Stop Making Us Guinea Pigs
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/opinion/stop-making-us-guinea-pigs.html?emc=eta1&_r=1Stop Making Us Guinea Pigs
Mark Bittman
MARCH 25, 2015
The issues surrounding G.M.O.s — genetically modified organisms — have never been simple. They became more complicated last week when the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency, a respected arm of the World Health Organization.
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Now that the safety of glyphosate is clearly in question, perhaps it’s time to mandate that the corporation — not the taxpaying public — bear the brunt of determining whether it should still be sold. Since the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the resources to test, let Monsanto pay for the necessary, and independent, research.
While we’re at it, let’s finally start labeling products made with genetically engineered food. Right now, the only way we can be sure to avoid them is to buy organic food. If G.M.O.s were largely beneficial to eaters, manufacturers would proudly boast of products containing them. The fact is that they have not. To date, G.M.O.s and other forms of biotech have done nothing but enrich their manufacturers and promote a system of agriculture that’s neither sustainable nor for the most part beneficial.
We don’t need better, smarter chemicals along with crops that can tolerate them; we need fewer chemicals. And it’s been adequately demonstrated that crop rotation, the use of organic fertilizers, interplanting of varieties of crops, and other ecologically informed techniques commonly grouped together under the term “agroecology” can effectively reduce the use of chemicals.
Meanwhile, how about getting glyphosate off the market until Monsanto can prove that it’s safe to use? There’s no reason to put the general population, and particularly the farming population, at risk for the sake of industry profits.
Correction: March 25, 2015
An earlier version of this column incorrectly described thalidomide as a product the government failed to ensure was safe before it went to market. The drug, which was linked to thousands of birth defects in other countries in the 1950s and 1960s, was never approved for use in the United States as a sedative. (The F.D.A. has approved its use to treat multiple myeloma and a complication of leprosy.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
No, he's not a chemist, but I for one am glad he's raising an alarm. As a cancer survivor, all of this concerns me greatly.
Also ran across this:
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/03/bittman-right-its-not-gmos-its-how-theyre-used
The Real Reason to Worry About GMOs
—By Tom Philpott
| Thu Mar. 26, 2015 6:00 AM EDT
In a recent column, The New York Times' Mark Bittman makes an important point about the controversy around genetically modified foods. "{T}o date there's little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health," he writes. Yet the way the technology has been used—mainly, to engineer crops that can withstand herbicides—is deeply problematic, he argues.
Here's why I think Bittman's point is crucial. The below chart, from the pro-biotech the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, gives a snapshot of what types of GMO crops farmers were planting as of 2012. In more recent reports, the ISAAA doesn't break out its data in the same way, but it's a fair assumption that things are roughly similar three years later, given that no GMO blockbusters have entered the market since.
If you add up all the herbicide-tolerant crops on the list, you find that about 69 percent of global GM acres are planted with crops engineered to withstand herbicides. But that's an undercount, because the GM products listed as "stacked traits" are engineered to repel insects (the Bt trait) and to withstand herbicides. Adding those acres in, the grand total comes to something like 84 percent of global biotech acres devoted to crops that can flourish when doused with weed killers—chemicals that are sold by the very same companies that sell the GMO seeds.
More than four-fifths of global biotech acres devoted to crops that can flourish when doused with weed killers.
As Bittman points out, almost all of the herbicide-tolerant crops on the market to date have been engineered to resist a single herbicide, glyphosate. And weeds have evolved to resist that herbicide, forcing farmers to apply heavier doses and or added older, more toxic chemicals to the mix.
Rather than reconsider the wisdom of committing tens of millions of acres to crops developed to resist a single herbicide, the industry plans to double down: Monsanto and rival Dow will both be marketing crops next year engineered to withstand both glyphosate and more-toxic herbicides—even though scientists like Penn State's David Mortensen are convinced that the new products are "likely to increase the severity of resistant weeds" and "facilitate a significant increase in herbicide use."
Meanwhile, unhappily, the World Health Organization has recently decreed glyphosate, sold by Monsanto under the Roundup brand name, a "probable carcinogen"—a designation Monsanto is vigorously trying to get rescinded.
So, given that 20 years after GM crops first appeared on farm fields, something like four-fifths of global biotech acres are still devoted to herbicide-tolerant crops, Bittman's unease about how the technology has been deployed seems warranted. It's true that genetically altered apples and potatoes that don't brown as rapidly when they’re sliced will soon hit the market. They may prove to be a benign development. But it's doubtful that they'll spread over enough acres to rival herbicide-tolerant crops anytime soon. And humanity has thrived for millennia despite the scourge of fast-browning apples and potatoes. The same isn't true for ever-increasing deluges of toxic herbicides.
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100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics is a book written by Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink first released in 1933 by the Vanguard Press and manufactured in the United States of America. Its central argument propounds that the American population is being used as guinea pigs in a giant experiment undertaken by the American producers of food stuffs and patent medicines and the like. Kallet and Schlink premise the book as being “written in the interest of the consumer, who does not yet realize that he is being used as a guinea pig…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000,000_Guinea_Pigs
