“Chronic health effects are increasing in the world. Even in young people, cancers, hormonal disturbances, reproductive problems, nervous and immune diseases are escalating. At least some scientists are pointing an accusing finger firmly at the pesticides and other chemicals to which we are now being exposed.”
(PESTICIDES AND GM – News, August 2009)
How is this possible with all the scientific ability we now have and all the risk assessment processes carried out by regulators?
The short answer is that the risk assessment for pesticides used on food has major holes in it.
Unfortunately, the current risk assessment carried out for GM food carries all the same flaws as its pesticide-oriented predecessor. Added to this concern is that food can have even more far-reaching consequences for our health, and is even more complex to test for safety.
The thing to remember is that “risk assessment data can be like the captured spy: if you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know” (Rucklehaus, US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator). This has been nowhere more obvious than in the re-analysis of Monsanto's data on feeding studies for three EU-approved GM corn varieties. Typically, the risk assessment was based on industry information only and was not designed to look for problems. When independent scientists looked again at the results, they found ominous side effects showing up in the kidney and liver (the organs of detoxification) and in other vital organs and tissues.
The deficiencies of both GM and pesticide risk assessments is that they fail to include the very things which can most cause harm; for example, interactions between mixtures, synergistic effects, certain important health end-points (such as endocrine disruption), and disproportionate effects on vulnerable population groups (such as the young, old and immune-compromised).
Without long-term, appropriate and comprehensive testing with clearly specified end-points, and without meaningful tracking and labelling to indicate what people have actually been eating, all we have to fall back on are epidemiological surveys.
Finding patterns of harm using epidemiology presents something of a challenge. The data depend on fragmented, often unverifiable evidence. Data quality is compromised by limited sampling, consumer willingness to participate and ability to recall, and variability of relevant end-points. While these are seen as weaknesses and give industry and regulators an easy excuse to dismiss the findings, once a correlation is established against these odds, it raises a very serious concern.
The same attitude that quickly dismisses population-scale problems for lack of proof, is as quick to suppress the evidence. For example, Argentinean villagers made ill by pesticides sprayed on GM soya monocultures near their homes were immediately attacked by the soya producers and by the provincial government: the victims were accused of “scaremongering”, “going against the (business) interests of the city” and “ruining (the area's) image of progress”, and were “declared to be their enemy”; a local doctor who reported the death and disease he was witnessing was called “crazy, a terrorist”.
Another inherent problem faced by typical victims of modern technology, such as the Argentinean villagers, is that their only recourse it to the courts. This is prohibitively expensive for most. It also means that safety becomes a question of legalities rather than of science.
The biggest problem with falling back on epidemiology to reveal harm is the time which is likely to elapse before the problem becomes obvious enough to be convincing. Consider the modern myth, beloved of pesticide and chemical manufacturers, is that it isn't their chemicals which are causing the current epidemic of cancers, but that people are simply living longer. The finding that cancer was extremely rare in a sample of almost 1,000 Egyptian and South American mummies, coupled to the lack of references to symptoms of cancer in ancient medical literature, suggest the disease is indeed a modern, man-made one. The first descriptions of distinctive tumours (for example, breast cancer in the 17 century and nasal cancers in snuff-takers in 1761) do not appear in the literature until the Industrial Revolution.
The pesticide-concern group 'Beyond Pesticides' has described an alternative risk assessment process which includes rejecting the use of substances if safer alternatives exist, and use of cost comparisons which include externalities such as water supply and pollution. To these costs, could be added the cost of sickness, the cost of soil destroyed, and the cost of global warming caused by agri-chemical production and use. All of these costs relate just as much to GM crops as they do to pesticides, and there are certainly alternative, safer crops available.
OUR COMMENT
Since GM is designed to fit into this whole chemical-based agricultural model, and contributes a whole new layer of costs of its own, it urgently needs a risk assessment of the kind Beyond Pesticides proposes.
A more sensible, thorough and comprehensive, socially-responsible risk assessment process would seem preferable to waiting for the two or three thousand years needed for a conclusive epidemiological study on GM foods.
The other simpler, quicker, much cheaper, and readily available safer alternative, is not to grow GM at all.
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