Why are consumer groups 'breeding distrust' of biotech foods?

by Ronald Bailey
The Consumer Federation of America has signed on to unfounded
scare stories about biotech crops.

from - http://reason.com/rb/rb011701.html

Excerpt -

"[d]ecisions regarding safety should be
based on the nature of the product, rather than on the method by which it was
modified." The report further noted that "over 30 million hectares of transgenic crops
have been grown and no human health problems associated specifically with the
ingestion of transgenic crops or their products have been identified."

If It Ain’t Broke, Don't Fix It
Why are consumer groups "breeding distrust" of biotech foods?

By Ronald Bailey, Reason Science Correspondent

This week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will release its revised regulations
for foods produced using biotechnology. The new regulations are expected to be a
bit more onerous but not nearly enough to satisfy some special interests in
Washington. One such special interest group, the Consumer Federation of America,
released a new 258-page report, Breeding Distrust: An Assessment and
Recommendations for Improving the Regulation of Plant Derived Genetically
Modified Foods, at a press conference at the National Press Club last week. The
CFA is a Washington, D.C. lobbying group under whose umbrella dwells some 250
organizations (including Consumers Union and the American Association of Retired
Persons), all of which claim an interest in protecting consumers. At the press
conference were CFA co-director Mark Silbergeld, Carol Tucker Foreman, director
of the CFA’s Food Policy Institute, and University of Texas Law professor Thomas
McGarity, co-author of the report.

So what is the CFA demanding that U.S. regulatory agencies do to control and to
monitor the menace of genetically enhanced crop plants? "These products need to be
subjected to a mandatory pre-market approval process," asserted Foreman. The CFA
reports recommends that U.S. biotech regulations be modeled on those developed by
the European Union and Brazil--not generally considered hot-beds for technological
innovation and economic growth. "Both the EU and Brazil have adopted
process-oriented regulatory programs aimed at all GM [genetically modified]
organisms," notes the report. "The laws in the EU and Brazil broadly encompass all
GM foods because they include all GM organisms within their scope."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration specifically rejected the EU and Brazilian
models in 1992 and declared that foods should not be regulated on the basis of the
process by which they were created. "The regulatory status of a food, irrespective of
the method by which it is developed, is dependent upon objective characteristics of
the food and the intended use of the food," concluded the FDA. In other words, the
FDA made the sensible call that determining whether a food is safe or not depends on
what’s in it, not how it’s made. The FDA also noted that the precision of
biotechnology made it much easier in general for scientists to tell what new
substances are in a food than conventional breeding does. The agency correctly
stated that "most, if not all, cultivated food crops have been genetically modified."

In 1992, the FDA further declared that "in most cases, the substances expected to
become components of food as a result of genetic modification of a plant will be the
same as or substantially similar to substances commonly found in food, such as
proteins, fats, oils and carbohydrates." Decoding the regulation-speak, these
substances are regarded as "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, which means
the agency won’t regulate them any more stringently than it does conventionally
produced foods. However, greater regulatory oversight would apply if genetic
modification produced "a protein that differs significantly in structure and function, or
to modify a carbohydrate, or fat or oil, such that it differs significantly in composition
from such substances currently found in the food." In other words, if a genetically
modified food is "substantially equivalent" to other foods already being eaten by
consumers, then it doesn’t merit any more regulatory scrutiny that conventionally
produced foods.

"So long has you don’t insert a gene for a known allergen or snake venom, then it’s
probably substantially equivalent," is the way Thomas McGarity characterized the
FDA’s position at the CFA press conference. But despite McGarity’s pointed
rhetoric, the FDA is taking exactly the right position scientifically: If a non-allergenic
corn protein shows up in a tomato, so what? People have been eating corn and
tomatoes for centuries.

And so far the U.S. regulatory system has worked well. Every scientific body that has
ever evaluated genetically modified foods has found them safe. The latest of these is
the American Medical Association, which represents nearly 300,000 doctors. In
December, the AMA adopted a report from its science and technology committee
that concluded that genetically modified foods are safe for people to eat and don’t
harm the natural environment. Indeed, as a medical officer with the FDA who was an
observer at the AMA meeting noted, there is no known case in which a genetically
altered food crop that has been approved for sale has caused harm to any person.

Scientific bodies consistently reject proposals like the CFA’s that call for singling out
genetically enhanced crops for special regulatory oversight. In July, seven national
scientific academies, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal
Society of London, issued a consensus report called Transgenic Plants and World
Agriculture. The document concluded that "[d]ecisions regarding safety should be
based on the nature of the product, rather than on the method by which it was
modified." The report further noted that "over 30 million hectares of transgenic crops
have been grown and no human health problems associated specifically with the
ingestion of transgenic crops or their products have been identified."

The CFA also demands that the FDA "require manufacturers and importers of all
foods containing more than a prescribed percentage of material from GM plants to
place appropriate labels on or near such foods. The CFA claims that this will increase
consumer choice. This is disingenuous. The CFA must clearly know that anti-biotech
activists are counting on consumers to mistake any labels on biotech foods as
warning labels which would induce them to avoid those foods. Talk about "breeding
distrust."

The FDA has repeatedly ruled that special labeling for genetically engineered foods as
a class is not required solely because of the demands of some consumers or because
of the process used to develop these foods. Why? Because the food labels required
by the FDA typically warn consumers of risks based on scientific analyses or provide
certain specified nutritional information, neither of which applies to biotech foods.
The chair of the AMA’s science and technology committee, Dr. Alvin Head, supports
the FDA’s position on labeling, noting that as of December 2000, "There is no
scientific justification for special labeling of genetically modified foods." Besides, if
some consumers, misled by anti-biotech activist campaigns, really want to avoid
genetically modified foods, they can buy organic foods certified by Department of
Agriculture regulations issued this past December. Why should the rest of us pay the
costs of accommodating their scientifically baseless fears by segregating biotech from
conventional foods?

Curiously, McGarity, who admitted during the question and answer period that eating
genetically modified foods "hasn’t adversely affected me as far as I know," pleaded
that "we are only urging that the U.S. join the rest of the world in adopting a more
precautionary approach." This is a near-open admission that McGarity and the CFA
cannot cite any credible scientific evidence that biotech crops have caused harm to
human health or the environment. For bioluddites, the great beauty of invoking a
"precautionary approach" is that even in the absence of scientific evidence, regulation
can be based on theoretical harms dreamed up by the most risk averse elements of
society. In other words, regulate first, ask questions later.

Sadly, the CFA report was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation. By financing
the CFA’s campaign to regulate biotech, the Rockefeller Foundation is undercutting
its support of biotech research to help the poor in the developing world. Rockefeller
money has, for instance, helped the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology produce
rice enriched with provitamin A, or so-called "golden rice." (See "Like Gold on
Rice.") This biotech grain could help alleviate vitamin A deficiency in some 2 billion
people around the globe. If the CFA’s regulatory proposals were adopted, such
worthy projects would certainly take longer to reach those in need without any
appreciable increase in safety or environmental protection.

The CFA co-director Silbergeld asserted at the close of the press conference that the
report "is a landmark that deserves everybody’s careful attention." In fact, Breeding
DIstrust really marks the nadir of a once proud consumer protection movement that
now cares more about the regulatory niceties of administrative law than it does about
scientific evidence and real consumer interests.

Ronald Bailey (rbailey@reason.com) is Reason Magazine's science correspondent.