you live on a farm and eat pretty much only the organic foods that you grow yourself, you are already eating genetically modified (or GM) foods. According to a new report by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), less than one quarter of American consumers believe that biotech foods are currently available in supermarkets, when in fact nearly 100% of supermarkets contain foods which have ingredients that have been genetically modified. Without a doubt, most restaurants cook with foods that have GM ingredients. This highlights not only a huge gap in consumer knowledge an education, but also the simple fact that GM foods have been generally accepted in the US.
One region that is not so GM friendly is the EU. Indeed, the issue of GM approval within the EU is one of the most contentious in modern agriculture. Many Member States, and millions of European consumers, remain steadfastly against the introduction of GM food. But despite the stringent controls in place, it is becoming harder for Europe’s regulatory authorities to deny market access to certain GM products. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was the WTO decision last year that the EU and six member states had broken trade rules by barring entry to GM crops and foods. GM foods will most likely be allowed ever more access into the EU markets in the near future. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the EU has been importing GM corn from the US for years, and using it as ingredients in a wide range of consumer goods. It’s already there too, and more is on the way.
The undeniable trend is going strongly towards GM foods worldwide. Monsanto, the leading global agricultural biotechnology company, yesterday said it expects to almost triple its presence outside of the United States in coming years. Currently, there are some 95 million acres outside the US planted with Monsanto’s biotech traits. That will soon be around 300 million acres. The forecasts highlight a growing global adoption of genetically modified crops, resulting partly from the increased acceptance of the technology as a means to address climate and yield challenges.
This aspect is particularly compelling, as climate change continues to wreak havoc on crops worldwide. Farming methods that have been tried and tested over thousands of years of human existence can no longer keep up with a global climate that is changing in new and dramatic ways. Droughts, extreme storms, and new animal and insect patterns, are among the many issues tearing apart crops that used to be cultivated with relative ease. So the question is logically posed… could genetically modified foods actually end up saving the human race from widespread famine in years to come?
One major issue with GM food is that people don’t like the fact that their food’s genetic structure has been altered in a way that they do not understand. They do not know what the changes are, and they do not know if those changes can somehow impact them personally. Do these plants somehow process differently through your body? Will super-plants take over the landscape and kill off other plants? Will eating GM wheat make you grow a third arm? Questions abound, and consumers are generally not given thre answers. To a large degree this is a typical case of breakthrough technology being misunderstood and rejected by contemporary consumers in its early days. That is not to say that GM food is flawless. There are indeed some very reasonable issues to consider in regards to GM foods, and to be certain there are potential problems, but those issues are not the ones being identified and pondered by consumers. Not to be curt, but the reality is that 99.99% of people simply cannot fathom the complexity that is involved when dealing with the genetic structure of any organism, and the impact that changes to that structure might have when interacting with the rest of the ecosystem.
To give a fairly basic example, let’s compare the Roundup-ready corn popularized by Monsanto with the drought-resistant soybeans created by Mendel Biotechnology. Monsanto’s corn has had its genetic sequence spliced to introduce new information into the genetic code. The plant has had a resistance to the herbicide Roundup inserted, so that it can fight off the killing effects of the herbicide. The result is that farmers can spray a large crop of this corn with lower amounts of Roundup, and in a cost-effective way kill off all of the weeds that would otherwise hurt their crop. A popular idea, but it has two problems… 1) You are still using herbicide, a poison, and spraying it on what you eat. 2) The more you do it, the more likely it is that Roundup resistant weeds will eventually develop. (Fun fact: The largest single user of Roundup reportedly is the U.S. Government, which sprays huge quantities of the herbicide over the northern countries of South America in an effort to discourage cultivation of the coca plant.)
Mendel’s soybeans on the other hand, do not involve any alteration to the genetic sequence of the plant. Instead, Mendel’s scientist have found a way to effectuate changes in the expression of plant transcription factors, thereby increasing or decreasing the degree to which any specific gene in a plant is expressed. Think of it like turning up or turning down the volume on any trait you select. A plant might have 30,000 genes in its genome, but those genes may be controlled by only 2,000 different transcription factors. By systematically analyzing the functions of transcription factors, Mendel scientists discovered that single transcription factors can control complex traits such as the ability of plants to withstand freezing or drought, yield, morphology, disease resistance, nitrogen use efficiency and many other complex traits. So the result in the example posed herein is a soybean plant that is resistant to extreme drought, but does so without any new information being inserted into its genome, and without the need for any external chemicals. I challenge anyone to find a major flaw in that - especially when such a crop can bring food to millions of impoverished and starving peoples all over the world. And keep in mind that drought resistance is only one trait. Transcription factors can also increase the oil (or protein) content of foods, make them resistant to disease, and make them flower more often and with a greater number of flowers, to note some examples. Imagine a soybean crop that yields ten times the nutritional content of typical crops, and can do so in very harsh climates. That’s something we may very well need to survive on earth.
Knowledge of the function of plant transcription factors has enabled many other novel inventions by Mendel scientists. One of which is the creation of biofuel feedstocks that can much more efficiently produce feedstock specifically for the production of ethanol and other fuels. This is going to be a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to solving our dependence on fossil fuels.
What’s the moral of the story? You decide for yourself. But before you lump all GM foods together, and write them all off as “strange and dangerous stuff’, realize two things: 1) You’re already eating them, and 2) They may save your life.
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