This article was co-authored by Vijay Jayaraj.
Across the globe, genetically engineered (GE) crops face opposition from environmental and organic food activists, who claim the crops harm the environment and endanger human health.
How factual are their claims? The evidence strongly supports GE over organic crops.
Not long ago, Vijay visited the Sprouts organic food store in San Jose, California. To his surprise, organic vegetables that had shorter shelf-life and higher risk of bacterial contamination and thus serious illness were priced two to ten times more than their GE and conventional food alternatives. The store is famous among millennial techies in the Silicon Valley and enjoys reasonable sales. One possible explanation would be the false notion that GE foods are risky or injurious to health; another is that buyers incorrectly believe organic produce have fewer pesticides, are more nutritious or better protect the environment.
But in science, neither a belief nor even a general “consensus” determines truth. A thousand people could claim the theory of gravity is wrong, but one simple scientific proof would prove their consensus false. Similarly, the safety of genetically modified foods cannot be determined by the increasingly vitriolic voices of anti-GE groups. It requires robust scientific testing by actual experts in various fields.
All the major GE foods currently on the market have been exhaustively tested and found to be safe for people, animals and the environment. Moreover, to date, Americans alone have consumed more than four trillion servings of foods with at least one GE ingredient – without a single documented example of harm to a person or the environment.
That is why more than 100 Nobel Laureates in chemistry, medicine and biotechnology have said GE foods are safe for human and animal consumption. That’s not an uninformed assertion or “consensus.” It is a professional, scientific conclusion based on thousands of risk assessment studies over several decades, as well as numerous real-world experiences.
Anti-GE activists typically use the term “genetically modified organisms” or GMOs, a pejorative coined simply to disparage the use of the most modern techniques. In fact, genetic engineering with molecular techniques is merely a more modern, rapid and precise way than traditional crop breeding methods to change or improve the genetic makeup of plants. It also enables scientists to enhance crops by introducing helpful properties like resistance to droughts, standing water or insects from one organism to another.
For example, corn varieties that integrate the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) gene right into plant tissue greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for spraying or dusting the crops with pesticides. Golden Rice incorporates two beta-carotene biosynthesis genes (Vitamin A precursors), one from daffodils, one from a soil bacterium, so that even malnourished people get sufficient Vitamin A to prevent blindness and death.
Organic farming prohibits modern manmade pesticides. But some are used surreptitiously anyway – and many organic farmers employ “natural” but still toxic pesticides like copper sulfate and neem oil. Though they oppose Bt-engineered crops, many spray live Bt bacteria on crops, killing good and harmful insects.
Studies by Stanford University and other researchers have found that “organic” fruits and vegetables actually have lower yields and are no more nutritious than conventional or GE alternatives.
However, certain organic practices, such as fertilizing with manure, have led to contamination with dangerous fungal toxins or listeria, salmonella or E. Coli bacteria. These problems are far more common in organic produce and can lead to serious intestinal illness, kidney failure, brain damage or even death.
It can fairly be said that the anti-GE war has reached levels that are ignorant, deceptive, and even fraudulent and lethal. Activist claims about the dangers of GE foods are baseless and without bona fideevidence. They ignore the many benefits of GE crops. Moreover, many of the groups and campaigns are funded, directly or indirectly, by the organic and natural food industries and allied foundations.
GE crops are environment friendly and promote sustainable agriculture, while potentially meeting the daily food demand of seven billion peopleglobally. They allow farmers to produce more food, from less land, using less water and fewer pesticides, and with greater resistance to droughts, floods and climate change, than would be the case with conventional crops – and certainly with organic crops. They enable farmers to grow Golden Rice and other crops that prevent malnutrition, blindness and death in children.
By contrast, organic crops require more land, more water, more labor and higher farming expenses to generate the same produce. Expanding organic farms will thus cause additional loss of wildlife habitats in a time when we are trying to nurture and protect what is left of Earth’s natural habitats.
Tuskegee University professor, dean and biotech expert C.S. Prakash points out that the percentage of land used to grow crops has increased dramatically during the past 200 years, as humanity worked to provide nutritious foods for rapidly growing populations. The ideal solution to avoid deforestation, he says, is to use GE crops, which produce much more food per acre than their non-GE counterparts.
An ardent proponent of GE in the fight against poverty and disease, Dr. Prakash worries that the anti-GE campaigns will impede our efforts to provide sufficient, affordable food in many developing countries. Moreover, non-GE crops are susceptible to many insects and diseases that GE crops are resistant to.
Much of the most important work to improve food crops genetically was done by Norman Borlaug, using pre-molecular techniques. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for developing crop variants that helped billions avoid certain death during the food crises of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, much of the wheat, maize (corn) and rice now consumed globally are Borlaug’s crops, which are disease resistant and high yielding.
GE crops are also more climate adaptive. New variants of rice and wheat are being designed to withstand extreme climatic and geographical conditions. One important example is wheat variants that withstand a whopping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), which was practically unimaginable just a decade ago. This can make wheat cultivation far more productive in the 40% of world’s dryland surface where conditions are hostile to normal wheat varieties.
Health Canada and the United States Department of Agriculture recently approved Golden Rice and High Fibre Wheat, respectively, thereby continuing to embrace GE crops, as they have done for years. This pro-GE stance has been echoed by international governing institutions such as the United Nations and governments of major technologically innovative countries like Israel, China and India.
Although the number of organic farms is increasing in India, its food markets are largely dominated by crops that cannot be considered organic. Organic madness has nevertheless invaded parts of India. The Indian state of Sikkim recently branded itself “organic” by banning the entry and sale of more than 25 non-organic horticultural and agricultural products. That decision has caused widespread chaos, leaving families unable to afford cereals, fruits and vegetables that otherwise would be their staple foods.
It is time to progress from unfounded fears about GE foods – and begin educating government leaders and regulators, as well as domestic and global journalists, about the safety and benefits of GE crops.
Let us begin by asking: What actual, replicable, peer-reviewed evidence do environmentalists and organic food producers and advocates have that organic foods are safer, more nutritious or more eco-friendly than conventional or genetically modified varieties? What actual, replicable, peer-reviewed evidence do they have that GE crops have harmed people or the environment in any way?
Neither we nor Dr. Prakash nor any other agricultural experts we have spoken with can find any such evidence. If environmentalists and organic food proponents cannot provide solid evidence, they should end their deceitful pro-organic, anti-GE campaigns – or be compelled to do so by government agencies and courts of law that deal in facts and sound science, instead of allegations, innuendo and intimidation.
The billion dollars spent by radical environmentalists and the organic foods industry on campaigns against GE plants would have been far better spent on approving more GE crops, upgrading agricultural practices, providing more nutritious, affordable food, and improving lives all over the world.
The lies, demagoguery and destructive tactics of anti-GE groups are poisonous to the century-long effort to eradicate food poverty across the globe. These inhumane, lethal tactics can no longer be tolerated.
Originally published on Townhall.com.
Featured Photo by Abele Gigante on Unsplash.
B. Dulock says
The problem with GE crops is three-fold: (1) they are not proven safe over the long-term, as in multiple decades, (2) their long-term ecological effect is unknown, and (3) they are a moving target since each GE crop is a unique organism and must be considered/tested separately. These points assume a bad actor will not introduce a GE crop that is engineered with a malicious intention.
One cannot categorically claim GE crops are safe. Each crop must be proven so over a long period, taking into account not only effect on human health but impact on our entire ecological system. This is practically an impossible task. It is imprudent to introduce unknowns risks into the food chain regardless of immediate benefits since a negative impact could be widespread and long-lasting before discovered. The author of the article states that GE crops are safe since nothing bad has ever happened; this is a naive approach for the reasons mentioned above.
Vijay Raj Jayaraj says
You have a pretty reasonable concern there. One cannot belittle the research done by Health Canada, USDA and others. And one cannot easily get the approval of over 100 Nobel prize winning scientists. Probably we have the two biggest health agencies and some of the most brilliant minds alive — all endorsing GE crops that have been tested. I don’t see a reason why it is ‘Naive’ to trust carefully done studies by different health agencies and numerous (hundreds) of independent scientists who continue to research on this issue. And this article argues only in favor of GE crops that are tested and approved to be safe. It would be imprudent to consider these state-of-art research studies to be inefficient in addressing the safety of the respective individual GE crop.
E. Calvin Beisner says
Your argument essentially depends on embracing what is called the Precautionary Principle–that a new technology or process should not be adopted until it has been “proven safe.” That principle, widely embraced by environmentalists, fails in that it is impossible, by induction (observing instance after instance), to prove a universal negative. For further on that, we recommend Indur Goklany’s book THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YJPJYK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).
Mitch Cervinka says
While I understand the desire to lower costs and raise yields of food production, especially for those regions where food is scarce, I feel that it is proper to maintain a “healthy skepticism” regarding man’s abilities to improve on God’s design for plant genetics, and the possible long-term consequences of tampering with this design. So-called “non-GMO” food is not some strange aberration, but is instead the original food that God gave us (discounting the effects of the Fall), and on which our ancestors have lived for millenia. There is something wrong with the notion that GMO food should be accepted as the norm (or as “superior food”), and that non-GMO food should be viewed as some sort of bizarre, elitist, overpriced commodity enjoyed only by the wealthy.
Certainly, science has provided many technological marvels to ease suffering and improve the quality of life on earth, and that is a good thing. However, the genomes of our various food sources are extremely complex, and it seems to me that scientists overestimate their understanding of how the DNA is coded and what effects various changes to the DNA will produce. If these were merely experiments in some isolated laboratory, it might not be worrisome, but by making widespread genetic changes to the world’s food supply without the decades of testing and observation needed to determine the long-term consequences of any given change, the results could be risky, if not catastrophic. Is this not a classic case of man “playing God”–presuming to know more than he actually does, and rashly acting upon his limited knowledge as if he could be sure of the outcome?
Yes, let’s allow GMO food products (with appropriate labeling), but let’s not pretend that non-GMO food is anything other than the normal food humans have been eating for thousands of years. And let’s not assume that it is necessarily safe to replace all food with genetically modified food–let’s keep the “original” varieties around as a fallback in case the GMO varieties turn out to have some seriously undesirable consequences.
E. Calvin Beisner says
Your argument essentially depends on embracing what is called the Precautionary Principle–that a new technology or process should not be adopted until it has been “proven safe.” That principle, widely embraced by environmentalists, fails in that it is impossible, by induction (observing instance after instance), to prove a universal negative. For further on that, we recommend Indur Goklany’s book THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YJPJYK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).
As for whether genetic engineering = “playing God”: The phrase sounds ominous, but in that we are God’s image and were given dominion over the earth to subdue and rule everything in it (Genesis 1:26-28), we’re actually supposed to “play God,” so to speak: that is, we are to subdue and rule the earth as His vicegerents, to do the kinds of things with nonliving and living things that God Himself could do if He chose to. Indeed, we have been doing that for thousands of years. For example, unless you are one of an extremely limited group of researchers with access to seeds of ancient strains of maize (corn), you have never seen or tasted natural, non-genetically modified maize–which was, for all practical purposes, nearly inedible for humans before centuries of hybridization, but which reached a form and consistency similar to today’s several centuries ago, long before you and I were born. Similar things are true of most other agricultural crops–and were true of them long before what we now normally refer to as “genetic engineering.” Hybridization is genetic engineering with low technology; it still aims at breeding into a genome a particular gene that controls a particular characteristic, but it lacks the precision of modern gene splicing. The gene splicing, far from making the outcome of the engineering less predictable, makes it more predictable, enhancing the safety of the process. For further discussion related to this, see https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/25/idiots-on-the-european-court-of-justic-r.