Dubious Benefits And Human Health Risks

One of the central myths propagated by agbiotech over the past few years is that GE crops will increase farm productivity and feed the world’s 800 million hungry people.

But as respected anti-hunger organizations like Oxfam, Christian Aid, Food First, and experts like Vandana Shiva have revealed, this claim is noth-ing more than a lie.

The world already produces twice as much food as necessary to provide all six billion of us with a nutritious and ade-quate diet now. Sensing that many people are no longer swallowing the “GE Will Feed the World” myth, the Gene Giants have had to modify their tune.

Now they say that new, gene-altered “functional foods” being readied for market will be fortified with vitamins, spliced with disease-fighting capabilities, or altered so as to be less fatty and healthier.

The flagship product of GE functional foods is the so-called vitamin A enhanced “Golden Rice,’’ bankrolled to the tune of $100 million by the Rockefeller Foundation and offered by the GE Giants as a “gift” to the developing world. Unfortunately this miracle rice is a hoax, and likely a dangerous hoax as well.

Poor people have vitamin A or Beta-Carotene deficiencies, not because there’s something wrong with the non-genetically engineered rice they’re eating, but because they don’t have the money or resources to eat a well-rounded diet with lots of green and yellow vegetables, fruits, and fish.

Even if Golden Rice will actually grow in the real world in diverse terrain and climates (an open question since so far it’s only been grown in the lab), for poverty-stricken people unable to afford much more than rice it’s not going to solve their nutritional problems.

The insidious consequence of Golden Rice and related myths of other GE func-tional foods is that it may delay or indefinitely distract the world community from getting to the root of the problem — i.e., poverty and injustice.

Wasting billions of dollars subsidizing research on GE crops is worse than misguided, it’s literally criminal. Land reform, poverty reduction, and sustainable/organic agriculture are the solution to world hunger, not genetic engineering.

Genetically engineered rice (and other functional foods) will still contain potentially hazardous GE constructs such as viral pro-moters (derived from the Cauli-flower Mosaic Virus) and, most likely, antibiotic-resistant marker genes as well.

In addition, scien-tists warn that over consuming Vitamin A can be dangerous for pregnant women, young children, people with liver disease, diabetics, and people with hyper-thyroid conditions. How do the gene engineers propose to regulate the dose of Beta-Carotene that people will be ingesting with a diet composed primarily of Golden Rice?

And, of course, similar hazards arise when you look at other vitamin-enhanced GE foods in the pipeline such as soybeans and other grains or vegetables. Even scarier is the notion of dosing people with indeterminant amounts of live vaccines or medicines gene-spliced into their food.

Not to mention the ecological consequences of drug or vaccine-spliced plants spreading their mutant characteristics into non-GE crop varieties or related species via genetic pollution.

Promoting Healthier Junk Foods

While 800 million people in the world suffer severe health problems from being malnourished, another 800 million people, mainly in the industrialized North, suffer from obesity — closely related to the public over con-sumption of junk foods, meat, and animal products.

Here again the Gene Giants tell us they’ve got a solution, namely genetically engineered junk foods and fac-tory-farmed meat (french fries, cooking oil, beef, pork, margarine) which are lower in fats or calories.

But as food activists from in Britain point out, the next generation of Frankenfoods are mainly “about making basically unhealthy food (such as chips and crisps) a little bit healthier…

But even if they were to work as is claimed in the corporate PR, these foods are in reality completely unnecessary when judged against the benefits of a truly healthy and balanced diet.

Instead, by convincing consumers that unhealthy, fatty foods are nutritious, these new crops might instead lead to a deterioration in people’s health.”