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The NSW and Victorian governments have lifted their bans on the growing of GM canola. Katrina Fox looks at what this means for consumers. 
Genetically modified (GM) food has been touted as the saviour of the starving masses in third-world countries.
Proponents of genetic engineering argue that if existing crops in places such as Africa are modified, they would be able to survive the hostile conditions and provide much-needed food to the people. GM foods are more nutritious and just as safe as non-GM varieties, they claim.
Consumer confidence in GM foods, however, isn’t exactly high, with polls suggesting the majority of us would prefer our daily sustenance did not contain items whose original DNA structure has been tampered with.
Nevertheless, the NSW and Victorian governments have announced recently that they will no longer observe a ban on the growing of GM canola – a move slammed by Dr Judy Carman, director of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research (IHER) who argues that safety testing of GM crops is severely lacking.
Carman claims that our food regulator, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), does none of its own safety testing, instead relying on GM companies to provide data.
“Canola seeds are crushed, the oil comes into the human food supply and the rest of it, which is called meal, goes into animal feed,” she tells CHERRIE. “The oil has never been safety tested [independently] anywhere. Generally it’s all done by the applicant company and would you trust a tobacco company to do safety testing on tobacco?”
Bob Phelps, executive director of Gene Ethics, an education and lobby group that’s been in existence since 1988, agrees. “There is evidence that some GM foods are not safe and the assumptions on which the assessments and regulations of GM foods are based by FSANZ are questionable.”
Measuring the impact on health of GM foods is not an easy task. As Carman points out in her chapter in the book Recoding Nature: Critical Perspectives on Genetic Engineering, without full preliminary testing of GM crops, we don’t know which diseases to look out for in people.
“Consequently, we are likely to be unaware of any problem until a critical mass of clinicians begins to individually recognise that they have been seeing a lot of syndrome ‘XXX’, start asking their colleagues if they have seen the same syndrome, and push for an investigation. If this does not happen, we may never know there is a problem,” she writes.
She does, however, refer to the case of the Showa Denko KK company which produced the amino acid tryptophan from a GM strain of a particular bacterium. “Taken as a supplement it resulted in an epidemic of illness in the United States and Europe. Although the product was 99.6 per cent pure, 37 people died within months and 1500 were permanently disabled before the governments stopped counting.”
The effects of GM crops on the environment are also not assessed adequately, Carman says. “The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator determines if [a GM crop] is safe to release into the environment, so it does an environmental and health assessment.
There are two aspects of health: one is occupational health and safety – is it going to harm people walking past the crop? And the other is in relation to food. But when it comes to food, they defer to FSANZ, the food regulator, whose data has been provided by GM companies.
“As far as I can see there’s been no environmental assessments done on these crops. At the time they go into the ground as a trial crop, at that point you really need to determine through independent testing what the yield of the plant is, and how well it compares to non-GM varieties and not using assumption-based reasoning like ‘Oh we think it’s going to be all right’, but a hard-arsed assessment of what the effect on soil, on birds, on native animals and waterways is – but they don’t do it.”
As a consumer, even if you want to buy GM-free foods, there’s no guarantee that’s what you’ll get, especially in the case of canola, which is a particularly promiscuous crop. “The gene moves, the pollen moves, the seed moves and non-GM farmers will find their crops will be contaminated with GM canola very quickly,” Carman warns.
And then there’s food labelling requirements, which by all accounts leave a lot to be desired.
“FSANZ assumes all foods are safe,” Phelps says. “If it looks like canola oil and tastes like canola oil, it is canola oil and unless it tests out differently they’re not going to require it to be labelled.”
Carman goes further: “Consumers aren’t being told if they’re eating oil from GM canola or cotton seed oil because it’s not labelled,” she asserts. “Then of the things that come into the food supply that are supposed to be labelled, there is no policing of the labelling laws. There is no testing of foods on the supermarket shelves for GM contamination ... We don’t know what we’re eating.”
http://sites.greenpeace.org.au/truefood/guide2.html
www.geneethics.org
www.iher.org.au
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