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The following transcript is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Link to Audio and Episode Info Here
Show
Transcript Deconstructing
Dinner Kootenay
Co-op Radio CJLY Nelson,
B.C. Canada October
4, 2007 Title:
"Biotechnology Myths?" Producer/Host: Jon Steinman Transcript: Erika Steeves Jon
Steinman: You're tuned in to Deconstructing
Dinner, a syndicated weekly one-hour radio program and podcast produced in the
studios of the currently rainy and cold Nelson, British Columbia. I'm Jon
Steinman, and I'll be with you for the next hour. As was introduced on last week's
broadcast, over the course of the upcoming weeks and months, we will be
featuring recordings and interviews compiled on September 18th and
19th of this year at the 55th annual CropLife Canada Conference.
This year the conference was hosted in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - a
conference that invited some of the most influential corporate figures in the
world of agri-business. CropLife Canada is the trade association representing
the biotechnology and pesticide manufacturers operating in the country, and
CropLife is often the most vocal of groups denouncing the many criticisms of
the dangers of pesticides, genetically modified foods and conventional
agriculture. And with those in attendance having had a
significant influence on how agriculture and food operates in Canada, I packed
my bags and microphones and hit the road to Saskatoon, to learn just what the
industry is up to and in what direction they're heading. On today's broadcast we hear from Keynote
Speaker Juan Enriquez of Biotechonomy and we hear responses to his presentation
from Terry Pugh of the National Farmers Union and Jeffrey Smith of the
Institute for Responsible Technology and author of the recently released book, Genetic Roulette. increase music and fade out JS:
It seemed fitting for me to drop in on this industry gathering as what became
quite clear during the two-day conference, is that this industry is very
concerned about the negative public perception of their products, and there was
an ongoing message throughout the conference that called for better
communication with the Canadian public on the importance, benefits and safety
of chemical pesticides and genetically modified foods. This concern was even
more evident in the concluding hours of the conference when attendees sat in on
a media workshop hosted by the CBCs Ian Hanomansing. The workshop was titled,
"The Media Today - an important partner in developing our vision." Ian guided
participants through a background on how any industry can best
communicate their vision to the media. Well, my role seemed fitting at the
conference, because there I was answering their call for more media exposure.
And as was one concern raised by a participant in the media workshop, she was
distraught at the industry always having to respond to environmental and health
concerns raised in the media; that is, always having to respond last. Well
today and on future broadcasts, we will give the industry the opportunity to
share their opinions and views, and then have others respond to them.
I was one of a handful of media
representatives there, but the only one recording the entire conference. And as
will likely be the format for shows in the coming weeks and months, we will
listen in on these presentations, and on interviews I conducted with some
presenters, and examine the messages being distributed among themselves and to
Canadians. We will be inviting a number of guests onto the broadcasts to
respond to these messages, some of which will be familiar voices from previous
shows. And so on today's first episode featuring
recordings from the 2007 CropLife Canada Conference in Saskatoon, we will
listen in on segments from the Keynote Speaker, Juan Enriquez, who launched the
conference with a long introduction into the future of the bioeconomy; that is
an economy based upon the life-sciences and genetics. Now keep in mind, Juan
Enriquez was speaking to some of the most influential figures in the world of
Canadian agriculture including agricultural giants Agricore, Viterra, BASF,
Bayer CropScience, the Canola Council of Canada, Cargill, Dow AgroSciences,
duPont, Syngenta, Monsanto, and the list goes on. There were about nine
attendees from Agriculture Agri-Food Canada including two Members of
Parliament, and many representative from provincial
ministries of agriculture. So needless to say, an examination of the
Keynote Speaker is perhaps the single most important presentation to
deconstruct at this conference. But before we get to that, I wanted to
share a couple of recordings I compiled during the trip to Saskatoon from here
in Nelson, BC. After taking an early morning bus to Alberta, and with an
overnight visit in Calgary, I then rented a car and proceeded in the direction
of Saskatoon, crossing over some of the largest expanses of agriculture in the
world. And it was a preferred method of transportation to be on the ground
witnessing the very agricultural systems that provided the foundation for the
conference I was heading to. On the sides of the highways were Agricore and
Cargill grain elevators, nitrogen fertilizer plants, advertisements for Dow and
Bayer crop protection products, and given the time of year, an ongoing parade
of combines harvesting this years crop. But with seven hours of monotonous
driving and only a handful of CDs, the radio seemed like an ideal tool to help
pass the time. It was an enlightening experience because as I discovered from
talking with those involved in agriculture, the radio is a significant source
of information and entertainment across the prairies and the rural expanses of
Canada. And when the vast majority of Canadians live in urban centres, it
seemed important to record some of what I heard on the radio and present it to
you so that those in cities can better understand the messages Canadian farmers
and rural communities are receiving. Now we will only listen to a couple of
these recordings today, but a couple of them tie in nicely to today's topic as
the message coming across Canadian rural radiowaves are quite mixed. In this
first one, you will hear me stumbling across a religious program denouncing the
theory of evolution and proclaiming it to be unscientific. This program caught
my ear as the majority of farmers across the country are using technologies
created by an industry that believes in the theory of evolution - a
comment even echoed in the keynote speech we will hear just shortly. So take a
listen to this first recording, which ends with me pulling into an abandoned
train station in the community of Cereal, Alberta just west of the Saskatchewan
border.
..and lives
today, and waits to say to the uttermost. All who come to him by faith, will
you come and put your trust in Christ today? I'd love to send you my booklet,
"How to be saved and know it." Oh today, take the time and write me a letter.
And pray for our broadcast. And pray for souls today that we might see God work
in mighty power. JS:
Now to give you an example of the seemingly contradictory messages broadcasting
on rural Canadian radio, here is an advertisement heard on CFCW, broadcasting
out of Edmonton. This ad is for a genetically modified product by Dow
AgroSciences, a company that certainly believes in the theory of evolution. Audio
of Dow AgroSciences commercial: Global demand
for Nexera Canola is gaining momentum fast. So sign your 2008 Nexera Canola
contract now for competitive yields, a premium over commodity canola, more
delivery options, two new varieties, profitability. Sign before September 30
and receive a four dollar break on signing bonus, plus a three dollar break on
next year's cereal bonus. Get on board. Contact your Nexera Canola retailer
today. Accomplish more on the same acres with Dow AgroSciences. JS:
And that commercial leads us nicely into the topics to be covered on today's
broadcast as the two issues my guests will be responding to on today's show are
genetically modified foods, and the economic health of farming in the country.
That commercial refers to both a genetically modified strain of canola, and the
contracts farmers have little choice but to sign. And this is of course
connected to these concerns over the economic health of farming. I will also note that this seeming
conflict between religious values and farming in Canada will be a topic to
explore on a future broadcast of Deconstructing Dinner, and so we will revisit
with these recordings in coming months. And again, all broadcasts of
Deconstructing Dinner are archived on our web site, and instructions on how to
subscribe to our podcast are also found there, and that site for any new
listeners is cjly.net/deconstructingdinner soundbite JS:
Moving along to the feature of today's broadcast, we focus in on Juan Enriquez,
the keynote speaker at the 2007 CropLife Canada Conference. Juan's presentation
was titled, "As the Future Catches You - How Genomic and Other Forces are
Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth". Juan is the Chairman and CEO of
Biotechonomy - a Life Sciences Investment and Research firm located in Boston,
Massachusetts. He is considered a world authority on the economic and political
impacts of life sciences, and with such status, it seems fitting to deconstruct
his presentation to this audience of agribusiness executives. Juan Enriquez launched his presentation
with a slide outlining what the headlines of newspapers would have been 500
years ago. And he uses this slide to introduce the idea that power today, is
determined by knowledge. His comments are suggestive of the common argument
presented by opponents of biotechnology such as Vandana Shiva - that control of
genes and control of life, is a form of neo-colonialism. Juan Enriquez uses the
very idea of colonialism to illustrate the potential of biotechnology. Juan
Enriquez: It hasn't changed that much. If you've
read the newspapers and you've read the newspaper this morning-basically the
same headlines. But of course a couple things change between the Renaissance
and today. And the interesting thing is change doesn't always appear in the
newspapers, and reading the newspapers is often a bad way of figuring out what
is really happening. Because the relative position over the next 500 years of
who is rich and who is poor actually really did change. You still had the same
sunsets; you still had the same sunrises; you still had the same headlines. But
you really had some pretty important changes occur. One of the things that happened is the
way you used to be rich and powerful was based on the military. If you took
over your neighbours land, you were richer. If you had more people, you were
richer. So as long as brute force was the rule of the game-more land, more
power, more serfs, more people-then armies were really useful. If you had the
largest army, you could take over your neighbor and be the richest country in
the world. Just before the Industrial Revolution, China and India were 40% of
the global economy. Wanted to get rich? It wasn't through productivity because
salaries between Rome, back in pre-Christian times, and France, just before the
Industrial Revolution, were about the same. So if the salaries were the same,
and the productivity was the same, the way you became wealthy was to get
bigger-to have more people, to have more kids. They got rich enough that they
were able to generate palaces made of marble. Wonders of the world. But eventually the rules of the game
changed. And the rules of the game moved from brute force and lots of people
towards open borders and a knowledge economy. We call that the Industrial
Revolution. And what ended up happening is that this huge empire with these
thousands of people started competing with an obscure little island, fog bound
in Northern Europe. And those folks started saying, let's have an open border
competition. You bring your 12 kids and make textiles; and I'll bring 1000
horsepower and make textiles. And that competition was so uneven because one
society had a few people but a lot of knowledge, and the other society had a
lot of people and not a lot of knowledge. But that little obscure island,
Britain, ended up taking over a huge chunk of the world. Instead of building those big marble
palaces, what they built is things like this (refers to slides): this is the Parliament building in India, and
this is the view from it. And that's India gate. That's what it means for a
government, for a society, to understand a transition in knowledge, or not.
It's not just ‘it would be nice to fix the schools', it's ‘your sovereignty
depends on fixing the schools, and learning stuff. Your country depends on
learning stuff.' JS:
In this next segment, keynote speaker Juan Enriquez continues on with his ideas
on how power is accumulated in our society, and he suggests that so long as
people keep doing what their grandparents were doing, they won't get rich. This
worldview is certainly the one that drives our global economy, that
technological advances such as the theme of the conference-biotechnology- are
the routes to power, to wealth and to, as Juan puts it, building an empire. Juan
Enriquez: Why are the rules of the game changing?
Is it suddenly that people understood things, or is it that some people kept
doing what their grandparents did, and the rules kept changing? Why do we get
rich actually? What are the rules of the game on getting rich? Well, see the
difference between a man and a mouse is actually very small. If you take the
gene code of a human being (that gene code that's in each of your cells),
there's 3.2 billion letters in each of your cells, so you have a full copy of
everything that's your gene code in each of your hundred trillion cells. If you
take that and stretch it out, that's about six feet worth of code, DNA. That's
what we call the genome. If you lay the gene code of a man next to
the gene code of a mouse, the difference between a man and a mouse is about 5%
of gene code. There are a lot of wives that already know that. (audience laughter) But the real
difference between a man and a mouse, the real difference between a man and a
chimpanzee, is that we teach our grandchildren and great grandchildren stuff.
If you're a monkey, you don't teach your grandchildren stuff. Because to
transmit data as a monkey, you have to touch, hear, feel, see, use your senses.
There is no animal on this planet besides a human being that writes, or draws
on a cave wall. Because we do this stuff, we can tell our grandchildren, our
great-grandchildren, our great-great grandchildren what we've learned. JS:
Now the irony of this segment of Juan's presentation is that while his comments
are suggesting that passing information from generation to generation is how
you effectively build an empire, it's the very model of industrial agriculture
that this conference was all about, that has effectively put a halt to the
transferring of farming knowledge from generation to generation. The dominant system
of agriculture today is one in which farmers themselves require less knowledge
of natural systems and less knowledge of animal husbandry. And as the
questionable messages coming out of this presentation began to increase, this
next one introduces my next guest. So take a close listen to these
comments. Juan
Enriquez: Who got rich over the last thirty
years? It's the farmers who understood how to use futures markets. It's the
farmers who understood how to access data from various markets from around the
world. It's the farmers who understood how to trade on a global scale. It's the
folks who found out first about the new genetic technologies, the new farming
technologies, the weather patterns-all of this data coming into a farm that
didn't used to come into a farm. And you all became knowledge workers. And in
the process of that, those folks who remained digitally illiterate are mostly
out of business. Those folks who did things just as grandpa did it, are
basically not in this room. JS:
As these comments of farmers getting rich run in complete opposition to many of
the issues discussed in the past here on Deconstructing Dinner, I invited Terry
Pugh onto the program to lend his response to this suggestion that farmers who
adopt new technologies are getting rich. Terry is the Executive Secretary of
the Saskatoon-based National Farmers Union, an organization first formed in
1969 and representing farmers across the country. Terry Pugh: I think that there are some people who have gotten
rich but for the most part I don't think you'll find too many farmers among
that crowd. Certainly it was the corporate sector (agribusiness) that supplies
the inputs and buys the commodities; that's the crowd that was getting rich
over the past five years. Particularly in 2004, the Farmers Union did a study,
compared and looked at profit levels of bigger corporations. This is publically
available data in their annual reports, and a surprising number of those were actually
recorded record profits in 2004. And of course 2004 was the worst year on
record, up to that point, for net farm income. There's a difference between
gross farm income and net farm income. You can have higher and higher gross
farm income on the chart, but it's what actually stays in farmer's pockets that
actually counts. So there's a huge gap between what farmer's make and what they
are able to keep. That wealth, that gap in the middle, is what is fueling the
agribusiness corporations, and that's who is getting rich. JS:
And you're tuned in to Deconstructing Dinner as we begin to take apart the
keynote presentation at the 2007 CropLife Canada Conference held in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan. CropLife Canada is the national trade association representing
manufacturers, developers and distributors of pest control products and plant
biotechnology for use in agriculture, and other settings. I attended the September conference in
Saskatoon and recorded among others, keynote speaker Juan Enriquez who opened
up the conference. Juan spoke about the future of the industry and the
importance of advancing technological innovations to stay competitive. Now
there were a number of highly questionable messages coming out of this
presentation, and we are beginning to examine these messages that the industry
is quite clearly discussing among themselves. As Juan suggests, the farmers
getting rich are those who adopt new technologies such as genetically modified
crops, crop protection chemicals, and expensive machinery, and Terry Pugh of
the National Farmers Union continues his response to such a suggestion. Terry
Pugh: It is a little bit misleading to say
that farmers will benefit economically if they simply adopt these new
technologies such as genetically modified seed and bigger equipment, because
what that is ignoring is the other part of the equation, that it is much more
expensive to get into these technologies. And also you tend to lose control
over your production as you get into those technologies. For example, most of
genetically modified crops is under production contracts. You buy the seed but
you sign over your ability to save seed, for example. It's against the law to
replant it unless under certain conditions it also specifies where you can sell
it and at what price. So a lot of those decisions that farmers took for granted
in the old days are gone. You're not making those decisions anymore. Also, it
is very expensive to get into bigger machinery. You pretty well have to lease
equipment now, a lot of the bigger stuff, to even have access to it. JS:
Following Juan Enriquez's presentation, he was escorted into a room reserved
for those within the media. Upon his arrival into the room, about four of us
gathered around to ask him questions, and I was of course eager to question
some of his comments about how farmers can get rich. Audio of question posed by Jon Steinman: One group not represented here are the
farmers. You were speaking at the beginning of your presentation that
essentially farmers are getting rich-those that actually adopt these
technologies, who buy into these futures markets. And looking at some of the
statistics that come out of some of these farmer's unions, I understand that
it's the complete opposite, especially when I speak with farmers that, in the
past ten years, average net income has been minus $323. And this is coming from
the NFU. When you actually add in the wage, which is the profit, and you figure
out how much farmers should be getting paid, you're looking at $7.75 billion
which has been in 2004 net farm loses. I'm wondering if you can expand on how
farmers will get rich when, at least in my understanding, it's the opposite. Audio of Juan Enriquez's response: Well if you asked that question five years ago
there probably would have been a lot of tears in the room because it did seem
like farming was in real trouble. Today, when you look at land prices in a city
like this, when you look at wealth in a city like this, when you look at the
price of agricultural land, when you look at investments into farmland, the
types of people who are making investments into farmland, I'm not entirely sure
that farming has been an awful business to be in for the past five years. It's
a tough business. You have to get up at four o'clock in the morning, you've got
a cycle throughout the year, and it's a hard way to make a living. But the last
five years I don't think have been that awful. If you are in the farm business,
look around this province and look at the prices. If your farmland prices are
in freefall like some of the secondary housing markets in the U.S, then I'd
agree a lot more with some of these statistics. But if your price of land keeps
going up, and people keep losing more money doing that business, that's not an
equation that works for me. JS: I did pass an audio of this response to
Terry Pugh to give him a chance to respond as well. And he responded to a
number of comments including Juan's idea that increasing land values are a
financial benefit to farmers. Terry Pugh was baffled by such a suggestion, and
refers to this idea as misleading and that farmland values have no relation to
farm cash flow. Terry
Pugh: One of the things he kept coming back
to was that farming is in good shape because farmland values are on the rise. I
think that it is quite misleading to suggest that just because farmland values
are rising that farmers are suddenly wealthy. Because there's really no
connection between the value of farmland on the market and a farmer's cash
flow. Look at people in the city who have suddenly seen the value of their
house rise, so their taxes have gone up, so their costs have gone up, but they
haven't actually seen any increase in their wages, which are totally unrelated
to the price of their house. I mean, there are reasons that real estate prices
go up: one reason is speculation; people are flipping real estate. Another is
because the subprime mortgage expansion in the United States, which is now
collapsed, and that's bringing values down. Eventually, those values will
reflect the reality of the market. They will also go down. The real increase in
farmland values has been around cities. That is a reflection again on that
urban housing market. JS:
Yet another comment made in Juan Enriquez's response was this. Juan
Enriquez: I'm not entirely sure that farming has
been an awful business to be in the past five years. JS:
Terry Pugh suggests the complete opposite to be true. Terry
Pugh: The last five years really have been
probably the worst, in terms of net cash income for farmers, and I really don't
know where he's suggesting that the last five years have been just marvelous
because none of the figures that I've seen support that argument. In fact,
we've made presentations to the agriculture committee in the House of Commons
and to the Senate agriculture committee as well. The Senate agriculture committee
recently held cross-Canada hearings on rural poverty. And wherever they went,
whether that was Southern Alberta, Prince Edward Island, or the middle of
Ontario, people were saying the same thing: that there was a serious problem
with net income. People have been able to keep going largely because of easy
access to credit and low interest rates. Once those interest rates start to
rise, we're going to see a really...and I think we're starting to get that
tightening up of credit, if not now, then in the very near future. And that's
going to really come down hard on a lot of rural communities. JS:
That was Terry Pugh, the Executive Secretary of the Saskatoon-based National
Farmers Union. You can learn more about the NFU by visiting their web site at
nfu.ca soundbite JS:
We now come back to Juan Enriquez's keynote presentation at the 2007 CropLife
Canada Conference in Saskatoon. The focus of his presentation: biotechnology,
life-sciences and genetically modified foods. In the remainder of today's
broadcast we will listen in on some segments from his presentation and his
responses during the ensuing media scrum, and we will bring author Jeffrey
Smith of the Institute for Responsible Technology onto the show to lend his
responses to the messages coming out of Canada's dominant agriculture and food
industries. In this first segment, Juan Enriquez
likens an orange to a computer diskette, and he suggests that to understand
life simply requires the understanding of gene code. Juan
Enriquez: So this orange becomes a disquette.
This becomes a computer program except this doesn't execute ones and zeros;
this executes life, and you don't need a Microsoft license, and you don't need
to plug it in. All you've got to do with this thing to execute code? First line
of code- ATCAGGG, make a root. Next line of code-TCAGGG, make a stem. GCAA,
make a series of leaves that look like this. TCGAA-make a flower. You change a
couple of lines of gene code in this thing, and it becomes a tangerine. Or a
grapefruit. Or a lemon. So you change a couple lines of code, and you change
the function of this object. Where it can grow, whether it's tolerant to salt,
whether it's tolerant to herbicide, whether it tastes like a lemon or tastes
like a tangerine. And all of that stuff is written like this. And we're
beginning to map it. In the measure that we begin to understand this gene code,
we begin to understand life. JS:
As Juan's presentation continued, I became even more skeptical than I already
was. In this next clip, Juan Enriquez speaks about the future of biotechnology,
and its impacts on food and agriculture. Take a listen, and see if you can pick
out some comments that should raise eyebrows. Juan
Enriquez: We've already modified most of the
grains that you plant in Canada. They're herbicide tolerant, salt resistant,
cold resistant. You've got this nifty brochure out here from Genome Prairie
that's talking about how you can take rye and adapt the cold tolerance of rye
into other things. Or how you can improve your seeds. This is stuff that's
going on here. It's already happening. You're already planting it. So that's
stage one. Here's stage two. If you can program
plants to do different things, then you can program plants to do different
things. This is a Danish company, and it has programmed plants to turn red, not
when it gets cold and dark in the fall. These turn red when they are exposed to
explosives. So you plant these little seeds everywhere, and you get green
fields, and where you get little red circles, that's where the land mines are.
Because the plants have been programmed not to resist salt, they've been
programmed to turn red when they are exposed to TNT. Or you could find uranium,
or you could find pollutants. This is beginning to change not just the
seed, textile, herbicide, pesticide, biotech and pharma companies, it's also
beginning to change food companies. Which is why Nestle is also beginning to
think about bio-marketers and DNA and mRNA and proteins and metabolites. And as
you go forward in this stuff we're also beginning to think of food as energy.
We already know that we can get energy out of corn. In fact, the investments in
this are getting quite large. To the point where you're now beginning to import
corn into Iowa. A little ironic. These investments are mostly driven by
subsidies and political reasoning, and that's why the dominant companies today
are companies that are very well connected politically. But as you go forward,
one of the things you should think about is if you can get petrochemicals out
of plants directly, a secondary and tertiary petrochemical process should also
be possible. So the first stage of energy processing is you make gasoline. But
what else comes out of refineries? Guess what, plastics come out of refineries.
So therefore you should be able to program plants for tertiary petrochemical as
well as secondary petrochemical. And this is a German company that takes a
hectare of corn and 6000 kg, 3500 kg of glucose, and 1250 kg of a biodegradable
plastic out of corn. When you walk into some of these exhibit halls, you begin
to see exhibits that look like this (refers
to slide). And you wonder why didn't they bring something to exhibit? Well,
because the exhibit is these little plastic cups. This is a Cargill Dow
operation, and they happen to be making biodegradable plastics out of plants.
They're also making t-shirts out of plants. JS:
So as may have sparked concern upon listening to that segment, Juan Enriquez
believes that petrochemicals come from plants. I was so shocked by his
suggestion that I even scrambled to an on-line dictionary on my computer to
verify I wasn't going crazy, and indeed, petrochemicals only come from natural
gas or petroleum. His final comment that extols the new and wonderful virtues
of creating clothing out of plants knocked me to the back of my seat. I looked
down at my clothes and felt as though I was some vision of the future. There I
was draped in cotton and hemp. I wanted to raise my hand and show the audience
how modern I truly was, but I did allow Juan Enriquez to continue his
presentation. soundbite JS:
If you're just tuning in, this is Deconstructing Dinner, a syndicated weekly
one-hour radio program and podcast produced at Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson,
British Columbia. I'm Jon Steinman. On today's broadcast we launch a series of
shows that will feature recordings from the 2007 CropLife Canada Conference
held in Saskatoon in September. I hit the road and travelled out of the
mountains and into the prairies to attend the conference and see what Canada's
most influential agricultural corporations are up to. We're currently listening to the
all-important keynote speaker, who this year was Juan Enriquez of Biotechonomy
- a life sciences and research investment firm located in Boston,
Massachusetts. In just a moment we will hear from author
Jeffrey Smith who has long opposed such genetic modification technologies being
applied to our food supply. As Juan Enriquez's message was one of eager
anticipation for the future of biotechnology and genetic modification, it
seemed as though the rapid introduction of such foods into the global food
supply needed to first be questioned. It was only less than 15 years ago that
GMOs entered into our food, and their presence is increasing rapidly. During the media
scrum following Juan's presentation, he was asked about the safety of such
technologies, and here's his response. Juan
Enriquez: It's been a concern of parents forever
what kind of gene swapping is going to take place with their sons or daughters.
It's been something that has terrified people for centuries. Part of what we
are doing is what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is making
what's out there more productive, better tasting, and easier to grow. If you take an all natural tomato: it's
small, it's green, it's about the size of your thumbnail, and it's slightly
poisonous. If you take an all natural dog, it is called a wolf. As we breed
dogs, we want this kind of poodle or this kind of great-dane, or we want this
kind of Chihuahua. Different people have different tastes. We're doing that
with citrus; we're doing that with fruits; we're doing that with whole series
of things. The difference is that we are doing it faster and more deliberately
today. And so far, the technology has been remarkably safe. There have been an awful lot of people
who have died from various food allergies. I have yet to know the case of a
person who has died from a GMO allergy, which by the way is extraordinary.
That's not the usual state of affairs. It's been a surprisingly safe
technology. Does that guarantee that we will never
make a mistake with it? No it doesn't. But we have to be careful as we think
about new technologies, about what the trade-offs are. Because when you say we
will not accept the new technology except if you can demonstrate that it's 100%
safe, we wouldn't be driving cars. We wouldn't be using electricity. We
wouldn't be using steel. These things have been misused, and they can be
occasionally dangerous if misused. We do need an ethical system. We do need
a regulatory system that respects peoples genetic right to privacy. We need to
keep the stuff out of warfare. But I'm not terribly worried about the food/feed
applications of this, and I know nobody is going to grow a third arm because
they are eating this stuff. Nobody is going to turn green because they are
eating this stuff. That's great for science-fiction writers, but that's not the
way these systems work. JS:
Juan's comments represent the standard argument that has existed ever since the
idea of genetic modification was first introduced. His arguments are the same
ones that have allowed such foods to be approved on such a wide scale, and are
the same ones that continue to assure the Canadian population that these foods
are safe. For seasoned listeners of Deconstructing Dinner, you probably
remember Jeffrey Smith whose GMO Trilogy made its way onto our program as a
three-part series back in 2006. Jeffrey is the Executive Director of the
Iowa-based Institute for Responsible Technology and the author of well-known
titles such as Seeds of Deception,
and his most recent release, Genetic
Roulette. Jeffrey is one of the most outspoken critics on the genetic
modification of our food supply and I caught up with him over the phone while
he was on a speaking tour in Vancouver, Washington. Prior to our conversation,
I sent Jeffrey some of the comments made by Juan during the media scrum (the
ones we just heard), and Jeffrey Smith first responds to this standard industry
comment made by Juan Enriquez, that genetic modification has been done for
thousands of years. Jeffrey
Smith: This man has given some very prime
examples of the basic platform of disinformation that's being used to give
people the completely wrong impression of genetically engineered foods. When
the FDA scientists were looking at genetically engineered foods in the early
90s, the compliance officers summarized all the opinions of the technical
experts of the agency and said that according to technical experts, GM foods
are different and lead to different risks. Trying to consider them equivalent
to the non-GM foods was like putting a square peg into a round hole. In fact, I was speaking to one of the
developers of one of the first genetically engineered crops-the Flavr Savr
tomato-and she looked at me and said of course it's not an extension of natural
breeding. It's complete public relations spin. Consider some of the
combinations that they're making: they're putting spider genes into goats in
the hope that they can milk the goat for spider web protein to make bulletproof
vests. It's hardly sexual reproduction. It's hardly natural. Yes, it is the
latest tool by those who are working with plants and crops in terms of
breeding, but it has nothing to do, in terms of the technology, with sexual reproduction.
It's taking genes from one species and blasting it typically with a gene-guard
into the DNA of another species, crossing genes from one kingdom or species to
another causing massive collateral damage, and all sorts of unpredicted side
effects. So when someone starts out with the
concept of "we've been doing this for thousands of years", watch out for
everything they say. David Suzuki said if a scientist or politician tells you
that GM foods are safe, they are either very stupid or lying. Either they are
completely unaware of the situation, repeating what other people have told
them, or they are consciously trying to manipulate in order to promote the
industry. I don't necessarily have any idea what the motivation is for this
man, but I can tell you that this has been dismissed by independent scientists
and experts as simply whitewash and public relations, I'm sorry to say. JS:
Yet another comment made by Juan Enriquez was this. Juan
Enriquez: I have yet to know of a case of a
person who has died from a GMO allergy, which by the way is extraordinary.
That's not the usual state of affairs. It's been a surprisingly safe
technology. JS:
And Jeffrey Smith responds to this statement often made by the industrial
agriculture sector. Jeffrey
Smith: It's remarkably safe in the sense that
they don't actually look for any problems, and since they haven't found any
problems, they can call it safe. This is very dangerous. It's one of the most
irresponsible, unscientific, and dangerous statements, that people have been
eating this for years and no one has gotten hurt. There's not a single human
clinical trial. There's no push marketing surveillance. In fact, the only human
feeding study ever conducted and published showed that genes transfer from
genetically engineered soybeans into the human gut bacteria DNA, and it
appeared to be functional, meaning long after you stop eating genetically
engineered foods, you might be producing these foreign proteins inside your
intestines. Consider if the BT corn has a gene transferred
to your gut bacteria, it could theoretically turn your intestinal flora into
living pesticide factories. Picking up the gene that was inserted into corn that
produces a pesticide. What we have here are individuals making claims about
safety. He said that he knows of no one who has died of genome allergy. But when StarLink corn was discovered to
have contaminated the U.S food supply in the year 2000, which was considered to
be a potential allergen, there were thousands and thousands of consumer
complaints to food companies about potential reactions. The FDA did not follow
up any of them. What they did is they waited for people to fill out an
extensive report for the FDA (there was only 52 of them) and they only actually
looked at 17 of those people. We know that some people have died after eating
corn products, and that other people were rushed to the hospital. This is
something where we know could be happening today. We know that soon after
genetically engineered soy was introduced to the U.K, soy allergies skyrocketed
by 50%. Inside soy that's genetically engineered, a known allergen called trypsin
inhibitor is as much as seven times higher in cooked soy. We know the new
protein that was introduced into soy that was unpredicted and unexpected, which
is an allergenic, and we know the protein that was intended to be produced,
which causes the soy to be herbicide tolerant, has properties of a known
allergen. Furthermore, when it was fed to mice, the
pancreatic digestive enzymes were produced in much lower levels, suggesting
that proteins were broken down less, which means that humans or animals might
develop allergic reactions to a whole host of proteins, not just the soy
protein. There are all sorts of technological and
scientific reasons why genetically engineered foods could be one of the causes
for the increase in food allergies and food sensitivities. The fact that no one
is actually doing post-marketing surveillance, and even if they did it's kind
of difficult to identify since genetically engineered foods are not even
labeled in the United States. It's kind of a genetic roulette, or a Russian Roulette, that they're playing with our lives, and since
they're not monitoring they can claim that they know of no one that has died,
but that's kind of disingenuous at best. JS:
And this is Deconstructing Dinner. We're currently listening to clips from my
interview with Jeffrey Smith, author of the book, Genetic Roulette, as he comments on recordings made during a media
scrum at CropLife Canada's 2007 Conference in Saskatoon. The conference was a
gathering of the most influential agricultural corporations in Canada including
Agricore, Viterra, Cargill, Monsanto, Bayer and DuPont among others. A number
of bureaucrats from Agriculture-Agri-Food Canada were in attendance including
two Conservative Members of Parliament. As you just heard prior to Jeffrey
Smith's response, keynote speaker Juan Enriquez assured the media that
genetically modified food is safe, and so I posed to him the following
question. Take a listen. Audio of question posed by Jon Steinman: On this topic
of allergies, in the case of genetically modified food that has been in the
food system now for 15 years, it hasn't really been that long. When you look at
allergies within the human body, it can take an entire lifetime for someone to
develop a gluten allergy. These sorts of allergies take time to develop in the
human body. Now, in the case of generations, is there any risk or concern that
these sorts of allergies that may be induced through this food that's now in
the food supply, is that going to pan out over time? Is there a concern over
that? Audio of Juan Enriquez's response: It's conceivable. A
lot of things are conceivable. What people have to understand is probabilities.
When you have these debates in Europe-places like France have been really
scared of some of this stuff, and they've gotten rid of their best scientists.
France is a place that had Nobels in this, France is a place that had Pester, it
had Monod, it had Jacob, and a series of people that were absolutely leading
edge that are now finding it very hard to do their research. Most of the start
up companies with smart young kids move somewhere else, and those jobs move
somewhere else because part of what they've adopted was called a precautionary
principle. You prove to me that this will never harm anybody before I allow you
to do it. We wouldn't be allowed to salt peanuts. Let me give you a sense of what fear can
do on this stuff. If you took a food and you said, "I don't like this food
because it's related to a known neurotoxin, because it has no health benefits
whatsoever, because it's known to hurt people's hearts. That's a medicine that
you probably wouldn't be allowed to sell even under prescription. And of course
you use that medicine everyday - it's called table salt. There is no reason to
use table salt. It just tastes good, and it helps food, and we're putting in a
regulatory system where we're so scared, and we're trying to preserve so many
things that we're driving a lot of this stuff into Asia, we're driving a lot of
this stuff into India, we're driving a lot of this stuff into China. That can
be really destructive to an economy in the long term. The second thing it does is makes
medicines very expensive. If you tell me, "prove to me that this new medicine
will never hurt anybody, and if it does I will put your company out of business."
If you applied this same technology, this same strategy to a car, none of us
would be driving cars. When you apply that to medicines, what we've been doing
is the cost of medicines have gone from $40,000,000 to $880,000,000. That means
that a whole series of medicines that aren't for rich people in rich countries
don't get brought to market. Because you're not going to make a malaria
medicine; you're not going to make a tuberculosis medicine; you're not going to
make a series of things unless it's a billion dollar market. We're really
under-serving people by doing that. We're doing an enormous amount of damage to
society by doing that. JS:
Yet again, a number of very questionable statements were made by Juan Enriquez,
with the first being an admission that risks from allergies are conceivable. I
was shocked to hear such an admission, and I asked Jeffrey Smith to comment on
whether it's common for the industry to admit to such risks. Jeffrey
Smith: Absolutely. I was talking to one
scientist who did research for Monsanto and who was going around the world
promoting genetic engineering, and we were talking in a very technical manner. As
I kept drilling down, we finally came to an admission that there is a possible
threat of allergies. You cannot wipe it out. You cannot pretend that it's not
there. You're introducing proteins, for example, that have never been part of
the food supply before. There's no way to test in advance because humans
require multiple exposures before they develop allergic reactions. So when I
finally said to him that you're still exposing the population and some people
might get an allergic reaction and die, he basically said that it was worth it
because this stuff is important for farmers for increased productivity. Then he
went off in terms of seeing what kinds of farming is going on in India, neatly
distracted from the fact that he just admitted that he was willing to risk the
lives of human beings eating the food for the promise that this technology will
help farmers. Now, we know that the average genetically
engineered crop reduces yield. We know that in India, for example, thousands of
farmers have actually committed suicide after betting their wife's fortune and
borrowing heavily for genetically engineered cotton. That has been a disaster
there. We know that the incomes from farmers
using genetically engineered crops has not necessarily gone up, but in fact the
closed markets has caused a huge economic catastrophe in the wake of their
introduction. JS:
Another questionable comment made earlier in the media scrum was one we heard
earlier. Here it is again. Juan
Enriquez: We're doing what we've been doing
for thousands of years, which is how do you make what's out there more
productive and better tasting and easier to grow. JS:
And Jeffrey Smith responds to this
comment. Jeffrey
Smith: This concept that they're willing to
risk the lives of human beings for this promise is like how we started off by
saying that GM crops are, "more productive, better tasting, easier to grow."
Well, they're not in general more productive. There is no product out there
that is engineered to be better tasting. Being easier to grow is true in some
cases, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth the ease of herbicide
tolerant crops if we're also dramatically increasing the use of herbicide and
putting potentially dangerous crops in the mouths of Americans. JS:
Jeffrey Smith had a number of concerns with the message that was coming out of
this conference in Saskatoon, and in particular, the comments being made by
keynote speaker Juan Enriquez. We just heard Juan respond to my question
regarding genetically modifying our food supply and the risks posed to human
health. His response then proceeded to dismiss the precautionary principle and
suggest that if such unfounded worries over genetically modified foods had been
applied to other technologies, we wouldn't be driving cars, using steel,
or eating salt. And Jeffrey Smith responds. Jeffrey
Smith: It was a brilliant response, if you
wanted to try and force the sense that if anyone is against GMOs they're
anti-science. Those of us who are demanding more science are being called anti-science.
The examples were just fantastic public relations opportunities. His complete
mischaracterization of the precautionary principle was telling. This is the kind of thing that was
reported by Dan Glickman, the former Secretary of Agriculture under Clinton. He
was a big biotech cheerleader. Towards the end of the administration, before he
stepped down, he said, "what I saw generically from the pro-biotech side was
the attitude that the technology was good and that it was almost immoral to say
that it wasn't good because it was going to solve the problems of the human
race, and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. If you're against it, you're Luddites.
You're stupid." This concept of being a Luddite, of being
ridiculous (the way Enriquez laid it out with driving cars and eating salt)
made it very unpopular to be a critic. In one sweeping motion, if you were
against GMOs, then you were against any technological progress. He ignored of
course those who were concerned about DDT and nuclear testing and all the
things that turned out to be serious health and environmental problems, and
just started to focus on salt, and driving cars. It was not at all a scientific
discussion; it was not at all logical. It was one of those emotional and
irrational arguments, and it was not scientific. In fact, there was a book
called Genetically Modified Language
where a linguist evaluated the statements of these pro-biotech advocates, and
found that they used irrational and emotional and non-scientific arguments to
call those against GMOs emotional, irrational, and unscientific. JS:
And in wrapping up my phone conversation with author Jeffrey Smith, he ended
with these final comments on Juan Enriquez and his place as the keynote speaker
at the CropLife Canada Conference. Jeffrey Smith: What we have is a seriously dangerous
and primitive technology based on assumptions that are 40 years old in terms of
the science, and it's obsolete. We're feeding the products of this infant
science to millions of people. We're releasing it into the environment where it
can never be recalled. We have billion of dollars at stake, so these companies
and their proponents are willing to risk our lives, our future, our environment
for getting their products to the market, getting patents. Ultimately their
desire as stated by them is to genetically engineer 100% of the world's food
supply. I think he [Juan Enriquez] was very polished-the "surprisingly safe
technology," "remarkably safe," "faster and more deliberate"-all these
statements were very polished. It's completely obvious why he was the
spokesperson or the keynote speaker for CropLife, who has been notorious around
the world for taking information and turning it into disinformation to promote
these products. To
me, all the bells and alarms rang when I heard these classic statements. It's
wonderful-it's like throwing me a softball. These are statements that are
entirely unsupported with facts. Yet, they are repeated over and over again. In
fact, $15,000,000 for five years at least are spent giving these types of
statements to Americans so that they would be in favour of genetically
engineered crops, thinking that it was going to feed the world, that it was
more precise, that it was well tested and remarkably safe, and that if you're
against it you're stupid. This is what I'm up against. It takes me some time to
unwind those tightly knit false arguments. But it's pretty easy these days.
We've got thousand of sick, sterile, and dead animals linked to GM feed. We've
got damage to virtually every organ and every system of laboratory animals that
have been fed these products and tested carefully. We have thousands of toxic
and allergic type reactions in humans, and we have numerous assumptions that
were used as the basis for safety claims that have since been overturned. It's
not hard to actually unwind these deceptive points; it's just a question of
having access to people. Thank you for that opportunity. JS: And that was Jeffrey Smith, the
Executive Director of the Iowa-based Institute for Responsible Technology.
Jeffrey is the author of Seeds of
Deception and his most recent title, Genetic
Roulette - The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods.
Jeffrey spoke to me over the phone while on a speaking tour in Vancouver,
Washington. Links
to more information on Jeffrey and his books will be made available on the
Deconstructing Dinner web site where you can also access Jeffrey's GMO Trilogy
which we featured here on the program back in 2006. We will also place links to
more information on Juan Enriquez, the President and CEO of Biotechonomy - a
Life Sciences and Research Firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. Juan
was recorded in September at the 2007 CropLife Canada Conference held in
Saskatoon, and you can expect many more recordings in the upcoming weeks and
months that I compiled while attending the conference. Some of these include
exclusive interviews with the President of Cargill Canada and the General
Manager of Monsanto Canada. And in closing, I'll leave you with a quick clip
played earlier in the show featuring the radio I recorded while driving from
Calgary across the prairies to the Saskatoon conference. Repeated
Audio of Dow AgroSciences commercial:
Global demand for Nexera Canola is gaining momentum fast. So sign your 2008
Nexera Canola contract now for competitive yields, a premium over commodity
canola, more delivery options, two new varieties, profitability. Sign before
September 30 and receive a four dollar break on signing bonus, plus a three
dollar break on next year's cereal bonus. Get on board. Contact your Nexera
Canola retailer today. Accomplish more on the same acres with Dow AgroSciences. theme music JS: That was this week's edition of Deconstructing
Dinner, produced and recorded at Nelson, British Columbia's Kootenay Co-op
Radio. I've been your
host Jon Steinman. I thank my technical assistant John Ryan. The theme
music for Deconstructing Dinner is courtesy of Nelson-area resident Adham
Shaikh. This radio program is provided free of charge to campus/community radio
stations across the country, and relies on the financial support from you the
listener. Support for
the program can be donated through our web site at
cjly.net/deconstructingdinner or by dialing 250-352-9600.
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