GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD

“Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.” - Alan Valentine

Just this week, our state Government publicised its decision to legislate that genetically modified (GM) food crops that until now were banned, could be cultivated freely in our State. This was in response to pressure from farmers who maintain that GM crops are more profitable and their deregulation will save their livelihoods. There has been quite an outcry from many groups in the community, first and foremost the environmentalists and following them the more conservative political groups. The first GM crop to be grown is canola, from whose seed much of the vegetable oil used widely in the food industry is extracted.

GM foods are derived from GM organisms, whose genes have been modified using modern biotechnology. This is a process that occurs in research labs and which creates organisms containing an improved genetic make-up, making GM crops more resistant to disease, higher yielding and more robust. This is a process akin to eugenics (the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavour only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis).

Without knowing the exact mechanism, farmers centuries ago made use of various breeding methods to produce farm animals, grain and plants which were bigger, healthier, tastier or easier to raise and grow. This natural process is not objectionable to anyone, but it achieves the same ends as GM processes in laboratories. Nowadays, scientists are identifying and modifying genes controlling specific characteristics in the laboratory, in a process that is much faster and more efficient than the centuries old method of animal husbandry and crop improvement through laborious cross-breeding and trial/error methods.

The question foremost in people’s minds is: Are GM foods safe for human consumption? The short answer to that is, yes. If you have ever eaten corn, corn meal, pop corn, corn flour, you have been eating a GM food. Only, the genetic modification has occurred over many generations by selective breeding. The wild American corn was small, stumpy, with few seeds and not as nutritious nor as tasty as modern corn. Many generations of farmers improved the quality of corn by selective breeding, which in effect genetically modified the corn.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have concluded that the use of modern biotechnology (including genetic modification) does not result in food which is inherently less safe than that produced by conventional techniques. In fact, all GM foods are subjected to rigorous safety assessments by the industry and regulatory agencies of the places of origin before they are put into the market. To date, none of them have been proved as unfit for human consumption.

There have been reports that GM foods available in the market may cause allergy and have health implications. In fact, all GM foods have been subject to stringent safety assessment before they are available in the market. While it is possible to develop foods containing toxins or allergens by both traditional breeding and genetic engineering, the advantage of genetic engineering is that the gene of interest can be well defined and introduced into organisms more precisely. Hence, the possibility of developing a food with toxins and allergens can be better recognised when compared with conventional breeding.

Increasing world population numbers, reduction in arable land, increasingly variable and unsuitable climactic conditions and scarcity of fresh water means that farming of the future will be much different from that which we were used to up till now. In some situations around the planet, the only solution to overcome these problems is to develop GM foods that are better adapted to these new, adverse conditions and they have a higher yield than traditional foods raised by conventional means. I have no problem consuming GM food, my stomach digestive juices will treat it the same way they do conventional food and my body will derive the same nourishment from it. However, I respect the objections that some people may have to the growing of GM food and its consumption. Their reasons for their objections have to be valid, nevertheless, and not some garbled rant about GM foods being bad because they are “unnatural”. We do not live in a “natural” environment and we have ceased to do so for several millennia.