GMO Banana Hubbub
A new potential GMO crop has become the target of anti-GMO protesting – a banana variety used as a staple crop in East Africa. The GMO banana is adapted to the Uganda highlands, and can represent up to 70% of the calories consumed by people in the region.
According to National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) acting director Dr Andrew Kiggundu, 52% of children under five in Uganda suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, while iron deficiency accounts for 40% of deaths in this age group.
The GMO banana,which has been in development since 2005, has 6 times the beta carotene as the existing cultivar. Field trials are under way as they attempt to increase the iron content of the bananas and increase their resistance to nematodes which can wipe out up to 60% of the crop.
Predictably, anti-GMO activists are opposing testing of the new GMO cultivar. In an open letter they claim that GMO crops as a category have not been proven safe for human consumption, which is not true.
They further claim that programs to increase access to existing vegetables rich in vitamin A and supplement programs are sufficient to address this issue. This is also not correct, as such programs have been underway for years with limited benefit.
The letter calls into question the current feeding trials on healthy students at 
Iowa State University, conducted by Dr. Wendy White who is a world expert on Vitamin A absorption and metabolism. They raise trivial objections to the research, failing to recognize that these are preliminary studies in healthy individuals. They also fail to recognize the hypocrisy of simultaneously complaining that GMOs are not sufficiently studied and that they are being studied.
The usual complaints about GMOs are not relevant to the GMO vitamin A enriched banana. The new gene is taken from a wild banana species, and so is not a transgene from a distant species. The GMO is being developed by the Ugandan government, NARO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This is a humanitarian project. There is no issue of corporate ownership or patents. The new cultivar has nothing to do with pesticides or farming practice.
There is, in fact, no legitimate reason to protest this banana except that it is being developed using technology that falls within the broad and somewhat arbitrary definition of genetically modified. I doubt they would be protesting the feeding trials, or this approach to vitamin A deficiency, if the cultivar were developed through mutation farming.
In fact they give away their true motivation in the open letter, writing:
We will not stand by idly as attempts are made to systematically genetically modify Africa’s staple foods and in the process gain a massive positive public relations coup by claiming to have conquered health problems at the unnecessary risk to Africans.
They would rather that children in poor countries go blind and die due to vitamin A deficiency than have to deal with a “public relations coup” because a GM crop actually improved lives.
The hypocrisy is especially acute for the privileged and well-fed ISU students protesting these feeding trials.
Bill and *Melinda* Gates Foundation
At least these GMO bananas are being tested on humans, since they’re not “nutritionally identical” to conventional bananas.
But as far as I can tell, most GMOs aren’t tested on humans or animals.
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/food-safety.aspx
“It is quite difficult and somewhat impractical to design a long-term safety test in humans… This is, in part, why no existing whole foods – whether from organic, conventional or GM production – have been subjected to long-term human clinical trials.”
Take the mutant salmon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AquAdvantage_salmon#Concerns
“The FDA reviewed data from the company and concluded that ‘The allergenic potency of triploid ABT salmon was not significantly different from that of sponsor control diploid salmon.'”
Doesn’t mention tests on humans or animals. The FDA just extrapolated from company-provided chemistry data. Hope they’re better at detecting all possible chemicals than Anti-Doping agencies are. But the first guinea pigs will be the customers, and they won’t even know it because the GMO is not labeled.
As far as risk assessment, if the GMO bananas or golden rice can prevent blindness from Vitamin A deficiency in many people, that reduction of a known health risk outweighs potential increase in unknown health risks. Same as with vaccines, which pose a small risk that’s outweighed by the reduced risk of infectious disease.
On the other hand, the fast-growing mutant salmon doesn’t reduce any health risk, so what does the consumer get out of it, just lower price? I suppose if it becomes cheap enough to substitute for red meat more often, then that could be healthy. Just label it, same way artificial flavors and colors are labeled even though they’re deemed safe by the FDA.
“They would rather that children in poor countries go blind and die…”
Oh please, you sound like tobacco shills Steven Milloy and Roger Bate, who said that Rachel Carson is worse than Hitler for getting DDT banned so African children die of malaria.
“The environmental movement has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been ‘politically correct,’” Bate explained (Tobacco Archives, 9/98). What the anti-environmental movement needs is something with “the correct blend of political correctness ( … oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future).” That something, Bate proposed, was DDT.
Getting back to GM, the open letter said “at the unnecessary risk to Africans.” And they’ll say that you’d rather subject Africans to unnecessary risk just for PR.
They figure that the potential health risks from GMOs outweigh the benefits, and you figure the opposite, that’s the difference. The open letter assumes there are “unknown long-term impacts on health, the environment and farming systems that are entailed by using GM crops.” So it’s a matter of weighing unknown risks against known risk reduction.
Their appeal to unknown risks of GMO, however, are simply not reasonable, and not backed by science. Every major scientific and health organization in the world has looked at the evidence and decided that GM technology is safe. Currently approved GMOs are safe. There is no real reason to think that the vitamin-enhanced GMO banana has unknown risks, while the vitamin-enhanced hybrid sweet potato they support doesn’t. This is an unscientific double standard. You have to look at risks vs benefit. They are absolutely willing to downplay the benefit, even if that means more death and blindness from vitamin A deficiency, because they do not want to risk a PR victory. They say it straight out. The “risks” is a BS ploy.
Their letter says, “Most of the research carried out by independent scientists on GM crops directly contradicts the results of biotech industry-sponsored studies that claim no evidence of risk or harm.”
They don’t cite sources, but they’re obviously drawing a parallel to various industry campaigns to deny the risks from tobacco, CO2 emissions, junk food, asbestos, DDT, tetraethyllead, etc. Monsanto still says, “a causal connection linking Agent Orange to chronic disease in humans has not been established.”
Recently, the IARC classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, upgraded DDT from possibly to probably carcinogenic, and listed peppermint flavoring agent pulegone as possibly carcinogenic, not to mention listing radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic in 2013.
The FDA doesn’t appear to be doing much to regulate the probable carcinogen acrylamide in food, which was discovered in food in 2002. The US Endocrine Society put out a statement last year warning that endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA, pthalates, and pesticides are increasingly linked to diabetes, obesity, and cancers, despite Dr. Joe Schwarcz’ best attempts to deny BPA risk.
A Pew study in 2013 found that all 451 notices of food additive safety voluntarily submitted to the FDA between 1997 and 2012 came from people with a conflict of interest. A 2015 study found that common anticholinergic drugs like Benadryl increase the risk of dementia even at low doses.
So if you really want to make a convincing argument, then instead of demonizing skeptical people, explain how GMOs are immune to unknown risks, and how denial that they pose any risk is different from other industry denial and astroturfing campaigns.
Mutation farming sounds scary too. Any rapid changes that aren’t time-tested are risky. That’s why Climate Change is a problem, because it’s happening too fast for ecosystems to adapt to it.
“I doubt they would be protesting the feeding trials, or this approach to vitamin A deficiency, if the cultivar were developed through mutation farming.”
Maybe they would if they were aware of it.
http://earthopensource.org/gmomythsandtruths/sample-page/1-genetic-engineering-technique/1-3-myth-genetic-engineering-crops-risky-mutation-breeding-widely-accepted-regulated/
“Mutation breeding is unpredictable and risky, and crops produced in this way should be as strictly regulated as GM crops.”
[…] wrote about the GMO banana controversy here. Bananas are a staple crop in parts of the world, including East Africa where it can represent up […]