Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  What followed next, according to Wilson and Akre, was a grueling nightmare of perpetual delays and station-mandated rewrites—73 in all, none of which proved satisfactory to station management. “No fewer than six air dates were set and cancelled,” Wilson recalls. “In all my years as a print and radio and local and national television reporter, I’ve never seen anything like it.” When the reporters balked at some of the station’s proposed changes—such as deleting Epstein’s warning of cancer risks—they say the station’s general manager notified them they would be fired for insubordination within 48 hours and another reporter would make the requested changes.

  “When we said we’d file a formal complaint with the FCC if that happened,” says Wilson, “we were not fired but were each offered very large cash settlements to go away and keep quiet about the story and how it was handled.” The reporters refused the settlement, which amounted to nearly $200,000, and ultimately were fired in December 1997.

  No Label? No Problem!

  If industry’s own polls were not enough to prove that labeling could be the marketing kiss of death for genetically modified foods, the launch of Calgene’s “Flavr-Savr” tomato in 1994 helped drive this lesson home. The Flavr-Savr was the first genetically modified fruit approved for sale in American supermarkets, but it failed to catch on. Designed to last longer on store shelves than regular tomatoes, it was expensive, had a soft texture that made it bruise during packaging, and some consumers thought it had a strange, metallic taste.33 Calgene’s marketing efforts also suffered due to its brand name and the publicity surrounding the product launch. Consumers knew that the Flavr-Savr was genetically engineered, and many were wary.

  In the early 1990s, biotech promoters lobbied intensely and successfully to prevent genetically modified foods from being labeled as such. In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decreed that GM foods are substantially equivalent to conventional foods. Under FDA rules, a new food must be thoroughly tested unless it falls into a category of foods that FDA terms “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS). By declaring that biotech foods are equivalent to the conventional variety, FDA deemed them GRAS and therefore exempt from mandatory safety testing or special product labeling. Government regulators rely on biotech companies to do their own voluntary safety tests and also determine themselves if the product in question is GRAS.34 One of the key decision-makers who helped draft FDA’s policy was Michael Taylor, previously an attorney for Monsanto. After the policy was written, in fact, Taylor left the FDA and eventually went back to work for Monsanto.35

  Rather than subject the merits of GM foods to open public debate, industry has tried to get the products quickly on the shelves and then deal with public opinion after the innovation has already become an accomplished fact. Until fairly recently, this strategy appeared to be succeeding. The first large-scale commercial plantings of transgenic crops went into the ground in 1996, and by 1998, they covered nearly 69 million acres in eight countries, not including China. In 1999, about a third of the U.S. corn crop and more than half of the soybeans planted were estimated to be genetically engineered varieties.36 Gene-altered products allowed on the market include cottonseed oil, canola, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet peppers, squash, sunflowers, milk (from rBGH-treated cows), and chymosin, an enzyme commonly used in hard cheese. Corn and soy in particular are widely disseminated in processed foods as sweeteners, oils, texturizers, fillers, and extenders. As a result, American consumers have been eating increasing amounts of genetically engineered food—mostly without their knowledge or consent—because the food has not been labeled as such.

  A 1999 industry-sponsored opinion poll found that 62 percent of Americans were still unaware that GM foods were already widely marketed. Tom Hoban, a sociology professor at North Carolina State University who has done extensive opinion polling for the biotech industry, likes to poke fun at the purported ignorance of the general public. “Lots of American consumers probably don’t know seeds are involved in agriculture—they don’t even know farms are involved in agriculture,” he quipped at a June 1998 meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Hoban sees such public ignorance as a great opportunity for industry to “proactively educate” consumers. Ultimately, he says, industry will win as GM-free products become difficult to find on store shelves. “Everybody’s going to be using biotech foods pretty soon, so there won’t be a lot of alternatives,” he said.

  In Europe, however, this disdain for the consumer backfired badly. Genetically modified tomato puree was one of the first biotech foods to reach British supermarket shelves. As in the United States, its introduction was marked by little fanfare. By the time that Professor Pusztai appeared on World in Action, however, consumers in England and other parts of Europe were realizing that they were eating GM food, and they were starting to resent it. According to the Wall Street Journal, Monsanto shot itself in the foot in 1998 when it not only refused to label but “decided to make a point of not segregating genetically modified soybeans from regular soybeans for the European market. It wasn’t Greenpeace but the supposedly responsible leaders of the supermarket industry who led the backlash. Malcolm Walker, head of the Iceland grocery chain, posing as the defender of ‘consumer choice,’ denounced Monsanto in ads and interviews. At Safeway, Chairman David Webster stormed a podium in 1999 to declare that his company was “fighting back against the tide of genetically modified foods and ingredients hitting UK shelves.”37

  By the fall of 1998, Monsanto’s own research showed that it was losing the battle for public opinion in Europe. An internal report by opinion pollster Stan Greenberg showed that the company’s pro-biotech advertising campaign had been “overwhelmed” by the public backlash. Monsanto’s refusal to label bioengineered products had even angered senior executives from leading British supermarket chains. “The latest survey shows an ongoing collapse of public support for biotechnology and GM foods,” Greenberg wrote. “At each point in this project, we keep thinking that we have reached the low point and that public opinion will stabilize, but we apparently have not reached that point. The latest survey shows a steady decline over the year, which may have accelerated in the most recent period. . . . The number saying that these products are ‘unacceptable’ has sky-rocketed: 35 percent last year, rising to 44 percent before the summer and to 51 percent now.” The only positive indicators, Greenberg said, were poll results showing that politicians and government scientists continued to side with the company. Their support was key, he noted, since Monsanto’s strategy was focused on winning over “a socio-economic elite” consisting of members of parliament and “upper-level civil servants.”38

  A newspaper opinion poll released that same month found that 68 percent of the respondents were worried about eating genetically modified foods. In March 1999 another poll found that “nine out of ten shoppers would switch supermarkets to avoid genetically modified food.” The Church of Scotland issued a study condemning the “unethical” practices of transnational biotech corporations. “There is indignation from people that they are not being given a choice,” said church spokesperson Donald Bruce. “It smacks of imperialism—but instead of a Boston Tea Party, this time we could have a Rotterdam Soya Bean Fest with soya and maize dumped into the North Sea.”

  As resistance grew, supermarket chains throughout Europe began bowing to consumer pressure by pulling genetically modified foods from their shelves. In April 1999, even Unilever, England’s largest food manufacturer and itself an investor in biotech research, was driven by hard economics to announce that it would remove GM ingredients from its products. “The announcement started a week-long stampede by leading companies, all household names,” stated the London Independent. The day after Unilever’s capitulation, Nestlé followed suit, as did England’s leading supermarket chains, including Tesco, Sainsbury, Safeway, Asda, and Somerfield. “When these phase-outs are complete, no major supermarket brands will continue to contain GM ingredients,” the Independent noted. “It’s an extraordinary revers
al from the rapid, silent, expansion of GM foods—from nothing to 60 percent of the products on supermarket shelves in less than three years.”39

  An internal report by the Deutsche Bank, Europe’s largest, recommended that investors sell their holdings of ag biotech stocks. “In the past month,” the report noted, “a senior manager at a European-based chemical giant expressed serious reservations to us about the benignness of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and said that given a choice, he would select non-GMOs any day. By the way, the company he works for is actively involved in ag-biotechnology.”40

  The Empire Strikes Back

  As the tide of anti-biotech sentiment rose, industry strategists began to reconsider their hush-hush approach. In May 1998, Monsanto launched an aggressive publicity campaign, spending $5 million on advertisements in French and British newspapers touting genetic engineering as a miracle solution for hunger in the Third World. Headlined “Let the Harvest Begin,” the ads used the rhetoric of environmentalism and social concern. “We all share the same planet—and the same needs,” they proclaimed. “In agriculture, many of our needs have an ally in biotechnology and the promising advances it offers for our future. Healthier, more abundant food. Less expensive crops. Reduced reliance on pesticides and fossil fuels. A cleaner environment. With these advances, we prosper; without them, we cannot thrive. As we stand on the edge of a new millennium, we dream of a tomorrow without hunger. To achieve that dream, we must welcome the science that promises hope. . . . Biotechnology is one of tomorrow’s tools today. Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford.”41

  The campaign came under immediate attack, however, from international agencies that actually work on hunger issues. “This is a technology that’s being developed for profit. It is not to any degree going to help with world poverty,” said Isabel McCrea of Action Aid, one of England’s largest overseas development agencies. “We are appalled by the cynical use of that argument by the industry to convince northern consumers that this is a technology that they should accept,” she added.42

  Biotech advocates claim that genetically engineered crops will be good for the environment by reducing the need to use environmentally toxic pesticides and fertilizers. So far, however, the opposite may be true. The vast majority of genetically modified crops currently on the market have been modified to either withstand herbicide (so that more can be sprayed) or produce their own insecticide. For Monsanto, of course, herbicide-tolerant crops create the perfect opportunity for marketing tie-ins. Not only do they get to charge farmers premium prices for their patented, genetically modified seeds, they also get to sell more weed-killing chemicals. In 1999, more than half of the U.S. soybean crop was “Roundup Ready”—genetically engineered to survive spraying with Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup. However, an independent analysis of 8,200 university research trials by Dr. Charles Benbrook found that contrary to Monsanto’s promised advantages, yields of herbicide-resistant GM soybeans were 5 to 10 percent lower than comparable conventional varieties. Benbrook, a former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences Council’s Board on Agriculture who now works as an independent consultant, reported that lost production due to this yield drag amounted to an estimated 80 to 100 million bushels in 1999. Benbrook also noted that nobody is testing the crops for increased pesticide residues. The EPA, moreover, has raised the allowable residue limits for Roundup on soybeans and cotton.43

  Some genetically modified crops do require fewer chemical pesticides—at least in the short term. The most common way to accomplish this is through the insertion of a gene that causes the plant to produce bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which has been used for decades by organic farmers as a natural pesticide. Like Pusztai’s snowdrop lectin, the Bt toxin has been tested and used for a long time with no reported harmful effects to humans, but it destroys the digestive tracts of certain very pesky insects. Biotech companies have successfully spliced the Bt gene into corn, cotton, canola, potatoes, and rice. Monsanto’s New Leaf potato, for example, is legally registered as a pesticide with the U.S. Environmental Projection Agency because it contains the Bt gene, making it toxic to Colorado potato beetles. The Novartis company’s Bt corn is similarly deadly to European and Southwestern corn borers, caterpillars that mine into cornstalks and cause up to $1 billion worth of crop losses annually.

  Enabling a plant to make its own insecticide may seem like a good idea, but it poses problems of its own. Organic farmers have applied Bt sparingly to their crops as a natural pesticide of last resort, but insect exposure was short-lived, and far fewer acres were sprayed than currently are planted with Bt crops, which are now planted on about 20 million acres in the United States alone. Moreover, Bt crops typically express the toxin in every cell of the plant. The widespread use of conventional pesticides has led to the emergence of more than 500 types of pesticide-resistant insect since 1945, and biologists who study bugs expect that the widespread introduction of Bt into the environment will create similar selection pressures that speed the emergence of Bt-resistant pests. If Bt-resistant pests emerge, organic agriculture will lose one of its most effective, time-honored tools, making it harder and more expensive to control insects without the use of synthetic chemical sprays.44

  Plant biologists also worry that pollen from genetically modified crops is spreading the genetically inserted traits to closely related weeds. Rice with the Bt gene, for example, might pollinate wild grasses that are close relatives. This could make the weeds pest-resistant and help them multiply. Similarly, the use of Roundup Ready crops might create herbicide-resistant “superweeds.” Even commercial crops can become weeds if they turn up in unwanted places, which is what happened to Charles Boser, a Canadian farmer who found to his dismay that some of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola had drifted from a neighbor’s farm into a field that he was trying to fallow. Boser, who was not trying to grow canola, tried unsuccessfully to kill the plants with two applications of herbicide before finally calling Monsanto in frustration. “Take your product and get it the hell off of my land is exactly what I told them,” Boser said. “I don’t want the stuff.” Monsanto dutifully complied, hiring workers to pick the plants out of Boser’s field by hand and compensating him for the additional costs of spraying that he had incurred.

  The issue of allergenicity is another health concern with GM crops. In 1995, the Pioneer Hybrid seed company added a Brazil nut gene to soybeans in hopes of achieving a more nutritional balance of proteins. Pioneer Hybrid abandoned the project after tests on the transgenic soybeans revealed that they could induce potentially fatal allergies in people sensitive to Brazil nuts. We can feel thankful that Brazil nuts contain a known allergen, so researchers knew what to look for. However, many of the other foreign genes now being inserted into foods are taken from viruses, bacteria, and insects, and they produce proteins that have never before been part of the human food supply. Are they toxic? The only way to find out would be to test them rigorously, first on animals and then on volunteer human subjects. By deciding that GM foods are “substantially equivalent” to normal foods, the FDA has left it up to industry to decide when and if such testing will ever be done, an approach that “would appear to favor industry over consumer protection,” according to the New England Journal of Medicine.45

  The risk of introducing unpredictable hazards into foods is inherent in the use of recombinant DNA technology. Genetic manipulations are frequently described as “gene splicing,” a term that obscures much of the uncertainty and imprecision of the process. It evokes the idea that gene manipulators are doing something akin to splicing a movie—an exacting process in which film is secured firmly on a cutting board, giving the editor complete control over which frames of the film are removed or added and in which order. By contrast, one common gene-splicing technique uses a patented “gene gun” that shoots little metal slivers that have been coated with DNA taken from one organism into the cell of another organism. If all goes well, the genes slip off t
he metal “transports” and are incorporated into the DNA in the cell of that organism, but no one can predict where the new gene is going to land within the genome of the targeted organism. It may attach to the site of any chromosome, or may attach in the middle of another gene and interfere with the normal functioning of the cell.

  “These positioning effects are not simple to predict,” Pusztai says. “Think of William Tell shooting an arrow at a target. Now put a blindfold on the man doing the shooting, and that’s the reality of the genetic engineer when he’s doing a gene insertion. He has no idea where the transgene will land in the recipient genome.” In his experiments with transgenic potatoes, Pusztai observed the imprecision of the technique firsthand. “We had two transgenic lines of potato produced from the same gene insertion and the same growing conditions,” he says. “We grew them together along with the parent plant. With our two lines of potato, which should have been substantially equivalent to each other, we found that one of the lines contained 20 percent less protein than the other. So the two lines were not substantially equivalent to each other. But we also found that these two lines were not substantially equivalent to their parent. This demonstrates that the unpredictability is inherent in the genetic manipulation process on a case by case basis—and also at the level of every single GM plant created.”