cientific America article on GMO's and a Rebuttal

Date:   11/4/2013 11:31:11 PM ( 11 y ago)

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ARTICLE AGAINST LABELING GMOS

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-we-science-should-accept...

e same plague of us-or-them absolutism that has infested the small community of self-described “climate skeptics,” wrecking any chance they could have played a positive role in critiquing mainstream climatology, now threatens to overwhelm the much larger “safe food” movement, too. It’s hard to have an intelligent conversation about how, when and whether to use GMOs when a huckster like alternative medicine guru Joseph Mercola calls them “one of the largest threats that we have against the very sustainability of the human race.” Such scaremongering is especially painful to me because even though I do not think that government-approved GMO foods pose meaningful health risks to consumers, and even though I believe strategic genetic engineering can be an important tool to ease human suffering on our warming and resource-constrained planet, I share the concerns of many environmentalists about the homogenization and consolidation of the global food system—trends that are accelerated by the spread of industrially produced GMOs.

There’s still plenty of debate focused on whether the monocultures and dependencies fostered by first-generation GMO products like Monsanto’s pest-resistant corn and cotton and Roundup Ready soybeans nullify their purported benefits of higher yields and reduced insecticide use. But what is beyond dispute is that those products were introduced not because they were the best way to employ genetic engineering to address critical global food issues, but because they were thought to be the fastest, most reliable route to profits for Monsanto and other producers.

Their adoption of a profits-first strategy was a fateful decision because the seemingly endless furor over Roundup Ready and other first-generation GMOs, fomented by green campaigners and Monsanto’s own missteps, have turned world public opinion decisively against bioengineered foods. Even in the U.S., whose citizens are more open-minded about GMOs than Europeans, the signs are ominous. We are all reaping what Monsanto has sown, and it is a bitter harvest for those of us who think that humanitarian-driven GMO projects such as drought-tolerant maize and vitamin-fortified cassava, developed by nonprofits and thoroughly tested by local researchers, should already be in wide use in countries that want them. Whereas GMOs should never be seen as a panacea, they can do a world of good as important tools within a broader strategy to combat starvation, disease and environmental degradation in places like sub-Saharan Africa.



REBUTTAL ON SCIENTIFIC AMERICAL ARTICLE AGAINT LABELING GMOS

Very intelligent

http://permaculturenews.org/2013/10/14/scientific-american-disinformation-gmos/

BEGINNING OF ARTICLE

America’s most trusted science magazine is spreading disinformation on behalf of a failing and desperate industry, in utter disregard of scientific integrity and the overwhelming evidence of hazards to health and the environment.

by Dr Mae Wan Ho, Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji and Prof Peter Saunders.



Deceptively authoritative pronouncements not backed up by evidence, scientific or otherwise

A recent editorial in Scientific American entitled “Labels for GMO Foods are a Bad idea” caught most people by surprise. In beguilingly authoritarian tone and without providing references for any of its confident-sounding assertions, it tells us that labelling GM Foods [1] “would only intensify the misconception that so-called Frankenfoods endanger people’s health.” If anything, the editorial itself is guilty of spreading disinformation regarding GMOs, which is very disappointing for a normally trustworthy and serious science magazine. We feel obliged to expose some of the major misconceptions in the editorial.


The piece begins with the tired old pronouncement used by industry to reassure the public since the early 1990s that humans have been “tinkering” with crop genomes since the beginning of time through the process of conventional breeding, implying that genetic modification is no different. In reality, there is no longer any doubt that genetic modification is distinct from conventional breeding and introduces new risks, as fully acknowledged in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety for regulating GMOs under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity [2], which was adopted by the international community on 29 January 2000 and entered into force on 11 September 2003.


9:30 pm
November 4 2013


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