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Biotech / Medical : Monsanto Co. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (1400)	2/26/1999 2:46:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 2539

The great divide Bob Holmes From New Scientist, 27 February 1999 WE MAY be living in the global village, but even villagers bound together by language and culture don't always see eye to eye. In the US, biotech firms and activists alike are bemused by events unfolding across the Atlantic. Even the fiercest opponents of GM crops realise that they cannot hope to mobilise public opinion as effectively as their British counterparts. The main difference between Britain and the US is the long and terrifying shadow cast by BSE, suggests Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC, a group which argues that some GM crops may be environmentally damaging. "It makes people very sensitive about what government is telling them and what science is telling them," she says. "I suspect if we'd had mad cow disease here, we would probably have more worry." Philip Angell agrees. He is the director of corporate communications at the GM food giant Monsanto's headquarters in St Louis, Missouri. "This kind of high-visibility, high-intensity reaction on the part of the British press is a confirmation of how deeply scarred the British people are by the BSE experience. It's going to take a long time for that wound to heal." Another factor behind the transatlantic divide is that North American consumers expect food to be cheap. They seem less willing than Europeans to pay a premium for organic produce, for instance. Tim Martin of Pioneer Hi-Bred, a seed company in Des Moines, Iowa, is convinced that Americans would not pay more for the segregation of non-GM foods. "Quite often they don't respond the same way at the counter, when they're paying, as when a survey's being taken," he says. In this climate, anti-GM crop activists in the US are turning to the law rather than trying to inflame public opinion. Last week, 65 plaintiffs including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements filed a suit in the district court in Washington DC against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), arguing that it acted unlawfully in approving crops engineered to produce Bt toxin, an insecticide produced by the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. The EPA rejects this accusation: "Biotech products we review fully comply with all legal requirements designed to ensure that they are environmentally sound." The suit demands that the EPA withdraws approval of all Bt plants and stops approving any new ones until it has done a complete assessment of their environmental impact. The EPA's opponents claim that beneficial insects may suffer and that genes for Bt could spread to other species. They argue that Bt plants will accelerate the evolution of resistance to the Bt toxin by insect pests, thus depriving organic farmers of a natural insecticide. The plaintiffs say this violates a federal law that prohibits the EPA from approving pesticides with damaging environmental effects. This legal battle could take years to resolve. In the meantime, more Bt and other GM crops will be planted in the US. The expansion of GM agriculture in the US will make it harder for consumers elsewhere to avoid them. "The problem that Europeans have is that most of the GM foods they have are coming from the US," says Kalee Kreider of Greenpeace in Washington DC. No matter how much public pressure Europe's activists raise, it will do little to halt the onward march of GM produce as long as the US continues to back the technology. newscientist.com

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (1400)	2/26/1999 2:52:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 2539

How to price what we put on our plate From New Scientist, 27 February 1999 Debora MacKenzie FOR most people, the main question about GM food is: do I have to eat it or not? If we are to have that choice, GM crops will have to be segregated from plough to plate and all products containing GM food labelled as such. The US government claims that this would impose heavy costs on its food suppliers. It threatens a trade war if the European Union responds to public pressure by demanding segregation of GM crops within US exports. But a new analysis suggests that the costs of segregation and labelling are manageable, and could even enhance trade. "This could be the only key to easing public acceptance of biotechnology," says Allan Buckwell, an agricultural economist at Wye College near Ashford, Kent. Buckwell presented his findings in Brussels earlier this month. He says that similarly stringent segregation--although not on the basis of genetic modification--is already widespread. "Different varieties of wheat, for bread or pasta, are already strictly separated from farm gate to production plant," he says. And in the US, soya growers already distinguish beans used in different kinds of tofu for export to Japan. The cost of such segregation is not prohibitive, say Buckwell and his colleague Graham Brookes. For example, soya growers and processors in the US separate and label beans with different protein and oil contents for an extra cost of just 6 to 9 per cent compared with unsegregated beans. Soya growers in Brazil distinguish GM from non-modified soya for a premium of 10 to 15 per cent. European dealers separate maize with a high oil content for 17 per cent extra cost, while US producers do it for 6 per cent. Canadian farmers distinguish GM from normal oilseed rape, or canola, for an 8 per cent premium. And costs will come down, says Buckwell, if segregation becomes widespread. The organisation that commissioned the Wye College study remains sceptical, however. The Food Biotech Communications Initiative, which represents companies such as Monsanto, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, concludes that segregation will increase food costs by "as much as 150 per cent". But this interpretation assumes that food labelled as non-GM has to be absolutely pure. In practice, regulators are likely to allow food to carry such a label if contamination with GM materials is below a certain level. The EU, which is currently debating its labelling criteria, is considering tolerances for GM contamination for individual ingredients of around 1 per cent. newscientist.com

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (1400)	2/26/1999 2:55:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 2539

Dispatches from the killing fields From New Scientist, 27 February 1999 David Concar PERHAPS the most serious charge levelled against crops engineered to produce insecticidal toxins is that they will poison beneficial insects as well as wiping out pests. The latest findings will fuel the debate over the environmental safety of these crops by giving both sides more ammunition. One unpublished study, which looks at the impact on insects of a bacterial toxin engineered into maize, suggests the toxin's effects mysteriously increase as it passes along the food chain. But another team is disputing earlier claims that ladybirds are harmed by plants that produce a protein toxic to aphids and other sap-sucking pests. Experts can't agree on exactly what the two studies mean--particularly since any harmful effects of insecticidal GM crops must be balanced against the probable benefits of reduced pesticide use in fields where the plants grow. Everybody accepts that plants producing insecticidal toxins will reduce the number and nutritional value of the pests that beneficial insects feed on, but confusion surrounds the extent to which the toxins poison predatory insects directly. At the Swiss Federal Research Station for Agroecology and Agriculture near Zürich, Angelika Hilbeck and her colleagues say they have found evidence confirming that lacewings, which eat caterpillars and aphids, can be poisoned by an insecticidal toxin engineered into maize. The gene for this toxin, called Bt, comes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Hilbeck raised a red flag about the effects of Bt toxin on lacewings last year (This Week, 2 May 1998, p 21). In later experiments, her team fed identical quantities of purified Bt toxin directly to lace-wing larvae or via caterpillars that had consumed the toxin. Fifty per cent more lacewings died after eating the caterpillars. Hilbeck believes that the toxin became more potent, perhaps because its chemical structure was altered. Her results may require changes in the way that biotech firms test for any "collateral damage" their crops might cause. They tend to feed the engineered toxins directly to beneficial predators, rather than through their prey. "You need to use a realistic route of exposure," says Hilbeck. Meanwhile, researchers led by John and Angharad Gatehouse at the University of Durham have studied what happens to ladybird larvae fed aphids that had eaten a purified lectin protein from a snowdrop. This is the same protein that was engineered into the potatoes that sparked Britain's current GM food scare. Fears for the safety of beneficial insects surfaced in 1997, when a team led by Nick Birch of the Scottish Crop Research Institute found evidence that eating aphids reared on transgenic potatoes reduced the lifespans and egg production of ladybirds (This Week, 1 November 1997, p 4). Now the Durham team suggests the lectin is not acutely toxic to ladybirds. The lectin stunted the growth of aphids, but when the ladybird larvae were given more aphids to compensate for the aphids' small size, they developed normally to the pupal stage. newscientist.com

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (1400)	2/26/1999 3:05:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2539

Seriously silly - Angst about GM foods is creating a farcical double standard in our thinking Editorial From New Scientist, 27 February 1999 AS EVERY fan of Monty Python knows, sketches can become too absurd for their own good. That's what seemed to be happening to Britain's great genetically modified food saga earlier this week when it emerged that scientists at the nation's biggest biotech company may have been breaking the letter of the law when they merrily tucked into tomatoes that had been genetically modified. The newspaper scoop claimed that government officials would now have little option but to investigate on the grounds that seeds from the tomatoes could have passed through the scientists and germinated in a sewage farm. To date, only GM tomato paste, which contains no seeds, has been approved for sale in Europe. The scientists were rumbled when a photographer snapped them (see p 7) munching tomatoes as part of a stunt to reassure the nation about GM food. It sounds like a spoof but in the present climate anything is possible. Are officials really concerned about this petty breach of regulations? Or are they merely playing a joke on the media and its current obsession with all things GM? Either way, the story exposes a serious issue. While we worry about the hazards of GM crops (would it really matter if a GM tomato germinated in a sewage farm?), we apparently care little about the environmental dangers of conventional crops. This double standard is reflected in European Union legislation, which manages to be both stringent for GM crops and virtually nonexistent for conventional varieties. Since GM farming seems fraught with potential hazards, you could argue that this is justified. Looking at the facts, however, suggests not (see p 4). Cut through the anti-biotech propaganda and you find that there is nothing about GM crops that gives them any special power to create superweeds and landscapes chemically cleansed of wildlife. But we should already know that. Across Europe, farmland wildlife--especially birds --has been in decline for decades, long before GM crops caught the eye of pressure groups. The problem has been caused by the everyday use of highly toxic chemical sprays, by ripping up hedgerows, and by the relentless spread of intensive farming practices which we have never quite had the collective energy or will to resist. The question that really matters in the GM debate is whether genetic engineering simply offers us more of the same or a chance to farm more intelligently. Or rather this is what matters in Europe. In the US, farmland wildlife is not such an emotive issue because most of the nation's biodiversity is locked up in vast national parks. Pocket-sized nations like Britain, by contrast, expect the countryside to provide us with cheap food, romantic landscapes and a home for our wildlife all at the same time. Will genetic engineering help us get what we want? Without a lot more research into things such as the impact on wildlife of genes which produce "natural" insecticides, and the pros and cons of herbicide-resistant crops, it is difficult to give a defini-tive answer. But what is clear already is that the way farmers use these crops will be crucial. In the hands of an enlightened farmer, crops that have been engineered to be resistant to herbicides could, paradoxically, work wonders for our herbivorous insects and songbirds by enabling the farmer to let weeds grow alongside crops for longer, secure in the knowledge that they can be eradicated later in the season. In the hands of someone more ruthless, the same crops could be a recipe for a sterilised landscape. The story is similar with crops engineered to be resistant to insect pests. Ecologists worry about these crops because they are designed to produce a steady supply of a natural insecticide that could harm beneficial predators such as ladybirds (see p 5). They argue that the wider effects of this could be quite different from those of chemical sprays which, because they are used intermittently, can allow insect populations to recover. To minimise any problems, it may be necessary to set aside areas of land to serve as GM-free refuges for insects. In other words, it all comes down to the farmers. Again. Strange, then, that amid the fuss there has so far been little discussion about these custodians of the environment. Egged on by pressure groups, people have been asking whether they can trust the biotech industry and its political allies. Perhaps they should also be asking whether they can trust the farmers. newscientist.com