And those numbers tabulate just the risks for humans. Pimentel has also found that agrochemicals kill some 70 million birds every year in the United States alone. A quarter-million domestic animals are also poisoned every year by pesticides; farmers lose some $30 million a year to animal illness and death caused by pesticide poisonings—an estimate considered low because it includes only numbers reported by veterinarians. “When a farm animal poisoning occurs and little can be done for the animal, the farmer seldom calls a veterinarian but, rather, either waits for the animal to recover or destroys it,” Pimentel writes.
It is true that pesticides and herbicides are not GMOs, and it is also true that farmers sprayed all kinds of chemicals on their crops long before the development of GMOs. Consider wheat, which is not (currently) genetically engineered. Wheat is often sprayed with glyphosate as a desiccant immediately before it is harvested, in order to force the plants to rapidly release their seeds. This puts a concentrated chemical on the plant right before it’s processed into food.
Some scientists wonder whether the rash of gluten intolerance currently afflicting the nation is actually Roundup intolerance. Glyphosate may be “the most important causal factor” in celiac disease, one study recently found; another found that glyphosate exposure can cause severe depletion of the nutrient manganese, a deficiency of which is associated with everything from anxiety to autism. “The monitoring of glyphosate levels in food and in human urine and blood has been inadequate,” the study’s authors reported. “The common practice of desiccation and/or ripening with glyphosate right before the harvest ensures that glyphosate residues are present in our food supply.” It is also plausible that “the recent sharp increase of kidney failure in agricultural workers is tied to glyphosate exposure.”
This, then, is not a question of “the safety of GMOs”; it is a question of “the safety of what we spray on our food,” a whole lot of which is GM. It’s obviously impossible to pin a nation’s health woes on a single chemical compound, especially when only a tiny fraction of the country’s 80,000 synthetic compounds have ever been formally tested for their health consequences. However, few chemicals have been spread as far and wide as glyphosate in the last twenty years, and glyphosate’s ability to disrupt the body’s detoxification pathways has been shown to intensify the effect of other toxic chemicals.
There is no question that the explosion in the use of chemicals like glyphosate has tracked right alongside the explosion in the use of GMOs. It has also corresponded with two other trends: a “huge increase” in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, and a “marked decrease” in life expectancy in the United States, write the authors of a study published in The Journal of Organ Systems. Diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases—all have jumped dramatically, to the point that one-quarter of Americans now suffer from multiple chronic diseases. These numbers run parallel to “an exponential increase in the amount of glyphosate applied to food crops and in the percentage of GE food crops planted.” The annual cost of treating these illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is north of $750 billion per year. While direct, causal links have not been firmly established, the correlation—especially given the scale of our exposure to pesticides, GMOs, and the processed foods both help create—surely merits more attention than it has thus far received.
Beyond worries about human health, there is the question of how much longer the pesticides currently associated with GMOs will remain viable. Farmers have sprayed so much glyphosate on their GM crops that weeds—the very things they use glyphosate to control—are evolving resistance to the spray. In 2004, a common weed called amaranth was found to have developed resistance to glyphosate in a single county in Georgia; by 2011, it had spread to seventy-six. “It got to the point where some farmers were losing half their cotton fields to the weed,” a Georgia farming consultant reported.
Glyphosate-resistant weeds have now been found in eighteen countries, with significant impacts in Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and Paraguay. In the United States, they have emerged on 100 million acres in thirty-six states, meaning farmers must now return to harsher chemicals (like atrazine, a known carcinogen) or to recently approved “stacked” herbicides that combine glyphosate with 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the carcinogenic defoliant used during the Vietnam War. Dow AgroSciences, which uses 2,4-D in an herbicide called Enlist Duo, says there are more than 1,500 products with 2,4-D as an active ingredient; over the next few years, the EPA predicts the use of 2,4-D will increase sevenfold.
The EPA’s recent decision to approve “stacked” herbicides was deeply flawed, according to Philip Landrigan, a renowned pediatrician and public health scientist, and Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist at Washington State University. The decision was based on studies done thirty years ago, which were not done by independent scientists but by the herbicide manufacturers themselves and were never published. The EPA did not take into account what scientists now know of the dangers such chemicals pose—even at very low doses—to the human endocrine system, especially in children. And they failed to consider the chemicals’ impact on the environment, especially its effect on pollinators like the monarch butterfly, whose population is down more than 90 percent.
By pushing chemicals like glyphosate so hard, and for so long, chemical and seed companies “have sown the seeds of their own destruction,” the University of Michigan’s John Vandermeer told me. “We now have twenty-five weeds that are Roundup resistant, so now they’re developing 2,4-D–resistant crops. Roundup and 2,4-D are not good things to have around in such huge quantities. Roundup is toxic to amphibians—it’s actually toxic to almost everything that people have studied.
“My worry is that spreading Roundup all over the place has not been a good idea, and now we’re about to start spreading 2,4-D around the world. It’s not a good idea for the environment, and it’s a potential danger for human health. Both chemicals are certainly suspected carcinogens, and Roundup is an endocrine disrupter. These are problems that were well known before there were GMOs. I don’t care what technique you use to create Roundup Ready crops. I will always have an objection to the chemicals they encourage. If they had created Roundup Ready crops the old-fashioned way, I still wouldn’t like them because of the Roundup.”
It would seem that with so much riding on this question of safety—with so much food, so much health, and so much money riding on a clear answer—the federal government would make answering it a priority. The trouble with federal oversight of widely used chemicals like glyphosate is that the agencies responsible for keeping an eye on industry are deeply compromised by the political power of these same industries. The EPA has “gutted” both internal and external research programs responsible for safeguarding the public from industrial and agricultural chemicals, Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, told me. The EPA says everything they do is online, but “damned if you can find it,” he said.
Relying on the seed and chemical companies to test their own products is folly, Blumberg said. Especially for something as ubiquitous as Roundup, large, long-term, and multigenerational studies ought to be carried out by a federal agency like the National Toxicology Program.
“This kind of work is the province of government, but they have totally shirked their responsibility,” Blumberg said. “We just cannot trust people with financial interest in product sales to do safety tests on these products. Companies will never show all the data unless it is in their interest. Look at history. Look at the tobacco industry. Look at General Motors and the ignition switch debacle at Takata and their exploding air bags. What does history tell us? Nothing good.”
The Information Squeeze
It is the absence—or, if you like, the impossibility—of an absolute proof of safety that has led more than sixty countries all over the world to require foods containing GMO
s to be labeled. With certainty so hard to come by, these countries (notably not including the United States) have decided that consumers at least deserve enough information to decide what they want to eat.
Europeans have bitterly opposed GMOs since the beginning. Their objections cropped up right around the time people in England learned that cows were being fed the brains of other cows. Mad cow disease, which had nothing to do with GMOs, nonetheless made people skittish over both the excesses of industrial agriculture and the paucity of government regulation.
Theatrical demonstrations popped up all over Europe and quickly focused on agricultural technologies of all kinds. Protesters dumped GM soybeans at the doorstep of the British prime minister. Food activists pressured supermarkets to pull GMOs off their shelves. Prince Charles said GM foods took mankind into “realms that belong to God.”
In 1996, the German division of Unilever canceled an order for 650,000 metric tons of soybeans unless they could be guaranteed not to contain GM beans. Four years later, the EU required that food with more than 1 percent GM ingredients carry a label. Such was the European resistance to GMOs that hardly any foods ever actually ended up with a label, because hardly any GM foods were actually available for sale. Around this time, a food analyst for Deutsche Bank in New York declared that “GMOs are dead.”
More recently, nineteen members of the European Union requested that they be able to “opt out” of an agreement that allows the planting of GM corn.
In the United States, poll after poll indicates that a majority of people are confused and frightened by engineered food, and that they share a deep mistrust of the large agribusinesses that make them. They worry about the evolution of superbugs and superweeds, and about the growing dangers of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers needed to keep industrial farms afloat. They worry about the creation of dangerous food allergies, like a GM soybean made with genes from a Brazil nut that became such a suspicious cause of allergies that it never made it to market.
“The GMO issue is something that continues to be brought up in an unprompted way in our interviews with consumers,” said Laurie Demeritt, CEO of the food research firm Hartman Group. “And when we look at things like fat, sodium, and sugar, GMO is showing the strongest growth rate in terms of characteristics that consumers are trying to avoid. . . . Consumers have a vision in their minds of people in lab coats taking syringes and injecting things into a product, a vision of food made in a lab—and that’s even worse in their minds than food coming off a factory line.”
In a 2013 New York Times poll, three-quarters of Americans surveyed expressed concern about GMOs in their food, with most worried about health risks. More than 90 percent of Americans want GMOs labeled, as they have been required to be in countries such as India, China, Australia, and Brazil.
In 2011, Gary Hirshberg, chairman and cofounder of Stonyfield, the organic yogurt company, partnered with Just Label It, a national coalition of nearly 450 organizations, to petition the FDA to make GM food labels mandatory. More than a million people have now signed up. In 2014, Vermont became the first state to require labels on foods made with GMOs (though critics complain that the state left a sizable loophole by exempting meat and dairy products, much of which comes from animals fed GM grain).
Companies have responded aggressively to these moves. They have spent tens of millions of dollars in the United States alone trying to limit the information they must provide about the GM ingredients in their food, or the pesticides they use. They fight citizen groups at the ballot box and pour rivers of money into the pockets of politicians who support them. They place industry insiders at the very top of the federal agencies charged with regulating their own industry. They invest millions of dollars in university laboratories, then urge the scientists they support—who the companies know “have a big white hat in this debate”—to explain the benefits of their products in the press and before Congress.
When California activists decided to float a petition for food labeling in 2012, they gathered more than a million signatures (and $9 million) in support of Proposition 37. The move was derailed by a massive counter-campaign (and $46 million) from Monsanto, DuPont, Pepsi, and Kraft Foods. In the end, the labeling measure failed 51 percent to 49 percent.
The story repeated itself in Oregon and Washington state: small-scale activists in favor of labeling followed by multimillion-dollar campaigns financed by the food and agricultural industries. “Monsanto was writing million-dollar checks at a shot,” recalled Trudy Bialic, the public-affairs director of a Seattle-based natural-foods co-op chain, who helped draft the initiative. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, the lobby for makers of processed food, donated $11 million. “Boom, boom, boom, millions overnight,” she said. “It was death by a thousand cuts.”
If some of this sounds familiar, it should. Companies pushing the “safety” of GMOs are following a playbook written by Big Tobacco and Big Oil, which spent decades claiming that science (about cancer, or about climate change) was bunk. Yet now, when consumers demand to know more about GMOs—what they are, how they are made, what their health and environmental consequences might be—industry claims to have science “on its side.” Consumers should trust these companies to do the right thing, because the science on GMOs is “clear.” According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the gap between what scientists and the public believe about GMOs is now wider than on any other issue. Almost 90 percent of scientists believe eating GMOs is safe. Among the public, that number is 37 percent.
The food industry has always been heavy-handed in its battles over what information the public should be allowed to know. Twenty-five years ago, many of these same companies fought bitterly to prevent the legally strict “organic” label from being applied to foods grown without synthetic chemicals. They had reason to be concerned: since the introduction of organic standards, the organic food industry has been growing at 20 percent a year, which has both cut into traditional profit centers and opened the door to a whole new array of growers, preparers, and sellers of food.
But the GMO labeling debate has a different feel. Requiring a “Contains GMOs” label on foods would function as a kind of “anti-organic” label, implying (given the public’s anxiety over the issue) that the food was somehow unsafe to eat. To big food companies and farmers who use GMOs, requiring a GMO label would do little more than give the organic food industry another big bite out of the American food budget.
As consumer anxiety over GMOs has grown, so have the marketing opportunities for food companies that do not use GMOs. Some 80 percent of consumers say they would pay more for foods carrying a “No GMO” label, even though they don’t necessarily trust food labels (or even fully understand GMOs). Whole Foods has pledged that by 2018 it will replace some foods containing genetically modified ingredients and require labels on others. Signs in Trader Joe’s proclaim: “No GMOs Sold Here.” Sales of products claiming they contain “no GMOs” exceeded $10 billion last year and grew at a faster rate than sales of gluten-free items, according to a recent Nielsen study.
“There’s no doubt that the industry is fighting a rear-guard action on this and trying to put it to rest,” said Carl Jorgensen, director of global consumer strategy for wellness at Daymon Worldwide, a consumer research and consulting firm. “But there’s an aura of inevitability about it now.”
Ten billion dollars for non-GMO foods is a lot, but it’s still a vanishing fraction of the $620 billion Americans spent in grocery stores in 2013. But if a traditional grocery chain like Kroger or Safeway were to begin labeling its private-label products, “that would be a game changer,” Jorgensen said. Unlike food manufacturers, grocery stores interact directly with consumers, Jorgenson noted; they can see which foods fly off the shelves and which foods remain.
But this is tricky magic: if companies start boasting that some of their products (like Cheerios)
do not contain GMOs, how will consumers react to their other products (like Lucky Charms and even Honey Nut Cheerios)—sitting right there on the same shelf—that do?
In the absence of broad labeling laws—there are currently eighty-four bills on GMO labeling in thirty states—companies hoping to take advantage of GMO anxiety have found other solutions. On its website, a testing organization called the Non-GMO Project—logo: monarch butterfly—shows a photo of a little blond girl carrying a sign saying “I Am Not a Science Experiment.”
“The sad truth is many of the foods that are most popular with children contain GMOs,” the site reports. “Cereals, snack bars, snack boxes, cookies, processed lunch meats, and crackers all contain large amounts of high-risk food ingredients. In North America, over 80% of our food contains GMOs. If you are not buying foods that are Non-GMO Project Verified, most likely GMOs are present at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
The Non-GMO Project, which calls itself “North America’s only third-party verification for products produced according to the rigorous best practices for GMO avoidance,” says it has verified more than 34,000 products. The nonprofit group tests ingredients, and anything passing the European standard of less than 0.9 percent GMO is eligible for the “Non-GMO Project Verified” seal of approval. Given the almost unavoidable reality of seed and crop cross-contamination, getting to zero—getting to actually “GMO free” is (so far) impossible.
Rather than mandatory labels on products, the food industry has long pushed the use of voluntary QR barcodes on products, which (they say) consumers could simply scan with their cell phones. The codes would direct you to the company’s website, which would reveal further information about the product. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has said the QR codes would solve the label debate “in a heartbeat.”
Food Fight Page 4
