Glyphosate is threat to food supply, not GMOs

By Tom Maertens
Vox Verax co-editor

Tom Maertens held several science and technology positions in the U.S. government, including minister-counselor for Environment, Science, and Technology at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where he had oversight responsibility for a $300-million-per-year science program with the Russian government.

A Pew survey two years ago found that 35 percent of Americans believe that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a greater risk than non-GMO foods, and 40 percent of those believe the risk is much greater.

Genetically modified foods contain at least one ingredient from a plant with an altered genetic composition. Genetic modification, also known as genetic engineering, introduces new, desirable characteristics to plants, such as better taste, earlier maturation and greater resistance to pests, drought or cold.

The University of Minnesota, for example, has been breeding cold-hardy, disease resistant plants for 125 years. It has released over 400 varieties of apples, grapes, trees, flowers and grasses, including the very popular Honeycrisp apple.

Genetic engineering has nonetheless alarmed some people who fear the unknown consequences of fooling with nature. There is also resistance from organic farmers who may not be able to compete with improved strains of food crops.

As Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) has written, “Hundreds of studies, every major health and scientific organization, and more than a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to their safety (unsurprisingly, he wrote, since there is no such thing as a genetically UNmodified crop.)” More than 90 percent of the soybeans, corn, cotton and canola grown in the United States come from genetically engineered seeds.

Virtually all scientists believe GMOs are safe — a view endorsed by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Health Organization.

Yet, as the ecology writer Stewart Brand has written, traditional ecology groups “with their customary indifference to starvation, have prosecuted a fanatical crusade to keep transgenic crops” from people.

I have seen that first hand. As the head of the science and technology section at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, I attended a European conference on GMOs in The Hague some years ago.

I was completely unprepared for the vehemence of the opposition to GMOs by European scientific delegations. They strongly opposed giving GMO foods to Third World countries with high rates of malnutrition and starvation because of some hypothetical risk that has never been demonstrated.

As The New York Times noted (April 2018), “Farmers and agricultural scientists have been genetically engineering the foods we eat for centuries through breeding programs that result in large and largely uncontrolled exchanges of genetic material. What many consumers may not realize: for many decades, in addition to traditional crossbreeding, agricultural scientists have used radiation and chemicals to induce gene mutations in edible crops in attempts to achieve desired characteristics.”

The results of genetic engineering can be seen in crops such as maize (corn), which was developed over nine or ten thousand years, mostly in Mexico, from teosinte, a native grass.

Native Americans domesticated nine of the most important food crops in the world, including corn, which now provides about 21 percent of human nutrition across the globe, along with peanuts, squash, potatoes, papaya, beans, pineapple, tomatoes and peppers.

Instead of worrying about imaginary Frankenfoods, people concerned with food safety should examine the herbicide glyphosate. It is sold by a hundred companies, including under the brand name Roundup by Monsanto. It is used in 750 products and has been approved for use in 130 countries on 100 crops and for city parks and gardens, making it the world’s most widely used herbicide.

Glyphosate levels in humans in some areas appear to have jumped over 1,300 percent in the past 20 years, according to a study in the Journal of the AMA.

It was labeled a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization in 2015, which triggered a wave of liability lawsuits against Monsanto. More than 8,700 plaintiffs around the country are suing Monsanto on the grounds that Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

A jury ruled against Monsanto in July, determining that Roundup had caused a man’s terminal cancer and ordering the agrochemical corporation to pay $289 million in damages, which included $250 million in punitive damages.

Many row crops in the U.S. (alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, oats, sorghum, soybeans, sugarbeets, and wheat) have been genetically modified to tolerate Roundup. This is a major advantage for farmers because the herbicide kills the weeds but leaves the crop.

Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

What has happened over time, as reported in The Free Press Jan. 24, is that weeds are developing immunity to glyphosate, an entirely predictable occurrence. That has prompted a return to conventional soybeans and other legacy varieties not genetically modified to survive Roundup that require traditional farming practices, such as cultivating between rows.
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Also published in the Mankato Free Press Feb. 2.