Welcome to the freshly constructed LoCO Coliseum! I’m your announcer Andrew Goff! Today, your Lost Coast Outpost launches a new feature … LoCO Infight! in which office disputes concerning issues that affect our community are waged in front of the bloodthirsty Humboldt multitude. Are you ready to rumble?

Let’s do this! The topic for our first online slobberknocker: Should Humboldt County ban the production of genetically modified organisms? Discussion surrounding this particular query arose due to the fact that local activists with the group GMO Free Humboldt are currently pounding the pavement for signatures with the hope of getting an initiative placed on this year’s ballot that would prohibit the cultivation and production of GMOs in Humboldt County. 

Your inaugural LoCO Infight combatants will be Ryan Burns, arguing against such a ban in the piece below, and Hank Sims, arguing for local GMO production prohibition in this opposing diatribe. It should be noted that your gladiators were not granted knowledge of the other’s attack strategy prior to clicking “Publish.” We want a fair fight.

Now, please enjoy the spectacle of co-workers bludgeoning each other on the blogosphere field of battle. This, is LoCO Infight. -AG

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GMOs feel scary. Hell, they even sound scary. A “genetically modified organism” sounds like something that might latch onto your face and plant its offspring in your chest cavity.

People tend to view GMOs as unstable “Frankenfoods” developed in Dr. Moreau-style laboratories by nefarious mega-corporations like Monsanto — hardly a good fit for us nature-loving, farmers’ market-shopping, corporation-wary denizens of the County Humboldt. Saying “no” to GMO cultivation feels like the safe, ecologically responsible choice.

But let’s examine those notions a bit closer. Truth is, humans have been manipulating our food’s genetics for about 10,000 years. Today’s juicy, plump-kernelled corn was deliberately and painstakingly developed from a straggly, all-but-inedible grass. Before we started messing with bananas they were kinda gross. And if you were to chew a handful of wild almonds, the hydrogen cyanide they release might kill you. Humans deliberately altered these plants from their “natural” forms through selective breeding, a clumsy way of tinkering with DNA.

During the last 30 years we’ve developed more sophisticated and precise methods of DNA tinkering. Now we can cut and splice specific strands of DNA to create corn that produces its own pest-repelling bacteria, tomatoes that create antifreeze proteins and grains that carry nutritious vitamins and minerals.

To many, this type of manipulation feels “unnatural” and a lot riskier than the artificial selection we’ve been practicing for thousands of years. Studies have not borne this out, but GMOs evoke such fervent distrust that facts and evidence tend to fall by the wayside. Here’s how Harvard instructor David Ropeik puts it:

“The argument about GMOs isn’t really about the facts, any more than the argument about whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines cause autism. The facts on all three are pretty clear. The world’s leading science panels agree that the evidence is overwhelming that GMOs pose no known risk to humans, that climate change caused by human activity is real, and that vaccines don’t cause autism.”

So why does the fear persist? GMOs trigger our irrational animal instincts for several reasons, Ropeik argues. For one thing, our risk-averse brains draw conclusions based on associations. With GMOs those might include industrialized monocultures, insufficient government oversight and the hijinks of mega-corporations such as Monsanto — all cause for legitimate concern.

Another fear factor: We’re especially wary of threats we can’t detect with our senses. And without a powerful microscope, DNA splicing is harder to perceive than a scorpion in a pitch-black cave.

Plus, humans have an innate tendency toward “loss aversion,” meaning our brains give “more emotional significance to loss than to equivalent gain,” Ropeik says.

This last one is tough to admit: “Although we may believe we’re making up our own minds about various issues, in fact we tend to choose views that align with those of our friends.” (In Humboldt County, most of our friends are GMO-averse.) From an evolutionary standpoint, such tribe loyalty is a smart survival mechanism. But it’s not so useful when it comes to scientific inquiry.

Just for fun, let’s try to clear away some of that fear pollution and take an analytical look at what’s actually known about GMOs, along with the ordinance proposed by the Committee for a GMO-free Humboldt, which can be read in full here.

What we find is that the ordinance gives voice to numerous unfounded fears and debunked claims.

Let’s take a look at the major ones:

Claim: The ordinance is necessary to protect “the health, safety and welfare of our people.”

While 48 percent of Americans believe GMOs present serious health hazards, scientific researchers have a much higher degree of confidence. “Within the scientific community, the debate over the safety of GM foods is over,” research biologist Michael White writes in Pacific Standard.

He elaborates:

“The overwhelming conclusion, in the words of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is that ‘consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.’ Major scientific and governmental organizations agree. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences found that ‘no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population,’ and a report issued by the European Commission made the same claim. The World Health Organization has concluded that GM foods ‘are not likely, nor have been shown, to present risks for human health.’”

Hard-core conspiracy theorists will allege that these organizations have sold out to the likes of Monsanto, but they offer precious little in the way of supporting evidence.

Claim: GMOs “have been introduced into the marketplace before the potential risks and long-term health and environmental effects of these organisms and products have been adequately studied.”

This is one of GMO opponents’ most common assertions. It’s also perhaps the most thoroughly discredited. GMOs currently in use have been extensively studied and declared safe not only by the organizations listed above but also by the American Medical Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, along with its counterparts in several other countries.

“Every major international science body in the world has reviewed multiple independent studies — in some cases numbering in the hundreds — in coming to the consensus conclusion that GMO crops are as safe or safer than conventional or organic foods,” Jon Entine reports in an October Forbes article.

Last year, a team of scientists reviewed a whopping 1,783 studies covering 10 years of research into the safety of genetically engineered crops and found no significant hazards directly connected with GMOs.

Here’s a snazzy infographic (produced by the nonprofit Genetic Literacy Project) that illustrates the global scientific consensus.

So it would seem that there are three possibilities here:

a) the global scientific community is inept
b) the global scientific community is complicit in the largest and most sinister fraud ever perpetrated on humankind

or

c) GM foods are as safe as non-GM foods.

Claim: GMOs “have the potential to imperil local ecosystems, to threaten traditional ways of life in our rural county, and to undermine critical industries including forestry, fisheries, and tourism.”

The proposed ordinance doesn’t explain how this doomsday scenario might play out, nor does it provide any examples of where it has happened elsewhere.

In fact, Humboldt County voters already rejected an anti-GMO cultivation measure back in 2004. Humboldt State University President Rollin Richmond at the time called the measure “fundamentally anti-science” and “anti-intellectual.”

Dennis Leonardi, a third-generation Ferndale dairy farmer, began feeding genetically modified corn to his livestock in 1998. “It meant using less toxic chemicals [to] control what we needed to control,” he told the North Coast Journal in 2004. “If you’re talking about being a good steward, that was it.”

Here we are 10 years later with a similar proposal. If GMOs threaten to undermine our very way of life here on the North Coast, there’s been scant evidence of it in the decade since the last ban measure failed.

Claim: GMO cultivation “has had a serious negative impact on the natural environment” in part because herbicide-resistant crops have “promoted indiscriminate herbicide use.”

Environmental activist and author Mark Lynas takes credit for helping to start the anti-GMO movement in the mid 1990s. In a compelling speech delivered last year, Lynas explained why he now deeply regrets those activities. In short, he said, “I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.”

Regarding claims like the one above, Lynas said:

“… perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better, either for people or the environment. The idea that it is healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature. We also know from many studies that organic is much less productive, with up to 40-50 percent lower yields in terms of land area.”

More productive yields mean lower greenhouse gases and more soil carbon sequestration. Plus, GMOs can actually reduce the amount of chemicals we spray on our food. One of the most widespread uses of genetic modification is developing crops that produce a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt), which acts as a biological pesticide.

“Between 1996 and 2011, Bt corn reduced insecticide use in corn production by 45 percent worldwide (110 million pounds, or roughly the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools),” journalist Amy Maxmen reported in July for PBS’s esteemed Nova program.

Public opinion of GMOs here in the U.S. comes down to a choice about how we want our food produced. But in the Third World, unfounded fears of GMOs can have a life-or-death impact. During a 2002 famine in Zambia, for example, thousands of people starved to death after European anti-GMO activists convinced the Zambian president to refuse food aid that contained genetically modified corn.

And then there’s Golden Rice, a genetically modified grain that carries a gene that provides beta carotene, which supplies vitamin A. This GM crop has the potential to prevent blindness and death in millions of Third World children and pregnant women suffering from malnutrition.

Before he died in 2009, the American biologist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, a devoted humanitarian who’s been called “the father of the Green Revolution,” warned against perpetuating anti-GMO myths. In the prologue to the 2004 book The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution, Borlaug wrote:

“If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

One more:

Claim: “The risk of contamination can erode public confidence in organic products, significantly undermining the job-creating, economy-boosting growth of the organic market.”

“Contamination” here refers to pollen drift. Anti-GMO activists often invoke tales of Monsanto lawyers suing organic farmers who, through no fault of their own, caught patented GM seeds on the wind. I’ve been unable to find a documented case in which an organic farmer was put out of business by such a suit, but regardless, the point is moot in California since our own U.S. Congressman Jared Huffman (then a member of the state Assembly) authored a 2008 law that indemnifies farmers who did not purposefully acquire patented seeds.

So this claim comes down to consumer confidence and market value. The spokesman for the Committee for a GMO Free Humboldt, Bill Schaser, admitted to the Times-Standard in October that, “The main point that I have is economic advantage.” Schaser argues that if we outlaw GMO production countywide, our produce may be more valuable monetarily.

That may well be true, given the widespread paranoia and misinformation surrounding GMOs. But that doesn’t make it right. We should not base public policy — nor should we seek to capitalize financially —  on unfounded, unscientific fears.

While an anti-GMO stance reflexively feels right for us environmentalists, in effect it boils down to an Amish-like rejection of modern technology — including advances that are potentially greener and more capable of feeding our crowded planet than traditional farming methods.

Like other technologies, GMOs have the potential for risk and abuse, which is why continued testing and government oversight is important. But to categorically ban their cultivation would be to embrace instincts over intellect, emotions over evidence, and groupthink over science.

YOU’VE HEARD BURNS, NOW HEAR HANK.