GM wheat: the story of our daily bread | TechNyou
BY JASON MAJOR
TECHNYOU (reproduced here by kind permission of TechNyou)
Australian consumers will soon be eating GM bread that has never been proven safe, according to Greenpeace.
Greenpeace have lately been rattling the can about CSIRO’s proposed trials of GM wheat that have altered starch characteristics. Part of the proposal to the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator was for possible human feeding trials, which they especially didn’t like.
As part of what Greenpeace say is just the beginning of a concerted push to oust any GM wheat from Australia and elsewhere in the world – research trial or otherwise, they yesterday released a report, “Australia’s wheat scandal: the takeover of our daily bread”. They certainly didn’t pull any punches in their criticism of CSIRO and other research organisations such as the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics.
Is the criticism justified?
I thought I had better check it out. In trying to get a handle on the actual CSIRO research, I have spoken to CSIRO’s Dr Matthew Morell, Theme Leader, Future Grains, Food Futures Flagship, who headed the research into the GM wheat with altered starch characteristics. I go into more detail about this wheat as we go and at the end.
First the Greenpeace report. If I was to go through every part of the report I thought needed clarification or context you would need to take an annual leave day to read it so these are just some of the main points. The report is also often a political and economic debate rather than a scientific one and so steps outside our agenda.
Greenpeace claim: Commercialised GM wheat by 2015.
This is highly unlikely. The closest GM wheat to commercialisation is the CSIRO wheat mentioned above and that is still in the research phase rather than any final tweaking for commercialisation. Dr Morell says that it would be at least 2017 before that hits the market, if all goes well with the proposed research trials and it gets through all the regulatory hoops and hurdles – and further trials.
Conflicts of interest?
Greenpeace are concerned that this year’s GM wheat trials were proposed and approved while two directors of Nufarm were serving on the board of the CSIRO. I am unsure how this is relevant as CSIRO are not lawfully allowed to approve such trials. This is the responsibility of the Australian regulator agency, Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR). CSIRO can chat and approve all they like internally, but they cannot conduct any such trials – laboratory or field – unless they apply to and get approval from the OGTR – which they have.
See CSIRO’s OGTR application DIR 093, and if you are interested all the other applications at this url
Shoddy science?
Under their heading of “Shoddy Science”, Greenpeace make the following claims about gaps or flaws in our regulators’analysis:
Failure to require corporate applicants to conduct molecular analysis to map gene insertion sites and copy number. This means that scientists and their corporate partners do not know what and where they have inserted novel genes into GM wheat before releasing it into the environment.
And – Failure to require corporate applicants to disclose evidence of short-term genetic stability.
And – Failure to require corporate applicants to disclose details on genes inserted, declaring this information ‘commercial in confidence’. (this one is partially true in that such sequences are not released publicly, but they must be made available to the regulators – FSANZ, at least – as part of their assessment)
I am unsure where they got there information from for this statement, but this information is exactly what Food Standards Australia New Zealand require as part of any application to have a GM food assessed before it is approved for human consumption. See references below for a more detailed idea of just what FSANZ do re: safety assessment of GM foods. And yes, I am aware that many of those opposed to GM crops think their assessment is insufficiently rigorous, but that is not for me to judge. The other side think their assessment procedures are too rigorous and make the cost of doing such research only accessible to those with lots of money – ie big corporations.
And – Failure to require corporate applicants to provide evidence that GM will not cause toxic or allergic effects in animals and humans. No amount of testing on animals or humans can prove that GM is safe.
Apart from the fact that no amount of testing can prove that non-GM or conventionally-bred food is safe either, I can only assume that Greenpeace are referring to the CSIRO wheat with altered starch trait at the stage of the research it is at now, in which case this statement is true. But the point is that the CSIRO wheat trials are research trials only. That is, they are trials designed to understand if the technology is working as they want it to. That is, the genes they silenced are having the desired affect. Should they decide that they can take this knowledge into a commercial variety then the research testing for toxicology and to determine if any unintended affects such as increases in allergenic compounds or anti-nutrients are present will be done. In fact, it is mandatory as part of any FSANZ assessment application.
As Greenpeace point out there may be all sorts of unintended affects caused by inserting chunks of DNA into a genome. This is well acknowledged and as pointed out is part of any research process to understand what unintended affects have occurred, what caused them and why. As far as the CSIRO wheat goes this stuff is par for the course. I guess the question for the consumer is whether this is sufficient testing? How safe does our food need to be before we are prepared to eat it?
Human feeding trials
The Greenpeace report states that The CSIRO announced that GM wheat from this year’s field trials in the ACT will be used for human feeding trials. This will be the first time in the world that GM wheat will be tested on humans. CSIRO and its global biotech partner, Limagrain, intend to test GM wheat on rats and pigs before testing it on Australians. However, there is currently no publicly available information on the parameters of these animal-feeding studies
CSIRO have been granted approval for human feeding trials, but they have yet to decide if they will conduct them. This approval came following a full application to the OGTR in addition to approval from a human ethics committee that is made up of external experts and operates under the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research) guidelines.
The human feeding trials – these ones anyway – have nothing to do with safety testing. If conducted, they will assess if the altered starch characteristics are having the desired affect. That is, the wheat has been altered to have higher levels of the resistant starch, Amylose, which is important for bowel health. For this type of analysis, one or two days are apparently all that is required to establish any effect.
In my opinion it’ s clear that GM crops are over-regulated.
But with people like greenpeace activiest any regulation to potentially improve the safety of our food will be NEVER enough in the case (and ONLY for this case) of food coming from gm vegetables.
At the bottom of their noising and boring complaining there is a lot of fear and disgust.
And you cannot convince even your little child to eat any healthy food like cabbages or lattuce if he feels disgust about it.
Millions already eat gm maize and soy with no ill effects. Greenpeace are a multinational who make money by selling fear. they should focus on the real issue of climate change and stop fueling the anti science agenda.