Americans have been eating GM food for 6-8 years. Have there been any health problems related to the consumption of GM food?
Answer:
GM foods were marketed in America without any prior testing on humans or animals to establish how they might effect health. As recorded by the US Centre For Disease Control, food related illness have doubled in the USA since the introduction of GM food, but not one single test has been carried out to discover if GM food is related to that increase. What is more, GM food in America is not labelled so consumers cannot connect health problems to the consumption of GM food. Only one health test is known to have been undertaken to discover if GM food effects human health. It was conducted in the England, at Newcastle University, commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency, and showed that GM material moved from GM food into the small intestines of 3 out of 7 volunteers. (See UK Studies Reveal Health Problems With GM Food.) These findings demonstrate the need for more testing of GM foods and should signal an end to the present practice of using the ecosystem and human population in what amounts to a massive uncontrolled experiment.
There is a GM strain of rice which contains high levels of vitamin A which it is said could help prevent blindness in South East Asia. Is this an example of how GM food could benefit human health?
Answer:
The nutritional claims made for GM ‘Golden Rice’, are in reality little more than a marketing ploy. ‘Golden Rice’ produces a minute amount of vitamin A precursor carotene. A person would have to eat 3.5 kilos of ‘Golden Rice’ each day to get the recommended daily dose of vitamin A. Furthermore, a large section of the Third World population, (who this rice is intended for) is malnourished, and therefore their bodies would have difficulty converting the carotene in ‘Golden Rice’ into vitamin A. The starving people of the Third World do not need GM ‘Golden Rice’ – they can get all the Vitamin A needed from their indigenous rice varieties. India grows 2,000 different varieties of nutritional rice, and just two meals a day of locally grown rice would supply all the vitamin A needed by India’s starving population. The problem is not lack of nutritional rice, but poverty. Poor people cannot afford to buy two rice meals a day – be it conventional rice or GM rice. (See, Feeding the World.)
Proponents of GM technology claim that GM medicine crops can produce more and safer medicines at cheaper prices. Surely GM medicine crops have advantages for human health?
Answer:
In general, the benefits of GM medicine crops are likely to be off-set by the high level of risk they pose to the environment and human and animal health. GM medicine crops represent a greater hazard to the ecosystem and human health than GM food crops because they produce biologically active compounds which should never be allowed to enter the food and feed supply. A contamination crisis occurred in the USA when a GM medicine crop contaminated a food crop intended for human consumption. (See GM Contamination Crises in the USA Pose Health Risks.) There are other issues related to the growing of GM medicine crops which are discussed in full in the website section GM PHARMACEUTICAL AND INDUSTRIAL CROPS. The main reason for ‘growing’ medicines in GM crops is because it is more profitable for the biotech companies to produce medicine this way than developing them in indoor factories. Using farmers as ‘low cost production units’ saves biotech companies the expense of building and maintaining pharmaceutical factories. While farmers are being promised a premium for growing GM medicine crops they may well find that the costs of growing GM medicine crops outweigh the profits they earn. Furthermore, producing medicines from plants rather than from bacterial or animal cultures is not necessarily safer, nor will the cost benefits of GM medicines necessarily be passed onto the consumer. (Profits from GM medicine crops may well be absorbed by the biotech companies who have massive research and development costs to recover).
Why does the World Health Organisation (WHO) support the biotechnology industry even though no tests have been carried out to see if GM foods effect human health?
Answer:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) is dependent for its existence on funding from its member countries. The United States of America is it’s most powerful member and its major financial donor. The US government aggressively promotes its biotechnology industry and has lobbied every layer of the WHO and the many agencies of the United Nations (which oversee global issues of food, health, environment and human development) to ease the way for the spread of GM crops into Africa, India and other parts of the Third World. The degree of pressure which can be applied by the USA in these organisations can be seen from the example of how it reacted when the WHO issued a report suggesting that human health would benefit from a diet which contained no more than 10% sugar. In response to this report, the powerful American Sugar Association demanded that congress end its $406 million dollar funding of the WHO unless the ‘dubious’ report in which the 10% recommendation was made was scrapped. It is not difficult to imagine how the American biotechnology industry would retaliate if the WHO or the FAO were to suggest that GM crops and products be subjected to health tests.
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