Thinking Broadly About the Risk of GMO’s

. Tales From The Rice Bowl – A Story Of Essential Consumption . Photograph by 3amfromkyoto at Flickr. 

The issues surrounding food production in Australia are so overwhelmingly large and urgent that it’s hard to pause for a moment and think carefully, weighing up the risks and rewards of actions that overlap between complex fields of study and competing interests. There are lists now of which Australian cities are likely to run out of water first — Melbourne in perhaps 63 weeks — and irrigation has already been halted for food production in the Murray Darling region, and if we widen our perspective to include the urgent concerns of our near-Asian neighbours we’re faced with the global threats of bird flu that might mutate into strains that cross from infected to healthy humans, creating a pandemic, and the world’s population rising fast, with no commensurate increase in our ability to be able to feed everyone. So, is it irresponsible not to genetically retool our foodstuffs to make them more environmentally flexible, gird them to prevent disease, and boost their nutritional value to address world hunger?

When those broad ethical concerns are translated into genetically modified foodstuffs, measuring their safety becomes the concern of the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) division of the Federal Government. It’s a two part process: first the Office of Gene Technology Regulator, reviews the organisms according to the guidelines in the Gene Technology Act 2000 ” in order to protect the health and safety of Australians and the Australian environment by identifying risks posed by or as a result of gene technology, and to manage those risks by regulating certain dealings with genetically modified organisms.”

If those genetically modified organisms are to become food for human consumption, FSANZ carries out further reviews, “after the OGTR has decided they are safe in the form of crops to be released into the environment, Food Standards Australia New Zealand does its own checks to see whether they are safe for humans to eat. We have a special Food Standard Standard 1.5.2. – foods produced using gene technology – that regulates the sale of GM foods in Australia and New Zealand. The standard has two provisions – a mandatory pre-market safety assessment requirement and a mandatory labelling requirement.”

The risks seem almost unmeasurably complex. If we start to use food crops to produce medicine how do we regulate the doses? What happens if we unknowingly mix different kinds of medicinal foodstuffs, or mix medicinal foodstuffs with traditional medicines? How do we measure the safety of a processed ready-to-eat meal made with gm drought resistant grains, transgenic frost resistant tomatoes, milk designed to prevent birth defects, and chicken genetically modified to resist bird flu? Are we at risk from genetically modified foodstuffs fed to the animals we eat? What happens if transgenic creatures accidentally mate and it exposes some trait we hadn’t bargained on and don’t want?

“This is the key issue for the second generation GMOs” Jack Heinemann told me by e-mail. “The first generation was plants with altered agronomic qualities, intended to be in other respects substantially equivalent to conventional. Second generation are designed to be significantly different either because they produce pharmaceuticals or other industrial chemicals or have purposely altered nutritional qualities.”

Jack Heinemann is a professor of molecular biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and director of its Center for Integrated Research in Biosafety. He carries out a broad and complex assessment of the risks of genetically modified and engineered organisms with a particular focus on horizontal gene transfer, where genetic material is passed between organisms by methods other than direct breeding. The Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety is independent of commercial interests in GMO products, transdisciplinary and involved with international collaborative projects. “INBI brings together scientists skilled in biotechnology research and safety assessment and social scientists with experience in the evaluation of the ethical, social, cultural and political impacts of novel technologies. This team is committed to working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries and to modelling new forms of integrated research.”

I asked Jack if there’s a short description of how this process works.“No, except to say that it is hard and that is why so few people do it” he replied. “It requires natural scientists like myself to take a genuine interest in law, regulation, gender and culture (at the research level), and for social scientists to acquire a reasonable standard of knowledge about particular aspects of the natural sciences. Not many folks are prepared to do this in such depth, and among them only a handful are interested in this particular topic. More importantly, it is a combination of skills that we don’t find easy to sell to the funding agencies, possibly because they don’t have people who understand the value of the skills mixture or how difficult it is to develop this mixture and maintain it.”

In June the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a background study paper he’s written called A Typology of the Effects of (Trans)Gene Flow on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Genetic Resources.

 

“The consequences of transgene flow are difficult to generalize. This is because of the variety of transgenes being developed, plants being made transgenic, environments in which GM plants are being introduced, legal systems operating worldwide, and stakeholder motivations,” he writes. “The only generalization that is possible is that transgene flow offers no intended benefits. Gene flow may not always be harmful, but it is highly unlikely to offer a fortuitous or designed advantage for those in the biotechnology industry, farmers that adopt GM crops, farmers that choose not to, those who value the present biodiversity of plants and wildlife, or those who monitor GM presence for safety or regulatory reasons. Gene flow potentially undermines the revenue of developers when those who do not buy transgenic seed nevertheless benefit from its agronomic properties. Simultaneously the industry may have increased costs from protecting their intellectual property, or exposure to additional liabilities. Farmers who do or do not adopt GM crops gain nothing from the flow of transgenes to wild relatives or to neighbors’ farms. They may even incur liabilities if transgenes do flow. Non-GM farmers also risk losing differentiated market certifications.”

By the end of last year FSANZ calculated that it had approved “31 different GM foods, including modifications of corn, cottonseed (the oil of which is edible), canola, soy, sugar beet and potato.” The complexity of dealing with the practical realities of the risks of genetically modified foodstuffs when they’re backed and introduced by a global agribusiness company is highlighted in application by Monsanto to bring into Australia the LYO38 strain of corn genetically modified to carry increased levels of the amino acid lysine, that’s intented to be imported in a processed form.

“There is no indication yet whether farmers will seek this corn for feed, so at present the corn’s main consumer will be human beings,” Jack said. “Presently it will be grown in the United States where it will co-mingle in silos with food corn, and cross pollinate corn intended for human food. Most will be harvested for use as animal feed (at least initially), with the rest being milled for processed food with the corn intended for humans. In time, it might be used in food aid (ostensibly to supplement the diets of Africans, for example), or it may be grown commonly because there are no regulatory barriers to its presence in the human corn supply.”

The Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety is concerned about the risks that might come from this corn being cooked. “LY038 has high concentrations of compounds that are known to produce food hazards when heated with the sugars found in corn. The modification results in highly elevated concentrations of lysine (total), free lysine (not in protein), saccharopine, α-aminoadipic acid, cadaverine and pipecolic acid, all of which may be converted into advanced glycoxidation endproducts (AGEs) during cooking and processing. AGEs are implicated in the development of complications from a variety of dietary-related diseases including diabetes and Alzheimer’s, as well as cancer, and the normal effects of aging. AGE content in food increases with cooking and food processing temperatures and pressures.” (The full submission can be found here.) (FSANZ addresses the Centre’s concerns about this corn on its website.)

Jack Heinemann is one of the sources Denise Caruso drew upon for her appeal to broaden the assessment of risk from genetically modified organisms in her book INTERVENTION: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. She suggests bringing more voices into the debate, from other branches of science, arts and humanities and the general public to augment the discussions between scientists directly involved in gene research and government agencies and business. “More than a decade ago, risk scholars figured out that the problems with assessing the risks of scientific interventions wasn’t so much a failure of traditional analysis per se, but a failure to involve other people in the process, people who inevitably have important knowledge and perspectives to contribute. With so much at stake, this failure to enlarge the conversation about risk is no longer tenable,” she writes. “The mantra in the U.S. has always been ‘let the market decide,’ but if the market is obfuscating or ignoring the risks of the technologies it invents and sells, how do we intervene to change course? The most effective way is through better regulation and better advice-giving to lawmakers. First, we must ask our governments to adopt these more inclusive assessment methods. And until they do, we can learn to use them ourselves, to powerful effect. Contrary to popular belief, people have consistently proven themselves smarter and more capable of understanding the complexities of risk than decision makers give us credit for. Now we have a way to prove it.”

 

 

 

LIBRARY: Becasse. Inspirations and Flavours by Justin North

neat. Photograph taken at Becasse by Xiaohan Shen at Flickr.

A few days ago, for the first time in our history as a species, the human population of the planet Earth became predominantly urban, not rural. Some bold researchers pinned down this epochal moment of passage to May 23, 2007. The date was of course a polite statistical fiction, based on a United Nations estimate of how fast people worldwide are shaking off the dust of the countryside and moving into town. In any case, nobody stood up to ask the important question: What does it mean to become a city-dwelling species?

Richard Conniff. ‘The Greening of the Urban Animal’. 11.6.2007 New York Times. ‘Select’

Becasse is the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Good Food Guide” Restaurant of the Year for 2007. Justin North has been mentioned as a ‘chef to watch’ by Food & Wine magazine, published in New York. His wife Georgia, the restaurant’s manager, has won awards as a sommelier and the quality of the service at Becasse has been praised. The entire enterprise sits at the pinnacle of a rarefied European artform.

So what does it mean when he says “it’s all about the produce”? The book Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours opens with a question: “Where are the traditional craftsmen, the skilled and passionate individuals? They are vanishing in a world of vast, overly simplified foods.” This isn’t a sentimental conceit, a classical artist revering an ancient instrument freakishly preserved beyond its own time. Or the way that the couture branch of fashion makes theatre of painstaking old-fashioned handcrafts applied to clothing made for an individual customer in an industry whose manufacturing process is otherwise completely automated to produce goods for an anonymous everycustomer. What Justin North does is align farming and food production with the precision and refinement of his own skills as a chef. He’s brought a contemporary, complex sophistication that’s generally thought of as something urban to the consideration of the practices of farming and food production. He introduces us to people who are at the pinnacle of their own branches of food production: many of them have large-scale businesses that are successful in export as well as local markets. He shows that that technology, through the development of new tools is no enemy to craftsmanship and tradition. For instance, Tim Terry trains dogs to search for truffles on his farm in Tasmania, but he’s working with a researcher in chemosensory science, Professor Bryn Hibbert, at the University of New South Wales, to develop mechanised detection systems, an “electronic nose.”

When Justin North opened Becasse in 2001 (in its original location in Surry Hills, it moved to Sydney’s CBD in 2005) he deepened his knowledge of the produce he was purchasing by visiting the farmers and producers. Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours is organised around the building blocks of his cuisine: lamb, beef, game birds, pork, seafood, and European delicacies: truffles, cheeses. He’s chosen a farmer or producer to embody each of these categories, and each section leads in with a description of their methods. He also sketches how these foods have become culturally important to us through history. He has a poet’s sharp eye for selecting a symbol that unlocks a whole world. These introductory texts could be excerpted as a book that stands on its own as an overview of food production in Australia as well as primer on the research and inventions that are maintaining the quality of fine foods, in challenging environmental conditions, as thriving businesses, in the twenty first century.