This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has an opinion piece calling for a review of approval policies for GMO crops. This article, co-authored by a medical researcher and a crop scientist, does not call for a loosening of approval processes to enable more rapid movement of GMOs onto the market; rather, it calls for the approval process to be revisited to take into account increasing evidence that GMOs are bad for human health and bad for the environment. The article makes three main recommendations:
- “the time has therefore come to thoroughly reconsider all aspects of the safety of plant biotechnology”
- The EPA should “delay implementation of its decision to permit use of EnlistDuo”, a specific herbicide that has been developed to combat herbicide resistance due to GMOs
- GM foods should be labeled to enable consumers to reject its use
The article basically makes the point that past assessments of GMO crops’ impact on human health were limited to a few studies that assessed the direct effect of genetically modified material on the human body, rather than the much more serious issue of over-use of herbicides; that there is new evidence that the herbicides being used on GMO crops are carcinogenic; and that the growing problem of herbicide resistance is leading to the reintroduction of dangerous chemicals. The article states that there are now 100,000 acres of arable land in the USA that are infested with herbicide-resistant weeds and the use of Glyphosate has increased by a factor of 250 in 40 years. Past assessments of GMO safety did not consider the dangers due to herbicides, and new evidence suggests that Glyphosate is a carcinogen. Thus GMOs have gone from a wonder crop to a hazard, both to the future of farming (through the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds) and to human health, in a very short period of time. It should also be noted that herbicides and pesticides have huge environmental effects outside of human health – such as the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river – and, as this Lawyers, Guns and Money blog post describes, while the health risks of herbicides entering the human food chain may be low due to good processing and quality control, they pose a much, much greater occupational risk to the farmers and farm labourers who work with the crops. As more herbicide is used these farm-gate risks increase.
The environmental movement has been making the case against herbicide and pesticide resistance since at least the time when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, and this case is also linked to the growth of antibiotic resistance (the main cause of which is use of antibiotics on cattle). Anti-environmentalist rhetoric consistently ignores this issue, preferring to paint the opponents of industrial spraying and GMOs as kooky and anti-science despite the strong scientific evidence that these chemicals and crops need to be deployed very carefully. A classic example of this deliberate ignorance of science is the campaign to have Rachel Carson declared “worse than Hitler” because her efforts to ban DDT led to the deaths of millions of children due to the end of anti-malaria campaigns. This rhetorical drive, which is still commonly seen in the anti-environmentalist movement, is ignorant on so many levels: DDT is not banned for anti-mosquito use, but is not used because mosquitos developed immunity rapidly due to DDT overuse, and modern campaigns use targeted spraying of an actually effective chemical in a way that balances the risk of resistance against the health benefits. The loss of DDT from our arsenal of anti-malaria weapons arose precisely because of its over-use in agriculture, and we’re seeing the same phenomenon occurring with Glyphosate; yet opponents of the GMOs at the root of this problem are described as “anti-science” by people who continually and deliberately ignore this issue. Just as DDT was simultaneously causing harm in the environment and to human health as its target vectors were building up resistance, so Glyphosate may be causing harm to humans and the environment, while its over-use is rapidly making it ineffective in its target ecological niche, and requiring the introduction of more types of more dangerous herbicides to supplement it.
The world is fast entering a period when we are going to need every tool at our disposal to ensure maximum crop yields and prevent major epidemics of malnutrition. Global warming and increasing pressure on water supplies are going to create a perfect storm of reduced yields, increased salinity and increased pest pressures at a time when some of our best tools to ensure high yields are being over-used and rapidly becoming ineffective. Pharmaceuticals and chemical products like herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics need to be seen not as some kind of magic cure-all that can be thrown at any problem no matter what, but as precious resources, that need to be carefully monitored and conserved in order to ensure they retain their potency. We also need to recognize that they have serious environmental and occupational health risks that need to be taken seriously. This means paying careful attention to the science and, yes, listening to the objections of opponents of these technologies.
I’ve said before on this blog that the environmental movement has a long history of being right about really serious threats to human health, from overuse of insecticides through the clean air act and the ozone layer to global warming. It isn’t always right, but dismissing the concerns of the environmental movement out of hand because of foolish stereotypes of the movement as anti-science and lunatic hippies is a stupid and counter-productive move. In the battle of science and GMOs it is the FDA and the agribusinesses that have been proven wrong; the anti-GMO movement has, in fact, been correct about the biggest threats to human health and well-being that GMOs pose. GMOs hold a lot of promise, and they’re going to become more important as we fight to maintain crop yields in an era of record temperatures, reduced access to water and pressures on arable land. But in order to realize that promise, it’s going to be necessary to listen to the environmental movement and take their concerns seriously, rather than dismissing them as anti-science when in fact, once again, it is the opponents of the environmental movement and the supporters of the agriculture lobby who are deliberately ignoring the science. It’s disappointing that it has taken this long for complaints about GMOs that were being aired by environmentalists years ago to finally make it into the pages of medical journals. With a better, more scientifically thorough approvals process and greater caution, we might have less GMOs in use, but they would be much more likely to be living up to their promise.
Compromise and Conceit 
August 23, 2015 at 5:25 pm
I’m not opposed to GMO foods. The issues you cite with herbicide use are not problems with GMOs themselves but problems with herbicides. And I agree that herbicides and pesticides are not good. What if a GMO food is developed which enables farmers to abandon chemicals rather than use more of them? Doesn’t that make the argument on the basis of carcinogenic herbicides and pesticides obsolete?
There’s a recent article in the NYTimes about how a farmer in Bangladesh has been able to stop using pesticides for the first time thanks to a new pest-resident variety of eggplant:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/opinion/sunday/how-i-got-converted-to-gmo-food.html
I also don’t understand why people are against golden rice which is a GMO food that has been altered to include beta carotene to prevent vitamin A deficiency and therefore blindness:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/peter-singer-advocates-a-case-by-case-approach-to-genetically-modified-organisms
It seems to me that some GMOs are potentially harmful but only indirectly through increased use of chemicals. While other GMOs are potentially beneficial and so it seems counter-productive to institute a blanket ban on all GMOs and lose these benefits.
August 23, 2015 at 10:22 pm
Rachel the NEJM article is not suggesting a blanket ban on GMO foods, just a change of the review process to take account of their full environmental and health consequences, not just the narrow “direct” health consequences, which are the least important. I think you and I are both aware of a certain argument that works like this: “CO2 isn’t poisonous so why do they want to ban it?” It’s the same kind of specious reasoning when people suggest we should focus only on the direct effects of GMOs.
A GMO which enables farmers to abandon herbicides would be great. Unfortunately much of the research effort went in the direction of a product that enables the company to sell more of its herbicides… hardly surprising. Critics of GMOs from within the industry have observed that the focus on products which increase the profits of farmers and suppliers rather than the food quality and experience of consumers has damaged their reputation; there is now a shift towards GMOs that consumers can actually sense a benefit from, and golden rice is a good example of this work. Unfortunately golden rice is unlikely to be an effective technique in the battle against vitamin A deficiency, because we have effective existing strategies that are cheap, readily available and well understood, and no evidence golden rice works (I have written about this before, if you’re interested).
We need GMOs that are saline-resistant, heat-tolerant and use less water, to prepare for the inevitable … I think companies are working on this, which is good. I would also be interested to see if any companies are working on GMOs that create completely new food crops, rather than tweaking existing ones. Our current food crops were developed over thousands of years of careful selection, using what was essentially an accelerated form of evolution (i.e. trial and error, with the best crops dominating). But GMOs offer the opportunity to jump evolutionary steps, not just speed them up – we could elevate new plants to food status with appropriate tweaking, which would diversify our food system and possibly also enable growing of crops in more diverse environments.
But regardless of what these companies are developing, their work needs to be assessed properly and taking into account the full totality of environmental impacts, not just the direct effects on health. And using the latest evidence, not studies from the 1980s!
August 24, 2015 at 9:19 am
Drat, Rachel M beat me to the argument I was going to make. I agree that you seem to be using the build-up of herbicide resistance (and consequent increase in herbicide usage) as a Trojan horse to block a technology that you appear to have a knee jerk objection to. If you advanced a narrower argument that “Glyphosate based GM changes should be more strictly monitored or even blocked” then you’d have actual evidence. Instead you’re saying “It turns out that Glyphosate based changes are bad, so we should put extra controls into GM foods and also install more car airbags. Please ignore the lack of logic/evidence for my car airbag argument.”
“It’s disappointing that it has taken this long for complaints about GMOs that were being aired by environmentalists years ago to finally make it into the pages of medical journals.”
This displays a confirmation bias. In order to support this statement we’d need to see the total number of environmentalist complaints in the time period and assess how many are right. We can’t operate from memory, because our memories are going to play to our biases. Pointing purely to successes would lead to the belief that “Miracles Happen”. I suggest we take “The Limits of Growth” (1972) as the catalogue of environmental claims that we should assess. Any objection?
You’re just arguing the precautionary principle. And that’s not how the world needs to work – we need to assess the evidence and then make decisions based on the balance of probability [1]. Otherwise a climate sceptic can argue “We think the climate may be changing, but we’re 100% sure that addressing it will ruin the economy and cost people’s lives through delayed development in poor countries. Therefore we should seek additional evidence to prove global warming beyond doubt. A 99% consensus is not enough – it has to be 100% (the same as the economic consensus) or people will die!” Such demands for surety are facile bullshit in the real world, regardless of who deploys them.
A useful reference to toss into the mix is: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/are_gmos_safe_yes_the_case_against_them_is_full_of_fraud_lies_and_errors.html
This contains a number of GMO examples that don’t rely on herbicides and illustrates why your blanket controls are a bad idea. It also discusses why labelling things as “GMO” in a blanket fashion is misleading and deceptive. It even addresses the issue you’re raising with quotes like “ One study, published in 2012 by Charles Benbrook, the most sensible critic of GMOs, calculates that GMOs increased pesticide use in the United States by 7 percent. An international analysis of multiple studies, published last year, calculates that GMOs decreased pesticide use by 37 percent. But the two assessments agree on a fundamental distinction: While bug-resistant GMOs have led to lower use of insecticides, herbicide-tolerant GMOs have led to higher use of weedkillers.”
[1] Bayesian analysis FTW. You’ll have to run lots more training sessions! And dumb it down. A lot!
August 24, 2015 at 11:06 pm
Yes, that’s exactly the argument I’m making – that GMOs should be assessed on their full environmental consequences rather than just narrow detail. That’s the full argument made in the NEJM article and the position I put here.
It’s possible though, on reflection, that this demand could be actually a subset of a bigger and more pressing need, which is to have agricultural practices assessed more thoroughly in terms of their impact on the common good. There’s not really any difference between the herbicide-resistance being built up by certain GM crops and the antibiotic resistance arising from poor animal husbandry practices, and it’s possible that these both reflect a generally poor level of regulation rather than anything special about GMOs. Maybe GMOs being new – arising in an era of environmental awareness rather than before it – means they show up these frailties in management of agricultural practice, rather than being special cases.
I don’t know enough about broader issues of agricultural policy to say if this is true or not.
I think you’re wrong to dismiss the precautionary principle and I don’t really believe that you do. For example, do you think that drugs should be approved for use in pregnant women without first assessing their risk of causing birth defects? If you don’t, then you are supporting the precautionary principle, and the rest is just haggling over details of what “assessed” means and what you consider an acceptable risk. Also I don’t think the precautionary principle is necessarily unscientific. There are almost no scientists who are serious about global warming who support trials of geo-engineering (at this stage), because they accept that the risks are too huge to quantify and though those risks may have low probability, we only get one chance to test them. I think it’s an important part of policy-making, for good reason.
I have been thinking about a post on the Limits to Growth issue for a while now. I think in fact we haven’t yet got far enough into the future to judge its predictions and they maybe aren’t so far off – you can see the work of Ugo Bardi on the long-term assessment of its impact (he was one of the authors, mind) and a singularly unedifying stoush at Quiggin’s for more information. But let’s come back to that if I get around to writing that post…
August 25, 2015 at 8:46 am
It depends on how the precautionary principle is applied. I’m generally opposed to the strong form as described at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
because of the low standards applied to “risks” raised. The example given in how Australia currently applies it seems reasonable.
The commentary from the NZ Treasury on how the application is changing towards the strong form is a concern, and it’s how I read your suggestion given you’re calling for a broad new regulatory regime that has no clearly defined acceptance criteria and no impetus towards efficient approval of new GMOs.
Maybe we could compromise by stacking the approval boards with GMO corporation reps and the most rabidly pro-GMO individuals we can find? I suggest not selecting anyone who’s not a declared trans-humanist.