Genetically Engineered Food: Promises & Perils

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APHIS science adviser Sally McCammon says the combination of buffer zones, sowing the crops at different times to vary when they shed pollen, and planting extra barrier crops around both the test crops and adjacent fields should ensure the transgenes don't escape into food crops growing nearby. But Hansen questions whether stringent controls for transgenic industrial or pharmaceutical crops are always followed. Since even basic information about the field trials is not available, he says it is impossible to know.

The National Academy of Sciences found serious flaws in APHIS's regulation of biotech field trials. Under current rules, a company can simply inform APHIS what it wants to grow to obtain permission. Such field tests are performed under "notification"-actual environmental impact assessments have been virtually nonexistent.

And the vast majority of transgenic field tests—96 percent in the year 2000 are conducted under these rules. What the transgenic compound is intended for determines how it is regulated; currently there are no rules specifically governing industrial transgenic plants, though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it plans to implement some. "At present, as long as your intent is not to use it for a pharmaceutical purpose—it can be a research chemical or an industrial solvent—you can put it into the plant,. do a simple notification to APHIS with virtually no data, and then you can commercialize it, as was done with avid-in-producing corn. Even the National Academy of Sciences noted this was a glaring loophole that needs to be closed," Hansen says.

Good for Farmers?

Unyielding consumer opposition to GMOs around the world has severely limited export markets for U.S. corn and soybeans. As a result, farmers have had to deal with both substantial drops in price and newly created competition from foreign farmers who are filling the demand for non-GM corn and soybeans, says Dan MacGuire, agricultural policy analyst with the American Corn Growers Association. Since farmers are already struggling with historically low commodity prices that fall below their costs of production, this is a hit they can ill afford.

One of the only bright spots for farmers over the last decade has been organic farming. What started out as a small niche market for health- and environment-conscious consumers has turned into a $9 billion industry, with sales growing at least 20 percent a year for the past 10 years. But organic farmers are starting to lose their lucrative markets-and consumers are losing their ability to choose non-GM food—because GM traits are turning up in organic crops. By the summer of 2000, virtually all of the tested organic corn samples from the Midwest showed some degree of transgenic contamination, says Fred Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. GM contamination has destroyed the small but promising Canadian organic canola market, and Janet Jacobson, president of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society, says she doesn't know any organic farmers who can assure the purity of their organically grown corn, soybeans or canola.

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