False promises of GM rice research
The Centre for Plant Functional Genomics has not applied to the Office of Gene Technology Regulator for a licence to research or trial salt tolerant rice. Yet the centre wildly claims that genetically manipulated (GM) rice ‘offers hope for the global food supply’.
“Without an application to the regulator, this research can only test an idea in the most basic way and is decades away from any commercial application,” says Gene Ethics director Bob Phelps.
“The reality of hot air claims by GM scientists who dip into the public purse must be checked to stop the waste of scarce public research funds on failed GM projects. No GM rice has passed any safety tests or public health hurdles anywhere and it is not grown commercially.
“In a recent Catalyst program * these researchers agreed that reviving our soils is a valid response to salty farmlands. But they dismissed the soil management option as too hard, without discussion, and advocated for the expensive, patentable, high-tech, GM option.
“To ensure food security for future generations of Australians, our public research should focus instead on sustainable farming systems that respond to the end of oil and phosphates, scarce land and water resources, and global climate change,” My Phelps says.
“But now corporate interests dominate the public sector too. Every public research team is compromised by having contracts with GM giants. For instance, last week Monsanto acquired 20% of Western Australia’s public plant breeding program InterGrain and as a result of the deal Intergrain now has GM wheat on its research agenda.
“Monsanto owns over 90% of GM crops and 26% of all commercial seed supplies globally.
“There is little prospect of commercial success from the centre’s work with rice because the drought tolerance trait is mediated by multiple genes interacting in the plant genome. Such muti-genic traits are just too complex for crude GM cut and paste techniques to work.
“Despite 30 years of research, the only commercially viable GM crops to date are the transfer of two single genes from soil bacteria – Roundup herbicide tolerance and Bt insect toxins. Only herbicide tolerant and insect resistant soybean, corn, canola, cotton and alfalfa have been commercialised.
“Drought and salt tolerant plants, nitrogen fixation in grains and more nutritious foods that rely on multiple genes cannot be manipulated using GM techniques.
“Governments should now reality test the false promises made by GM interests and should conclude that it’s time to abandon this hopeless GM adventure.
“Let’s get our research priorities aligned with reality, not GM fantasy,” Mr Phelps concludes.
COMMENT BY JOE LEDERMAN:
I believe it is wrong and biased for Bob Phelps to stigmatise something simply because it involves a gene-splicing technology development for production, as he has done in his response to the story about the development of a salt-tolerant rice strain.
Maybe the lumping of all GM in one category as “GM food’ (or ‘GE’ foods) – as if every GM technology is always the same – does a disservice to the biotechnology sector as doing so potentially gives Bob Phelps and cohorts an opportunity to stigmatise everything and anything that uses gene-splicing. Bob condemns anything with a gene-splicing element even at the early stage of development when the salt-tolerance genetic modification experiment is being just proven. It is also unfortunate that the reputation of something that shares the concept of a gene-splicing exercise with something unrelated can be potentially tainted so easily.
I don’t like negativity and total cynicism to an experimental concept that could help improve things but which is ruled out as unacceptable because someone is saying gene-splicing must be disqualified as a potential tool for improving the world.
Perhaps people might realise where we would be if there was no genetic modification work being undertaken to develop our vaccinations all the time. Would it be seriously preferable to avoid creating any such vaccinations – even when we need to splice genes in order to keep up with the speed of virus mutations.
We ought to ask ourselves why it is that some people can proclaim all things that are so-called “natural” ought to be automatically considered superior to new technologies that might improve the circumstances of the starving or the sick or the homeless?
Must we always be compelled to accept NATURAL DISASTERS simply because we are told that they are ‘natural’?
I would like Bob Phelps truly to justify his claim that creating a salt-tolerant rice is a bad thing – instead of just stigmatising an attempt to resolve an obvious problem. Would he rather that we condemn every salinated-flooded region in Asia to starvation and oblivion?
I think you’ll find, Joe, that many of the people in opposition to GM anything are also vaccination sceptics.
I applaud Bob Phelps for his sustained efforts over many years, with only not-for-profit status and meagre funding, to bring people’s attention to the potential health and safety aspects of GM technology, unlike the major corporations like Monsanto who have unlimited funds and are all-for-profit. There is I believe, an underlying agenda behind Monsanto’s race to control every seed on the face of the earth, GM, conventional and now, organic. The long term health effects of GM food are unknown. What we do know is that farmers trying to grow GM cotton in India have gone broke and many are committing suicide. Haiti said “thanks but no thanks” to Monsanto’s offer of seeds after their “natural disaster” recently. They’d rather deal with their natural disaster naturally, thanks very much.
There are social networking groups on Facebook called Millions Against Monsanto and and Organic People against Monsanto with thousands of members.
People are waking up to what is really happening and are no longer only concerned with food security, but food sovereignty. The group Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, led by Nick Rose in Qld, is growing in numbers and will be a real voice for the concerned consumer in the near future.
Salinity is a serious issue in Australia and we’ve brought it upon ourselves by importing Western farming methods to a landscape and climate ill-suited for this. So we understand about salinity here and more and more farmers are looking at sustainable, organic farming as an option – those that haven’t been driven off the land by the forcing down of the value of their produce by our supermarket duopoly that is, more corporate destruction of our food security and sovereignty -45000 farmers have left the land over the last 20 years largely due to this.
Call us sceptics, call us “natural faddists” or whatever you will, we are convinced, we are committed, we are growing.
I defend your right to express your opinion Joe however I think deeper consideration of the issues are required. It is only Man’s arrogance that gives rise to the opinion that the human race knows better than Nature and can improve upon it. Following that path almost always leads to unnatural disaster.
How outrageous that any private company looking for a profit shoud be allowed to “OWN” any food! Food is provided by our Creator, God for all people, and should NEVER be a product any greedy company like Monsanto can own and control! What have we allowed to happen? We have got to take our food back, with all rights to farm and plant seeds which have been passed down by farmer’s families for generations! SAFE, HEALTHY seeds for people to buy, plant and consume. Such greed should never be rewarded with profit! Let us protest boldly and with confidence that we have the RIGHT to plant and grow food from “healthy” seeds in a free Country! NO GENETIC altering of our food is HEALTHY for any of us! This is a disaster of catastrophic proportions, and we will see it’ s impact on our health, and our children’s health, if it is not STOPPED!
To Joe Lederman,
I don’t think its blind scepticism that is at the heart of Bob Phelps’ comment. His principle point is this: 30 years of GM research, obstensibly owned by private interests, have not yielded a single benefit to society. Rather than tacking the root causes of salinity, poor crop yields, envrionmental degradation by re-thinking our agricultural systems, the gene-jockeys like Monsanto et al are fixated on a short-term high-tech solutoin that has inherent risks but no track record of success which only perpetuates the problem and by extension, justification for their existence. Bob Phelps is merely saying: “Hang on, this GM experiment is extremely costly to the public purse but isn’t producing any discernable benefits to society, yet burdens it with all the risks. ”
If we were truly concerned about feeding the world, there are already a multitude of other solutions that are proven, here and now (not decades away), are cheaper and clearly sustainable and equitable. Bob’s is the ‘Occam’s razor’ of the agricultural/GM debate.
I think Bob is providing a valuable service by calling for a wider debate to consider all the options on the table. GM is welcome to be a part of that discussion but its not the only game in town. At the moment, GM is fast becoming the betamax of the technology world.