The Halifax Chronicle-Herald/Toronto Star/National Post/Globe and Mail | October 7, 1999
A scathing attack on the way governments are approving genetically engineered foods was launched Wednesday by scientists who say the public are being used as guinea pigs to prove whether the foods are safe or not.
The attack came as the head of Monsanto admitted that his company had been using bully-boy tactics, high-handedness and "arrogance" in promoting gentically engineered crops and foods across the world. British scientists claimed Wednesday that current safety stamps were almost meaningless and should be abandoned in favour of rigorous toxicological studies such as those used to approve drugs and pesticides.
Until these are carried out, no one can safely say that engineered foods are not harming peoples' health, the scientists claim. They say the government is sacrificing public health to the interests of biortechnology.
At the heart of the scientists' concerns is a system known as "substantial equivalence." Governments, under pressure from the biotechnology companies in the early 1990s to give the foods the green light, chose this method for approving genetic foods as safe to eat. The system is based on the notion that the current wave of engineered crops is scarcely different from traditional crops and that the proteins produced will also be similar.
But the researchers, led by Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex, say in the journal Nature that "substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept because it is a commercial and political judgment masquerading as if it were a scientific one."
Michael Khoo, a Greenpeace activist, was cited as saying that the report backs up what environmentalists have been saying all along, adding, "But now that it's published in Nature, it adds some credibility."
Nature is the same magazine that published a report earlier this year warning that pollen from genetically modified crops can kill monarch butterflies.
In the report to be published today, three researchers at the University of Sussex, Erik Millstone, Eric Brunner and Sue Mayer, called for a much more rigid testing standard based on intensive scientific testing.
Currently, governments including Canada use a "substantial equivalence" test approved by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization three years ago.
The Post story notes that Health Canada officials were quick to rebut the paper, saying it is "misinformed" and "inaccurate."
Paul Mayers, director of the Bureau of Microbial Hazards, which assesses the safety of GM foods for Health Canada, was cited as saying Canadians, who are some of the biggest consumers of GM foods in the world, are well-protected by the regulatory process.
In the past decade the department has approved 42 different GM crops, including several varieties of corn, soybeans, canola, potatoes, squash and flax. Components of these plants, which usually have two or three foreign genes inserted, are found in more than half the processed foods sold in Canada. But there is no telling which ones because GM foods do not have to be labelled.
Mayers says the department studied the composition of the sprayed GM soybeans before they were approved in Canada.
He stresses Health Canada does not base its assessment of GM food solely on the concept of "substantial equivalence." The department requires companies to provide detailed analysis on the foods' composition and the nutrients it contains. Mayers also says new proteins produced in the crops by the inserted genes are tested for toxicity, and for whether they will cause allergies. "We do not stop at substantial equivalence as this paper implies, we go well beyond it in terms of assessment."
The claims were also questioned by Derek Burke, former chairman of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods in the U.K. The Nature paper is scurrilous, over-the-top, out-of-date and wrong on specific points, he said, adding that the first author is a "social scientist and crusader."
