A while back, Greenpeace was floating a petition to save Olive Ridley turtles from the new port at Dhamra being constructed by the Tata group. Seemed a worthwhile cause, I signed up. Since then, GP has seen it fit to keep me appraised on other causes they’re seen fit to fight for. Fair enough.
Recently, however, they have taken up the cause of Genetically Modified crops, or GMOs. With their usual lack of subtlety, they’ve gone about lambasting Nestlé for allowing “Genetic contamination” in their products in India. Their emailer is a case in point. The header depicts green, wholesome fruits and veggies, with the Greenpeace logo, all that is good and pure in this world. At the bottom, you have the evil wicked Nestlé mommie bird revealed in her true colours as a cobra about to feast on your innocent little babies chicks.
Exhibit 1: The wholesome and pure Greenpeace header. Where are the bunny rabbits and rainbows?
Exhibit 2: The vile duplicitious Nestlé corporation. You can almost imagine the poor chicks crying for their lives: ” No, not the GM worms…. “
What a load of hooey. It’s quite tiresome and frankly quite disingenuous to paint GMOs as inherently unsafe, or that the scientific community is somehow divided on the issue.
Rather than take up the cudgel on this matter myself, I’ll repost from the excellent Skeptoid blog/podcast on this issue.
When we turn our skeptical eye toward the Philippines, we see Greenpeace activists wearing full biohazard spacesuits cutting down GMO crops and disposing of them in sealed containers. By inviting reporters and photographers to document these demonstrations, they very effectively spread terror among the undereducated poor Filipino public. Now, I think any reasonable person agrees that you wouldn’t do such a drastic thing without very good reason; so there must indeed be very good evidence that GMO crops are only safely handled by hazmat disposal teams — wouldn’t you think? Let’s look at Greenpeace’s website and see what frightening information they’ve uncovered.
The production of unexpected toxins and allergens. Because genetic engineering is a very imprecise technology, the insertion of foreign genes can stimulate the production of unexpected proteins, which may prove toxic or allergenic.
First of all, it’s hardly a “very imprecise technology”; gene manipulation requires great precision, and produces far more precisely designed results than can be hoped for with simple cross pollination. The very purpose of the research is to avoid toxic or allergenic results. When these results are found in GMOs, those products are not sent to the market. Duh.
A large part of science involves learning how to make things better. Do we stop all scientific research in every field because learning how to make things better also teaches us what makes them worse? What a ridiculous objection.
Antibiotic resistance. Scientists add genes that confer resistance to common antibiotics.
What they meant to say is that some GMO research seeks to find ways to make crops resistant to harmful bacteria, by incorporating the right toxins into the crop, thus eliminating the need to apply that toxin separately in the form of synthetic or organic pesticides (yes, people, organic pesticides contain the same toxins found in synthetic pesticides — they have to, otherwise they wouldn’t function). Finding ways to manage this process to avoid creating resistant pests has been a major area of study in farming science for centuries. This is a farming problem that exists independently of GMO. GMO neither creates not exacerbates this issue.
Effects on the Environment. Genetically engineered crops represent new and potentially invasive forms of life.
All plant species are potentially invasive, and that’s why farmers use good management techniques. There’s no reason you should be expected to do this any more or any less with GMO crops as you have always had to do with all crops. This criticism says nothing about GMO.
Contamination of seeds and crops. People are still increasingly finding even non-GE stocks contaminated. This is due to cross pollination where contaminated pollen is carried by wind or as seeds spread out in the environment or are mixed up during handling.
This has always been true of all plants. Cross pollination has nothing to do with GMO. It is responsible for all the biodiversity of plant life on the planet. Calling it “contamination” is simply using a weasel word to raise alarm about a perfectly natural, normal process.
GE foods remove consumer choice. Because of the widespread contamination caused by GE crops and the fact that many GE crops are not kept separate in the food system, consumers in the Philippines have been denied the right to choose not to eat genetically engineered food.
Again, this has always been true of all food crops. Virtually all modern food crops — cereals, corn, rice — are the result of human hybridization. Is Greenpeace applying this criticism to all food crops, or only to those developed by for-profit companies? Is this a scientific objection, or an ideological objection?
Biopiracy. In order to achieve the desired traits chemical companies often use genes acquired from plants, animals and bacteria found in poorer countries. In effect these genes are being stolen from the poor to feed corporate profits.
And what is Greenpeace’s most frequent argument in favor of maintaining Brazilian rain forest? The forest, says Greenpeace, acts “as a crucial medicine chest for pharmaceutical advance.” When it serves their purposes, Greenpeace is all in favor of using substances from plants in poor countries. But when someone else does it to feed people, suddenly it’s “biopiracy”. This is the height of hypocrisy. Increasing knowledge by studying genetics in a different country is good for everyone. Is this really the best Greenpeace can do?
Loss of Farmers Rights. Because genetically engineered seeds are patented, the seed company can maintain strict control over how the seeds are used.
This is true of all patented products in the world. Even Greenpeace retains strict control over their legally protected properties, profiting from T-shirt and bumper sticker sales, and prosecuting those who violate their copyrights. This is yet another hypocritical and irrelevant argument that has nothing to do with the science or safety of GMO.
Genetic engineering is unnatural. Because genetic engineering creates new living organisms that would never naturally occur, many people hold moral and spiritual objections to it.
Finally, an honest and factual objection. There’s nothing at all wrong with having moral and spiritual opinions. What is wrong is calling them science, and using them to deny food to poor people to whom your spiritual notions may not be as important as feeding their starving children.
And yet, these are the best reasons Greenpeace can come up with to defend the act of terrorizing Filipinos by raiding their farms wearing hazmat suits. I’ll conclude my discussion of GMO with a quote from Norman Borlaug, who says it better than I could:
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Valaraukar 