Agriculture & GMOs

Just what are genetically engineered foods, and who is eating them? What do we know about their benefits—and their risks? What effect might engineered plants have on the environment and on agricultural practices around the world? Can they help feed and preserve the health of the Earth's burgeoning population?

Most people don't realize that they've been eating genetically engineered foods since the mid-1990s. More than 60% of all processed foods on the supermarket shelves—including pizza, chips, cookies, ice cream, salad dressing, corn syrup, and baking powder—contain ingredients from engineered soybeans, corn, or canola.

In the past decade or so, the biotech plants that go into these processed foods have leaped from hothouse oddities to crops planted on a massive scale—Applications show that more than 18 million farmers in 26 countries—including 19 developing nations—planted over 185 million hectares (457 million acres) of GMO crops in 2016. This represents a 3 percent increase over 2015, and the highest area of biotech crop adoption since cultivation began in 1996.

More than 50 different "designer" crops have passed through a federal review process, and about a hundred more are undergoing field trials.

Genetics. It's all rather complicated, isn't it. But is messing with DNA ever okay?

What is a Genetically Modified Organism?
A GMO, or genetically modified organism, is a plant, animal, microorganism or other organism whose genetic makeup has been modified in a laboratory using genetic engineering or transgenic technology. This creates combinations of plant, animal, bacterial and virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.

GMOs in agriculture are used as tools for research and production of molecules of interest. In addition, transgenesis allows plants to be modified to give them new traits in order to improve production and product resistance. This method is faster than traditional varietal selection but can be harmful for environment. This process is the modification of an organism to give him new specificities and create resistance to cold, insects or viruses.

In fact with GMOs we lose more varieties of vegetables and fruits than the number we produce. Gathering every “useful” characteristic means having only one type of tomato, or salad, resistant to every insects and viruses. This “monoculture” is the main problem linked to GMOs and is one enormous source of species extinction.  

Genetically modified foods have been demonized in recent years by health advocates and environmentalists alike. If we look at the history of food cultivation, however, it is apparent we've been eating them all along. Scientific American editor Eric R. Olson explains.

History

Ancient Genetic Modification
While our ancestors had no concept of genetics, they were still able to influence the DNA of other organisms by a process called “selective breeding” or “artificial selection.” These terms, coined by Charles Darwin, describe the process of choosing the organisms with the most desired traits and mating them with the intention of combining and propagating these traits through their offspring. Repeated use of this practice over many generations can result in dramatic genetic changes to a species. While artificial selection is not what we typically consider GMO technology today, it is still the precursor to the modern processes and the earliest example of our species influencing genetics.

Curious about how a GMO is made? How scientists create GMOs is one of the top questions we get about GMOs. This video shows how GMOs are made, through the story of the Hawaiian Rainbow Papaya.

The Birth of Modern Genetic Modification
An enormous breakthrough in GMO technology came in 1973, when Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen worked together to engineer the first successful genetically engineered (GE) organism. The two scientists developed a method to very specifically cut out a gene from one organism and paste it into another. Using this method, they transferred a gene that encodes antibiotic resistance from one strain of bacteria into another, bestowing antibiotic resistance upon the recipient. One year later, Rudolf Jaenisch and Beatrice Mintz utilized a similar procedure in animals, introducing foreign DNA into mouse embryos.

The first GMO to come in Europe was tabac, created in 1983, by Belgian researchers. In 1988, the first transgenic food was created, it was corn and the goal of this special corn was to resist insects. The first food on the market was a variety of tomato supposed to resist a virus, it was in 1990, only 7 years after the discovery of transgen products, but today we still don’t really know if GMO’s are harmful for humans.

Giant GMO Corporations

GMO corporations are called giants because they dominate the agricultural input market, that is, they own the world’s seed, pesticide and biotechnology industries.
The "Big 6" pesticide and GMO corporations are BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto, and Syngenta. With the merger of Monsanto & Bayer, 61 percent of our global seeds and pesticides production are now in the hands of just three megacorporations, Monsanto/Bayer, DowDuPont, and ChemChina.

The most well-known one:

Monsanto/Bayer
Monsanto is one of the largest pharmaceutical and agricultural companies that producers a wide range of genetically modified foods and seeds, drugs and pesticides and herbicides. This multi-billion dollar company has branches in 100 different countries and is one of the main producers of genetically modified foods and seeds in the world.

Monsanto has been around since 1901 and makes billions of dollars every year in pure profit from selling toxic chemicals and pesticides. In 1977, Monsanto sold its chemical business and got heavily engaged in biotechnology and genetically modifying corn and soybeans.

Following the Second World War, Monsanto championed the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. Its major agrochemical products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, DDT, Lasso and Agent Orange, which was widely used as a defoliant by the U.S.

The success of the herbicide Lasso had turned around Monsanto's struggling Agriculture division, and by the time Agent Orange was banned in the U.S. and Lasso was facing increasing criticism, Monsanto had developed the weedkiller “Roundup” (active ingredient: glyphosate) as a replacement. Launched in 1976, Roundup helped make Monsanto the world's largest producer of herbicides.

In 1987, Monsanto did its first test on genetically modified crops.

In 1994, Monsanto released rBGH and rBST growth hormones into the market. Bovine growth hormone have been linked to early puberty and breast and prostate cancer.

In 1995, Monsanto's genetically modified canola oil was shipped to Canada. In 1995, Monsanto was ranked 5th among other corporations for releasing more than 37 million pounds of toxic chemicals to the environment. As Monsanto started to focus more on biotechnology, the company used "feeding the world hunger" as one of the main reasons behind the need for GMOs. Monsanto also invented a new genetically modified crop that was resistant to its best selling herbicide Roundup.

Although the first of Monsanto's biotech products to make it to market was not a GM crop but Monsanto's controversial GM cattle drug, bovine growth hormone – called rBGH or rBST, Monsanto's corporate strategy led them for the first time to acquire seed companies. During the 1990s Monsanto spent $10 billion globally buying up seed companies – a push that continues to this day.

We will explain how GMOs can destroy agriculture, ecosystems and natural life in general by showing their social and environmental impacts.

Where?

Biotech crops were planted in 26 countries, including 19 developing nations. Brazil, the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Bolivia, Philippines, Spain, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Colombia, Honduras, Chile, Sudan, Slovakia, and Costa Rica all increased the amount of land cultivated in GE crops, while China, India, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico, Portugal, and Czech Republic decreased the area in production. Pakistan and Myanmar reported no change in the amount of biotech crop planted.

The researchers attributed the increases and decreases in biotech crop area to the acceptance and commercialization of new products, increased demand for meat and livestock feeds, ethanol consumption, weather conditions, global market prices, disease/pest pressure and biotech enabling policies adopted by governments.

The US is the top producer of biotech crops, followed by Brazil, where 93.4 percent of the soybean, maize and cotton crops are biotech. The country is also developing GE varieties of beans, sugarcane, potatoes, papaya, rice, and citrus.

Argentina is the third-largest producer, growing soybean, maize and cotton. It has recently approved a virus-resistant potato developed by an Argentinian scientist. Researchers there are also working on drought-resistant wheat and herbicide tolerant sugar cane.

Canada is the fourth largest producer, growing GE canola, soybean, maize, and sugar beet. It recently approved the commercialization of the non-browning Arctic apple, the four-traited InnateTM potatoes and new herbicide tolerant stacked soybean.  Consumers there also can purchase the fast-growing AquaBounty salmon.

In the Philippines, the adoption of GE maize increased 65 percent over the previous year, with small-holder farmers choosing herbicide and drought tolerant varieties. Confined field trials continue there on Bt eggplant, virus-resistant papaya, Bt cotton and Golden Rice.

In the European Union, just four nations planted biotech crops, led by Spain and followed by Portugal, Slovakia and Czechia. Though insect-resistant maize is the only GE crop approved for cultivation in the EU, the amount of land in production with that crop increased by 17 percent from 2015 to 2016.

India remains the world’s top cotton-producer, and 96 percent of it is genetically engineered with the Bt insect-resistant trait. However, for the first time in 14 years a slight drop was recorded in the amount of land cultivated in Bt cotton. Field trials have been approved for chickpea, rice, cotton, maize, sugarcane and Bt brinjal, but the adoption of GE mustard has been stalled due to opposition by activists.

Impact on the food industry

After 20 years of genetically modified crops and despite all the industry's promises on the benefits of GMOs for farmers, the evidence shows that these crops are benefiting mainly the agribusiness multinationals.

It is clear that we do not modify plants in order to increase benefits or profits for farmers. Indeed, 88% of GMOs are created to tolerate herbicides, increasing the use of pesticides and therefore the profits of the companies that sell them, surprisingly the same ones who sell GMO seeds. These companies, like Monsanto for example, are growing exponentially since their creation, they became so big that Monsanto was sold for 63 billion euros.

Monsanto has been bought by Bayer, a pharmaceutical company with the goal of combining their research potential and develop more GMOs seeds. These multinationals are a real threat for humanity because after the seed business and the pesticides business which started to do research on bees, in order to transform them in GMO resistant insects. GMOs are responsible for the reduction of bees all over the world and, if they start to modify bees, we don’t know what could be the consequences.

Impact on environment

GMOs have several impacts on our environment. The worst of all will be the disappearance of species which is due to the combination of all the particularities of many plants in only one. For instance, due to GMOs the lost varieties of tomatoes in the last twenty years is around 70 species. And we can consider that 80% of the tomato market is composed of only 3 species (the cheapest and the more resistant but not the more tasty). These species are known as the “supermarket tomatoes” that gather many specificites genetically stolen to other varieties.

Watch out for the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) myths and truths which provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks.

Seed War

This phenomenon is also due to patents created by companies like Monsanto or Bayer. When a farmer buys GM seeds and the farmer uses these seeds, the crop of his neighbor will be contaminated by the new gene and plants next to the GM seeds will start to have the same particularities. And when the new plant is contaminated by the other gene, Monsanto has the right to use the law and push the farmer to stop his production or use the seeds from the company. The last step of this phenomenon is the standardisation of plants and the disappearance of biodiversity in the food industry. The consequence of this process is monoculture and what we know today in many countries.

• Netherlands

The Netherlands is one of the most important battlefields on the global battle for patents. The best seed breeders are here. It is crucial that growers and breeders continue to produce new tomato, broccoli and pepper varieties, because new diseases keep appearing.

We will have no food without breeding. Another important point is that growers can use each other's inventions to grow new varieties themselves. In this way food safety is guaranteed and you prevent monopolists from taking control. The latter threatened to happen anyway.

Monsanto was granted the patent for the slightly higher-growing broccoli in 2013. Dutch growers feared companies such as Monsanto, because such large players have been applying for more and more patents on "natural properties" in recent years.

The multinationals scour nature and the seed banks in search of the best seeds. In laboratories they do DNA research on plants to know exactly how such a plant works. To then say via a legally useful route to the patent office: this broccoli, which we can give a long handle through our invention, is our intellectual property.

• Tanzania  

In Tanzania farmers are facing heavy prison sentences if they continue their traditional seed exchange

In order to receive development assistance, Tanzania now has to give Western agribusiness full freedom and protection for patented seeds. “Eighty percent of the seeds are being shared and sold in an informal system between neighbors, friends and family. The new law criminalizes the practice in Tanzania,” says Michael Farrelly of TOAM, an organic farming movement in Tanzania.

“As a result, the farmers’ seed system will collapse, because they can’t sell their own seeds”, according to Janet Maro, head of Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT). “Multinationals will provide our country with seeds and all the farmers will have to buy them from them. That means that we will lose biodiversity, because it is impossible for them to investigate and patent all the seeds we need. We’re going to end up with fewer types of seeds.”

“I have seeds of my family, because my great-grandmother used them. She gave them to my grandmother, who gave them to my mother and my mother then gave them to me. I’ve planted them here in the demonstration garden in Morogoro and that’s why very rare plants now grow here. Local farmers find it hard to understand the idea that you can patent and own a seed. Seed should simply be something that is easily available”

Increased use of toxic herbicides and pesticides
The majority of GM crops are those which have been engineered to be herbicide resistant. ‘Roundup ready’ soya, produced by Monsanto, is grown extensively in North and South America. It allows farmers to spray with a toxic cocktail of glyphosate and other chemicals. This may not harm the crop – but it does create residues and run off, making it disastrous for surrounding ecosystems.

It also encourages the development of ‘superweeds’ which are resistant to glyphosate, such as the giant pig weed, which grows over 2m tall.

GMOs are widely being accepted for their theoretical benefits, not their real-world effect. In this video, 5 reasons that GMOs aren't worth it when you stack up the evidence - even after biased Anti-GMO information is excluded.

Monoculture

The monoculture is certainly another main problem of GMOs. We cut massive forests to plant only one or two species of trees or plants. But plants need other plants to grow, they share nutrients between species and even sometimes between trees from the same species. We call it mutualism.

But when monoculture happens, trees need pesticides and fertilizers to grow and this is a vicious circle. You cut more trees to plant one kind of GM tree, palm for example, then this tree needs more fertilizer because it doesn’t have  enough access to nutrients and when you start to put fertilizer and pesticides, you kill other plants and this leads to a bigger use of fertilizer…

GMOs could create, in the future, plants impossible to stop. Because when a crop of colza resistant to dunlop is next to another crop of colza resistant to liberty (different types of pesticides), they will share their resistance and become resistant to both. Scientists found that in Canada, three years after being cultivated in the same area, three different GM colza started to be resistant to three different herbicides. And it became impossible for farmers to erase them and plant something else, because they were growing on their crop every years more numerous.

GMOs are known for having particularities and effects that are not really known by scientists and companies that sell this type of product. Even if they look like regular fruit or vegetable, they are not natural and could have consequences for human and animal health in the long term. We don’t know how the modification of cells and genetic can affect health, but for economical reasons, this product is still produced and sold.

Nowadays, only 20 species of plants constitute 90% of food ration of people. Any loss of the one of those 20 species can create serious danger for food security in our planet. For instance, for the last 80 years, 97% of species of vegetables had been lost in USA. Out of 7000 species of apples only 900 remained, out of 2600 species of pears only 330 remained. In India, 30 years ago, there were about 30 000 species of rice, and today 75% of the rice planted territory consists only of 10 species. There are many reasons for species’ loss.

Biodiversity

Herbicide-tolerant crop systems have encouraged the use of herbicides that reduce overall plant diversity in agricultural systems and can limit habitat and food sources for other important organisms.

Monarch butterfly populations have declined by more than 90% in under 20 years. It is estimated that the butterflies may have lost more than 165 million acres of habitat in this time-frame largely due to the increase in the use of the herbicide glyphosate, which kills the common milkweed that the butterfly needs to breed.

Pollen and other plant parts containing toxins from genetically engineered insect-resistant (Bt) corn are washing into streams near cornfields. Lab trials showed that consumption of Bt corn byproducts produces increased mortality and reduced growth in caddisflies, aquatic insects that are related to the pests targeted by the toxin in Bt corn.

For example in Canada, one third of birds are already gone. The reason? GMO is part of the answer with corn that can affect the nervous system of birds and pesticides that kill their food sources like insects or some sauvage plants. Noise pollution caused by agricultural machines is another part of the answer. Irrigation system that take water from rivers or lakes are very noisy machines and can affect the communication and the life of birds as well. The lack of trees due to agriculture is also a sources of deregulation of the bird’s life.

Why Should You Avoid Genetically Modified Food? Dr. Sara Gottfried and Pedram are here to discuss everything GMO-related. Watch this new webisode to find out all the risks that are associated with conventionally grown products.

Pleiotropy

DNA is a complex structure. It is not like Lego - altering it in any way can create new consequences in the cell’s composition, as well as its relationship with other cells. Chemists call this Pleiotropy. In every organism, genes, proteins and pathways do not act as isolated units but interact with one another and are regulated in a complex, multi-layered network process. Such is the wonder of natural life.

Despite scientists’ claims to ‘solve’ a problem, it is impossible to predict the impacts of even a single gene modification. Pleiotropic effects have included alterations in the crop’s nutritional, toxic and allergenic properties. For example, a GM soya tested in 1996, had 27% higher levels of a major allergen, trypsin-inhibitor, than the non-GM parent variety. GM Bt insecticidal maize, tested in 2008, had an altered protein profile, including the appearance of a new form of the protein zein, which is a known allergen.

GMO & Animals

In addition to crossbreeding, GMOs can also affect genetic diversity through uncontrolled growth of a genetically engineered population. If advantageous genes are introduced into GMOs, it may allow them to become more fit than their wild relatives. This situation would be detrimental because the GMOs would grow faster and reproduce more often, allowing them to take resources away from non-GMO relatives if they inhabit the same environment.

• Salmon

One GM animal where uncontrolled growth is a concern is a fast-growing Atlantic salmon engineered by AquaBounty technologies to reach market weight in half the time as their standard relatives. AquaBounty introduced two sequences of DNA into these salmon. The first codes a growth hormone from the related Chinook salmon that stimulates growth, and the second is a sequence that activates the growth hormone year-round and not just in warm weather. The combination of these two DNA sequences allows these fish to develop at a dramatically increased rate, and many are concerned about what would happen if they escaped into the wild. Some believe that engineered salmon will continue to grow at a faster rate in the wild. However, others suspect that because the engineered salmon have traits that were not developed by natural selection, they will not be perfectly adapted to the wild environment, resulting in similar or even reduced fitness compared to wild relatives in their natural habitat.

• Bovine Growth Hormone

More popularly known as BGH, or bovine growth hormone, BST interacts with other hormones in cows' bodies to control the amount of milk they produce.

In order to increase milk production, scientists working for Monsanto spent years in the lab developing a genetically-engineered synthetic version of the hormone called rBGH, or recombinant bovine growth hormone. Monsanto obtained approval to market rBGH (known by the trade name Posilac) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993 and began offering it to interested farmers. Today, about a third of American dairy cows are injected with rBGH, which boosts milk production by about 10 percent.

But the use of rBGH is controversial, due to potential health hazards to both cows and humans. According to the Center for Food Safety (and supported by a 2003 study published in the Canadian Journal of Veterinary Research), cows treated with rBGH suffer a 50 percent greater incidence of lameness (leg and hoof problems), 25 percent more udder infections (mastitis), and serious reproductive problems including infertility, cystic ovaries, fetal loss and birth defects.

Such animal health issues can sometimes translate into human ones, as antibiotics used to fight infection can find their way into milk, affecting our disease-resistance. Also, animals given rBGH produce more insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1). Studies, says the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), have linked high levels of IGF-1 in humans who consume rBGH milk with breast, prostate, colon and other cancers. This suggests that our natural defenses against early cancerous cells may be blocked by IGF-1.

“While the rest of the world sorts out its feelings about the safety and ethics of cloning animals for food production, China is charging ahead and building the world’s largest animal cloning factory, set to begin operations in 2016. The 200 million yuan (over $31 million) commercial animal cloning center will be located in the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, a government-sponsored business area about 100 miles from Beijing.”

Solutions

“In the shadows of short-term finance and profit, a handful of sprawling multinationals have taken over all levels of the global agri-food system. From seeds planted in land to large-scale distribution, from GMOs to animal genetic selection, from trade to processing, nothing escapes them.

Resources are running out, inequalities are widening, the farmer is dispossessed of his job, the consumer is fooled. Only one possible answer to the industrial superpower globalized: to exercise the right and the right to choose what we eat.”

José Bové and Gilles Luneau.

These companies are destroying the agricultural world and stealing thousands years of work with patents and laws that are made to help this type of company. We must change our production system start to re-use previous agricultural methods to keep our diversity and the health of our environment.

Recognize the work of farmers
Farmers have always selected and kept their seeds. All the plants today cultivated come from this work. It is only by choosing in the immense diversity of peasant seeds that the industry has been able to select for a half-century some varieties standardized for its needs. Today, few multinationals are trying to keep all the seeds, and with them, the right of people to food. The recognition of the contribution of farmers, and of their resulting rights, is the only guarantee of the renewal of the cultivated biodiversity, the food security, the diversity and the quality of our food and from that of our children. They worked since five thousands years for the increase of productivity and improvements in the quality of our foods by exchanging seeds, spreading new discoveries that can create particularities by adapting to climate or diseases and create more diversity.

These rights, enshrined in the International Seed Treaty approved by the European Parliament, are still not applied by our governments.

Pamela Ronald studies the genes that make plants more resistant to disease and stress. In an eye-opening talk, she describes her decade-long quest to help create a variety of rice that can survive prolonged flooding. She shows how the genetic improvement of seeds saved the Hawaiian papaya crop in the 1950s — and makes the case that it may simply be the most effective way to enhance food security for our planet’s growing population.

The right for farmers to re-use their seeds.
The main source of seed evolution and creation of diversity was the re-use of seeds.

This practice was the best way to make a species evolve, but with the laws, nowadays, farmers don’t have the right to use it twice, because of the tests that food industry needs for the seeds according to law.

The plant must co-evolve with its environment (soil, climate, farmers practices) to be able to adapt to it without recourse to chemical inputs. This adaptation is only possible if farmers can regularly re-use part of their previous crops as seeds.

This founding right of agriculture is today threatened by the Plant Variety Certificates, patents, aids related to the purchase of certified seeds or seedlings, contracts linking the sale of the crop with the purchase of the seed and the GMOs.

The right to exchange the seeds
As for the re-use of seeds, farmers can’t exchange them. The exchange is totally banned by the european law and very tracked by companies like Monsanto.

Every time they exchange their seeds, farmers increase biodiversity. These exchanges are indispensable for adapting crops to climate change and to changing techniques and human needs.

This right is now threatened by the official catalog, health regulations, patents and GMOs.

Biodiversity conservation
Genebanks within research institutes are not enough to secure seed conservation. The conservation in fields is their indispensable complement, if we want to ensure constant adaptation of the seeds to the climatic, technical, social evolutions... This work can be realized only at a local level. Its public interest character requires the commitment of local authorities: the latter must support the farmers, the gardeners, the researchers and the citizens who organize themselves collectively in this direction. This work must also be financed by the benefits of those who make free use of the available biodiversity to sell seeds that are not freely reproducible.

The right to produce and consume without GMOs
No coexistence measure can prevent the spread of GMOs grown in an open environment. The protection of GM-free crops and wild biodiversity requires the ban of GM crops in open fields. Farmers and consumers must also be given the opportunity to refuse new unregulated GMOs (mutated, herbicide-tolerant plants...) by providing clear information on plant breeding, selection and multiplication processes.

Recognition of biological and peasants methods and knowledge
Sanitary, phytosanitary and biosecurity precautions guarantee the quality of seeds, crops and food. Regulatory standards are now moving towards a chemical sterilization of all seeds, to the detriment of bees, birds, soil microbial life... They prohibit biological and peasant methods of risk control based on good agronomy and natural products like nettle manure or hot water, much more respectful of the environment and the health of consumers. They impose disproportionate constraints, on small businesses, that are only adapted to very large volumes and large markets.

These solutions are not at the scale of people and more initiatives that government must take if they want a liveable world for the following generations. But we can all participate to make people aware of agricultural changes that will affect everyone if we don’t change our production system.

• Dutch seed developer wins 2019 World Food Prize

A Dutch seed breeder who introduced new hybrid vegetable varieties to Southeast Asia has been awarded the 2019 World Food Prize.

As the founder of East-West Seed, Simon Groot is credited with bringing disease- and stress-resistant vegetable seeds to millions of smallholder farmers, helping to lift them out of poverty.

The seed company, which began in 1982 as a partnership with Philippine seed trader Benito Domingo, now has 973 improved varieties of 60 different vegetable crops that are being used by more than 20 million farmers in 60 countries.

The World Food Prize for 2019 is awarded to Simon N. Groot, the founder of East-West Seed. The Prize given in recognition of East-West Seed’s contribution to improving nutrition and creating sustainable economic opportunities for small farmers around the world.

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