Claims and Facts
The marketing of genetic engineering inspires visions of perfect health, long
life, and miracle foods. The reality is that these claims are often completely
unsubstantiated and sometimes simply wrong.
Claim: Genetic engineering is necessary
to feed the world.
Fact: Hunger in the world is caused by
poverty, by the simple inability to buy food, not by lack of supply.
Claim: Genetic engineering will help
developing countries.
Fact: Biotech companies patent their seeds.
To protect their investment, the farmers that use the seed sign a contract which
prohibits saving, reselling, or exchanging seed. The family farms of the poorer
nations depend on saved seed for survival. Biotech companies also patent other
people's seeds, like basmati rice, neem, and quinoa, taking advantage of
indigenous knowledge and centuries of selective breeding by small farmers
without giving anything in return. The same companies, backed by the U.S.
government, proposed to protect their seed patents through the terminator
technology. A terminator seed will grow, but the seeds it produces are sterile.
Any nation that buys such seeds will swiftly lose any vestige of agricultural
self-sufficiency. Furthermore, genetically engineered seeds are designed for
agribusiness farming, not for the capabilities of the small family farms of the
developing nations. How are they to buy and distribute the required chemical
inputs?
Claim: Genetic engineering will reduce
the use of herbicides.
Fact: Genetic engineering develops crops
with resistance to specific herbicides. For example, Roundup Ready(tm) crops
survive spraying with RoundUp(tm). On the one hand, this allows the farmer to
use more herbicide. On the other hand, this leads to herbicide-resistant weeds.
Claim: Genetic engineering will reduce
the use of pesticides.
Fact: This claim is based on the sowing of
crops genetically engineered to produce their own pesticides. Such crops produce
the pesticide continuously in every cell. Some of these crops (the Bt potato,
for example) are actually classified as pesticides by the EPA. The net outcome
of sowing pesticide-producing crops is an vast increase in pesticides.
Claim: Genetic engineering is
environmentally friendly.
Fact: The increased quantities of herbicides
and pesticides noted above is one strike against this claim. Pollen from
genetically engineered crops can be transferred to cultivated and wild relatives
over a mile away. This threatens the future of organic crops. It can pass
herbicide resistance genes from GE crops to weedy relatives, necessitating the
development of more herbicides. Also, the huge areas of genetically identical
crops will influence the evolution of local pests and wildlife, and through the
food chain, the whole ecology.
Claim: Genetically engineered foods are
just like natural foods.
Fact: There is no natural mechanism for
getting insect DNA into potatoes or flounder DNA into tomatoes. Genetically
engineered foods are engineered to be different from natural foods. Why else all
the patents? This claim is empty sales talk.
Claim: Genetic engineering is simply an
extension of traditional crossbreeding.
Fact: Crossbreeding cannot transfer genes
across species barriers. Genetic engineering transfers genes between species
that could never be crossbred. Also, crossbreeding lets nature manage the
delicate activity of combining the DNA of the parents to form the DNA of the
child. Genetic engineering shoots the new gene into the host organism without
reference to any holistic principle at all.
Claim: Genetic engineering is safe.
Fact: Safety comes from accumulated
experience. In the case of genetic engineering, there has not been the time or
the public debate essential for accumulating sufficient experience to justify
any broad claim to safety.
There is a vast domain of ignorance at the root of the technology:
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