Monsanto and Me

I have been seeing a fair amount of news, and lots of outrage about the massive agri-business company Monsanto.  The outrage seems to be based on Monsanto being probably the largest company in the world producing and selling Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's).  For the very few readers who don't know what this means, it means changing some of the genes in a particular animal or plant to achieve a particular effect.  These effects can range from attempts to increase yield to producing insecticide.

The pro-GMO position is that GMO's improve the quality of the organism in some way, leading to greater yields, reduced herbicide and pesticide use, etc..  The anti-GMO position is that GMO's have health risks associated with them (toxic, carcinogenic, allergenic), that there are unknown risks of contamination within the environment, that biodiversity is reduced through monoculture (vast areas with only one crop), and that GMO companies are shady dealers buying influence within their own regulatory organization (the Food and Drug Administration in the USA) creating farmer dependence on their products, and aggressively suing people.

My beginning position on this whole thing was that giant multinational companies are generally shady, trying to avoid regulation, lobbying governments, putting money over safety, etc.. Monsanto's record on environmental health is bad, but that was when they were largely a chemical company rather than the modern agriculture intellectual property approach.  This doesn't mean I think that Monsanity suddenly got morality, just that Monsanto isn't contaminating places with Agent Orange and PCB's anymore because they don't make them. 

On the other hand I think that most grassroot efforts on safety are woefully ignorant about science and that simple, outright claims are taken as gospel.  The clearest example of this ignorance is the whole issue with irradiated food, a process that improves food safety at lower cost and with less damage to the product than freezing.  Being against the irradiation of food means you simply don't know how radiation works and aren't willing to find out, but there are enough ignorant, lazy people that there are no irradiated foods in your store.  There are all sorts of sites declaiming the danger of irradiated foods.

So I thought that GMO's are not inherently bad, but there could conceivably be problems, and Monsanto would almost certainly hush things up to be able to make money.  There are a lot of psychopaths in big business.  There are some things I knew already, such as genetic modification has been going on for something like 10,000 years through breeding.  That cross pollination in plants (a worry of GMO's) happens all the time in natural plants, and that most of the food w eat has GMO's in it and we aren't dropping dead right and left.  My starting position was that GMO's are almost certainly an overall good for humanity as long as they are properly regulated.

So, what did I do?  I looked stuff up. There are links throughout this post to some of the things I looked up (but not all).  For a start I went to the competing web sites and noticed that pro-GMO people linked to such places as the US Department of Agriculture and the World Health Organization which generally had clear links to the science.  Anti-GMO people linked to smaller, less official web sites that made claims but almost never showed the evidence for them.  When I did research the specific claims the scientific data came from the defenders rather than the attackers.

I would say the arguments against GMO safety had a couple of basic, starting positions; GMO's are specifically harmful, we don't know enough about GMO effects yet. 

The most common basic error in the harm claim is the "they fed it to rats and they died of horrible stuff.  They sure did, but they fed it to rats in massive, massive doses, enormously higher than any person would ever ingest no matter how crazy they might be.  You feed a person five pounds of sugar a day and they will die but nobody eats five pounds of sugar a day.  The second basic error is that since GMO's have been introduced allergies and cancer rates have increased and so GMO's cause allergies and cancer.  Correlation is not the same as causation and allergy rates and cancer rates were increasing before GMO's were introduced.

We don't know what the effects of GMO's might be over the course of decades and some previous technology introductions have certainly caused harm despite being thought safe initially, but we can make some predictions.  DNA produces proteins, and if you know the properties of those proteins you can make a really good guess over what will happen.  People have been doing this with less information for thousands of years, cross two sorts of apple and you will create a new organism, but one that only produces the proteins already found in apples.  You might worry about introductions of pesticides within the DNA of plants, but these proteins already exist within plants and farmers generally spray their crops with pesticides anyway (in Monsanto's case it is Round-Up in both cases of GMO and spray), it is reasonable to think the GMO pesticide within plant DNA reduces contamination of the environment.  Farmers already try to produce mono-cultures in their fields, often with non-native species, so the only difference I see here is that GMO's are new introductions within a species rather than transported other species or varieties.

The big thing here is that these questions should be dealt with by a regulatory organization, in the USA it is the Department of Agriculture which has a method of testing new food for safety involving scientific examination.  Monsanto cannot introduce a new form of food without it passing the clearance of the US government.  In a perfect world this should solve the problem, the people with the most expertise and the most to lose test for safety and then only approve safe food.  We seem to be fine with this when eating at restaurants even though people do die each year from food poisoning.  This isn't a perfect world and we know that unsafe things have been approved before and that companies will lobby, produce "scientific studies" that meet their own agenda, and try to remove regulations controlling their business.

This is where the politics comes in.  The politics for me started when the so-called Monsanto Protection Act, a non-budget item in a budget law was added with most members of Congress passing the bill without reading this portion.  The claims were that the law freed Monsanto from lawsuits so that they could put anything out there without fear of any consequences.  This was frankly bullshit as could be seen by anyone spending five minutes to read the law.  What the law actually did is require the Department of Agriculture to allow Monsanto and others to continue to produce previously approved GMO's while Monsanto was being sued.  The claims of anti-GMO activists in this area were either lies, or ill-informed.

However, there is a real problem with the regulatory process.  There are serious problem in that a number of previous Monsanto employees then went to work at the FDA, and vice versa.  This has been called the "Amazing Revolving Door."  This is common in governments, just look at the connection of Merrill Lynch and anything to do with economics in the White House.  This is a clear conflict of interest, particularly in a health and safety situation, that simply shouldn't happen.  It will continue to happen everywhere in government.

In summary, there isn't actually any data that says GMO's are bad for you. No-one has ever died because their food was genetically altered.  However, the regulatory organization is compromised by its direct connections to those it should be regulating.  Those howling against Monsanto generally don't know what they are talking about while Monsanto has an excellent PR Department.  When it comes down to it the real reason for objection to GMO's is that the idea seems icky, mad frankenstein stuff.  My objection to Monsanto is the same as my objection to multinational companies in general, they have far too much power within the agencies that are supposed to regulate them.

I will continue to eat GMO's without worrying about my health.