What is in this article?:
- Do more GMO crops really spell the end for organic?
- GE alfalfa, more GE corn, what is next?
Charles Benbrook, chief scientist for The Organic Center discusses the long-term impact of GMOs on consumers, farmers and the organic industry and what he suspects will be the next Roundup Ready crop.
Charles Benbrook will be joined by Rebecca Spector, West Coast director for The Center for Food Safety, and Mike Movitz, vice president of business development for SPINS, to offer a GMO Update at Natural Products Expo West, Friday, March 11 from 11 a.m. to noon.
More About:
A: The genetic engineering of plants has created a seed industry with a profoundly different set of goals and priorities than the seed industry up until the mid-1990s. This is without a doubt the biggest impact. Over the last 15 years, the percentage of the total supply of seeds that are genetically engineered has gone from zero to close to 100 percent for many crops in many regions. As a result today, farmers that feel they really haven’t gotten their money’s worth out of their GE seeds or farmers that are tired of dealing with Roundup-resistant weeds, they don’t have an option. GMOs have eliminated the progress and innovation of plant breeding and turned it into a profit center and tool for private corporations to extract more money from farmers.
Q: And how are consumers impacted?
A: I think that it's very likely that genetically engineered corn and possibly genetically engineered soy beans have contributed to the increase in food allergies. This is very difficult to prove and the biotech industry continues to claim that there is no evidence of a single case of food allergies that can be definitively traced to a particular field of GM corn or GM soybeans. And they’re probably right in making that statement. It’s very difficult to trace any human allergy back to the exact thing that triggers it. That doesn't mean though that the rise of GE foods is completely unrelated to the dramatic increase in food allergies. At the same time that GE crops began to win the natural market share, we saw food allergies increase, particularly in children.
There are food- safety and food-quality risks associated with today’s GE crops and the companies that produce these foods have basically received a free pass from the government. Agencies have not required companies to do the rigorous kinds of testing that many people have asked for. It just hasn’t happened, so it's not possible for science to say for sure whether there are adverse impacts from today’s GE foods. We just don't know.