I realize battle lines have been drawn and positions established, so this follow-up to my recent GMO post won’t change a lot of minds, but let’s give it one more shot anyway.

I’m coming from the point of view that genetically modified foods (e.g. 90 percent of corn, soy, beets and canola now grown in the U.S.) and medicines (including insulin and rabies shots) have been around since the mid-1990s, and I’ve seen no persuasive evidence that GMOs are harmful. Of course, they may yet prove to be, but after 20 years, you’d expect some obvious problems to occur if they were, since at least half of processed foods now sold in the U.S. include at least one GMO.

Actually, we’ve been genetically modifying foods for millennia by hybridization and cross-breeding – there are no honest-to-God “natural” foods to be had these days.

GMOs, meanwhile, are increasing yields while reducing the indiscriminate spraying of insectides, and offering (in the form of Golden Rice) a cheap and efficient way to combat Vitamin A deficiency in third-world countries.

LABELING

As far as labeling GMO foods, check out the Co-op—they’re already labeled! That is, non-GMO foods are labeled (along with “natural” and “organic” and all the other gimmicky labels to persuade us to spend more money than we need to feed ourselves). The problem with labeling a food as GMO is that is stigmatizes it, making it sound like the government is warning you about eating it. And GMO labeling doesn’t come free – one study estimates an additional $500 annual food budget for a family of four.

By the by, labeling’s probably good for Big Organic, though, such as Whole Foods Market (a $14 billion/year operation – coincidentally, the same as Monsanto), which is able to charge consumers more by selling the “purity” emotion.

META-STUDIES AND GMOs

A meta-study, as the name implies, is a study of studies. But instead of just averaging out the results of 10 or 100 other studies, a meta-study determines how much weight should be given to each individual study.

Taking a medical example, a study based on randomized controlled trials (especially those with double blind protocols) counts for more than case control studies (where, for instance, correlation may be seen, but causation not established). Case control studies trump animal and cell studies, and so on. The beauty of meta-studies is that they typically take into account hundreds of separate studies, which helps mitigate bias and errors.

So I trust the PLOS ONE (peer reviewed, open access journal) paper (November 2014) from the University of Göttingen, Sweden meta-study on the effects of GMO technology on soybean, maize and cotton. The paper concludes that genetically modified crops have

• reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%
• increased crop yields by 22%
• increased farmer profits by 68%

(Note that increased yields means that farmers use less acreage to grow the same volume of crops; I’ve seen where non-GMO crops require up to twice the cultivated area of equivaltent GMO crops.)

Adding an insectide (e.g. Bt) directly to the crop (meaning farmers don’t have to spray insectide) is probably good, both for the environment and ultimately for the consumer.

There’s an argument to be made that herbicide-resistant seeds (e.g. Roundup Ready soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, cotton, and sorghum) encourages farmers to indiscriminately spray – or drown, as anti-GMOers like to say – their crops with glyphosate (Roundup). But I don’t see where that’s happening. For one thing, Roundup is expensive. For another, it takes time and energy to apply. And of course, the more Roundup applied, the more likely you’ll get glyphosate-resistant weeds.

Here’s Iowa farmer Dave Walton’s take on the controversy.

HOW DANGEROUS IS GLYPHOSATE TO HUMANS?

Depends whom you ask. Last month, 17 reviewers for the World Health Organization unanimously placed glyphosate (the world’s most widely used herbicide) in its “probably carcinogenic” category. This puts WHO’s agency at odds with virtually all other regulatory agencies, including the EPA and the European Union Glyphosate Task Force. (Interestingly, and as a counter to those who think of science as monolithic, the reviewers interpreted a rat study as evidence for carcinogenicity, while the actual authors of the 2004 study claimed their results showed no evidence!)

The full monograph of the new WHO recommendation hasn’t been published yet, so expect a battle royal to ensue when it does. By the way, you should know that the same agency lists alcoholic beverages as “probably carcinogenic.” Just saying.

And FWIW, of 515 hospitalizations in California due to agricultural chemicals over a 13-year period, none was attributed to glyphosate.

BUT ARE GMOs SAFE?

Maybe GMOs increase yields while requiring less pesticides and herbicides, but are they safe? Here’s a list of 21 international science and medical organizations, societies and associations (including the AAAS, AMA, the European Commission and WHO) with brief statements attesting to the safety of GMOs. (Specific references here, scroll down.) This is really a meta-study of a meta-study, since each of these bodies, composed of thousands of participants, has done its own meta-study to arrive at their conclusions.

The “GMOs are as safe as conventional foods” conclusions are consensus views, of course. In any group of individuals (particularly those with science backgrounds, given that science promotes skepticism), there will be dissenters. For instance, GMWatch (an anti-GMO advocacy organization) notes that after the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement in 2012 claiming GM was safe (and opposing labeling), the statement was condemned by 21 scientists. Considering that AAAS has over 120,000 members, 21 doesn’t look like much of a condemnation.

For that matter, several commentators made much was made of the fact that the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) has a list of signatories to its “no scientific consensus on GMO safety” statement. This list of “over 300 independent researchers” (including doctors, judges, mathematicians and a host of just Ph.D.s – without listing their fields) is pretty slim pickings for what it’s claimed to be. You can find 300 professionals opposing just about anything! (Compare, for instance, with the 9,000 American Ph.D.s who’ve signed a petition gainsaying human-caused global warming.) (They’re wrong, of course, but that’s another rant.)

OK, I think I’m all GMO’d out, for now, anyway. Next week: The Case of the Missing Vulva.

###

Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.