FIELDS OF GENES: The Battle Over
Biotech Foods
Broadcast on THIS MORNING, CBC Radio, May
3-7, 1999
FIELD OF GENES PART 1 - MAY 3, 1999
AVRIL BENOIT (CBC): Hello again, This Morning continues on Radio One. We now begin a series about a revolution in what we serve for dinner. The revolution is about food, specifically food that is genetically modified. We can already buy many of these at the grocery store and even more on the way. Biotechnology companies have staked billions of dollars developing these so-called novel products. Millions more are being spent to try to make consumers comfortable with the idea of eating foods with foreign genes in them. But some people find them hard to swallow. And to help us take a look at the battle over biotech foods, I'm joined by our Ottawa producer, Bob Carty.
BOB CARTY: Good morning Avril.
BENOIT: Good morning. Now, over the course of your series, you'll be bringing us various dimensions of this story. But why do you think it's important to address these issues right ow?
CARTY: I think we're at a really interesting juncture, a really interesting moment in the history of this particular science and these products for three reasons. One is that there's new science coming out, and we're going to look at that a bit more on Wednesday, regarding the possible negative environmental and human health consequences of these kinds of genetically modified organisms or GMOs as they're called. That's one reason - it's not conclusive but it's a very interesting science.
Secondly, there's a whole new generation of GMOs just about to come on the market. The new generation is called nutraceuticals, and they're promising to bring us things like plastics in a plant or food that you can eat to prevent cancer. So, there's a new explosion coming of even more products.
And thirdly, there's a meltdown in public confidence in Europe over these products.
BENOIT: So you'll be taking a look at that. Now, it seems... we have talked about biotechnology and food on our program, we've been hearing about it for years. Can you tell me how much of this genetically modified food is actually out there right now?
CARTY: A lot more than people know. You're right, the science goes back to about '82 when they first got genes from one species into a different plant altogether. But there were years of testing, and it was only in '96 when approval started in North America and in Europe. And since then, it's been an avalanche. We went from just four years ago having zero acreage in commercially-grown genetically modified foods to having over 75 million acres, about ten million of those in Canada. Half of all the soya crop, for example, in North America, is genetically modified. There's 39 crops approved in Canada like corn, potatoes, canola, wheat, soya, tomato. So, in fact, the genetic revolution is around us and inside of us.
BENOIT: So it's not just on the farms. We're able to buy this stuff in the stores too. What kind of food can we buy that has already modified... at least some of its ingredients are?
CARTY: They're on the shelf. Some estimates are as many as 30,000 different products on the grocery stores shelves. That's largely because processed foods contain a lot of soya - soya beans, soya flour, soya oil, soya corn oils - which are genetically modified. You know, you have canned soups, you have processed cereals, baked goods, pasta, pizza, chocolate, salad dressing, oil, margarine, a pet food, and the sugars, you know, all the soft drinks. Even Aspirin has a bit of sugar in it that could be from a corn fructose. And then, your French fries, Avril.
BENOIT: Are you serious? All of that?
CARTY: Yeah. An awful lot of stuff.
BENOIT: I had no idea.
CARTY: And we don't know how, you know, exactly which is which, because they're not labelled of course. But all of those could contain genetically modified organisms.
BENOIT: If they're so prevalent though, Canadians must be fairly open to, accepting of these foods?
CARTY: It seems. Most Canadians in the polls... it's interesting. Canadians say they've heard of the word biotechnology and they're not uncomfortable with it, but in the same poll say they admit to not knowing a lot about it. And as you may have heard in the news this morning, my colleague in this series, Dave McKie, reported that the dieticians just had a survey of their own people, saying that their own people don't trust the information being given to them from the biotech companies or by the government regulators.
But in this area of public opinion, really, the big story is in Europe. As I said earlier, they're on the same timetable as we are about approval of new products, but last year, they hit a big bump in the road. Public opinion went to as high as nine out of ten in some European countries rejecting genetically modified organisms.
So I asked myself, what's the big difference across the pond here, Europe and Canada? And to sort that out, I pulled together a few BBC reports, a few sound effects of the protests over on that side. And I went to find an expert to sort it out. And I went to a fellow named Peter Montague. Peter is the director of the Environmental Research Foundation in the United States, and he writes a lot on that intersection between the environment and health. And he watches genetic debates around the world. So here's what Peter Montague makes of the protests and media reports on genetically modified organisms, to GMOs in Europe.
TAPE REPORT BEGINS
BBC, Radio Announcer: The big American biotechnological company Monsanto has been defending itself against the strong attack from Prince Charles. He criticized the practice of genetically modifying food, saying he believed that the use of the technology took mankind into the realms that belonged to God, and God alone.
PROTESTERS: Say no to GMOs, say no to GMOs...
PETER MONTAGUE (Director, Environmental Research Foundation): The public Europe has been extremely negative. In England, Ireland and in India, people have ripped up test plots of crops. They have burned fields, they have swelled the streets with tens of thousands of protesters. They have threatened to throw governments out of office.
NORMAN BAKER, MP: There's a hidden revolution going on in this country, but none of you out there, none of us in Parliament have ever voted for this revolution. This revolution is being driven by a small number of unelected, multinational companies largely based in America, at the expense of the environment, at the expense of farmers, at the expense of consumers.
BBC ANNOUNCER: There are more signs that consumers attending against genetically modified food with a move by three fast food outlets to ban them from their menus.
MONTAGUE: In England, the seven largest grocery store chains are committed to getting genetically modified organisms out of their stores. They are aiming for zero genetically modified crops, including in processed foods.
PROTESTER: We don't want genetically engineered foods. We don't want genetically (inaudible)...
BBC ANNOUNCER: The owners of restaurants, cafés and take-aways and other caterers are to be fined up to 5,000 pounds if they fail to inform customers that the food they're buying contains certain genetically modified ingredients.
MONTAGUE: Really, it's the death knell for genetically modified organisms in England for at least the next five years, and maybe longer than that.
MUSIC ("Food 'N Health 'N Hope" by Seize the Day): ... the mother nature terminators of food 'n health 'n hope ... Cause we're Monsanto, that's right, Monsanto...
MONTAGUE: Europeans are very concerned about this, they're concerned about safety. They have fresh in their memories, at least in the memories in the older people, the Nazi experiments with eugenics to produce a super race biogenetic engineering and genetic modification and genetic selection. So, they're not... they don't think of this as a benign technology, they think of it as evil. The experience in England and France was mad cow disease has undercut the credibility of government. And in general, I think Europeans are more concerned about the taste and the nutritional quality of what they eat than are Americans and Canadians. Americans particularly, you know, our basic staple diet is French fried potatoes and iceberg lettuce.
MUSIC: We're more than nature terminators, hell on earth creators, gene manipulators, biotech dictators, the future's going to hate us...
MONTAGUE: My personal take on genetic engineering is that it does have the potential for medical benefits. For example, genetic engineering has been used to produce insulin which is needed by diabetics. I am not opposed to genetic engineering in principle if it's done under careful laboratory controlled conditions, but the use of genetically modified organisms in food crops is right out there in the open environment and it's directly in the human food chain. We will provably see some kind of gene flow from one creature to another in an unexpected way and it will be a bad surprise when it happens.
We need to stop and reflect on what we're doing. Proceed we must, but we need to be extremely cautious and slow and thoughtful and deliberative about doing it.
TAPE REPORT ENDS
CARTY: Avril, that was Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation.
BENOIT: There's an incredible amount of passion there. It's understandable with mad cow disease and how it affected England, so it's understandable they'd be protesting and much more concerned, but do they know something about the science of biotechnology that the average person here doesn't?
CARTY: I think that's probably a really critical question: in almost every big, tough, scientific or technology question, can the layperson - and I put journalists like us in that category - can the layperson understand deep science and complex science? Maybe we can't, but at the same time maybe we have the right to try and we have the right to choice at the end of the day. When laypeople find it hard to sort through their science they usually then rely of course on the producers of the products or the regulators and what's happened in Europe of course is that people don't trust either of those.
BENOIT: Right, and this hasn't yet spread...this concern hasn't spread to Canada and the United States in any large scale?
CARTY: Not, yet, but we're seeing some signs that are really quite intriguing. In the United States for example, corn sales to Europe have fallen in the past year because the corn producers can't separate what is genetically approved material and what is not. In Canada, Canadian canola cannot be sold in Europe; now, we don't sell a lot in Europe, but that's a big concern for our trade minister and our agriculture sector, and everybody is worried about Japan where about two thousand different municipalities have already moved towards labelling, wanting labelling of genetic foods. They're really worried about that market. Farmers are beginning, on this side of the Atlantic, to think twice. You know, maybe they like genetically modified plants, but if they're not gonna sell, they're not gonna plant them.
BENOIT: Right, how are the biotech companies reacting to that?
CARTY: Well, they call the reaction in Europe, hysterical. They say that the claims of critics are exaggerated. On the other side I should add, critics also say that the claims of the biotech companies are exaggerated; they claim great things of these products - that probably they'll deliver many more health benefits than they actually can.
But to sort out that reaction, I did talk to a Monsanto official. They say they're not scared about that meltdown in Europe of public opinion. But last week Monsanto announced it would not pursue its terminator technology until it was more fully studied. The terminator is that genetic technology that prevents plants from reproducing. It's caused a lot of uproar in India. So that's a significant retreat I think by Monsanto which owns the subsidiary which owns the rights to that patent.
Still Monsanto says that all this will pass. There's an interesting metaphor ... in fact there are several metaphors about technology that are being thrown about. The critics use the Titanic, DDT, the Chernobyl metaphors. On the other side, Monsanto officials use the example of the refrigerator. People were worried that ice cubs from the refrigerator when it was first introduced would make them sick. Of course that was silly. That's the viewpoint of Mike Montague, he's no relation to the other Montague. He's the director of research operations at Monsanto and a molecular biologist. And here's Mike Montague and how he reacts to the uproar in Europe over GMOs
TAPE
MIKE MONTAGUE: The movement of genes from one organism to another certainly sounds scary even on the surface of it. It's interesting that virtually every new technology that has ever been introduced throughout the history of the world has met with resistance. Sometimes it comes from a perceived issue of safety and ultimately as people learn more about the real value of the technology and lean more about the real safety margins of the technology, the technology is adopted and this story of resistance followed by adoption has recurred again and again throughout the history of the world. I personally have no hesitation whatsoever about consuming those products. The amount of testing that is done for genetically modified foods is an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude greater than the food derived from classical breeding.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: That was Mike Montague, the director of research operations at Monsanto.
BENOIT: Monsanto is a major player, isn't it in genetic engineering? It's a favourite target of the critics.
CARTY: It is a target. It's not biggest company in this field. There are of course a number of others on this side of the Atlantic - there's Dupont and Dow Chemical - and on the other side there's AgEvo and Zeneca and Novartis. Monsanto is not the biggest, but it is a target I guess because it's been the most aggressive in trying to sell the concept of biotechnology. And it has generated ad campaigns in Europe that in turn have generated a lot of negative, not positive, feelings towards both the technology and this company. Monsanto though, does have a credibility problem in trying to be the pitchman for the technology and its credibility problem comes because of its history as a chemical producer. It's actually a classic example of the changes in this century. Monsanto was an example of this being a chemical century and now it's an example of the next century perhaps being the biotech century.
BENOIT: Well, tell me about this company. Where does it come from? Who is the founder?
CARTY: In St. Louis, Missouri, an Irishman named John Queeney decided to start a little chemical manufacturing company in 1901. And he had another job so he called the company Monsanto because that was his wife's name - she was Spanish, Olga Mendez Monsanto - and since he was moonlighting I guess he had to keep the company name a bit away from his own …. So it wasn't Queeney chemical. And he started off making saccharin and was fortunate enough to get a little contract after the first couple of years with this tiny little upstart company called Coca-Cola. So their company took off.
There's not a lot written, Avril, about the history of Monsanto other than the corporate version. But there was a study done by a social ecologist by the name of Brian Tokar. He teaches at Goddard College in Vermont. So here's Brian Tokar running through some of Monsanto's history.
TAPE BEGINS
BRIAN TOKAR: Monsanto is not a brand name that many people recognise because really from the beginning they've been involved in manufacturing chemical pre-cursors which were largely sold to other chemical companies. They began to be involved in the manufacture of PCBs. Monsanto came to be perhaps the world's leading producer of PCBs. Monsanto first became known to the public as the company involved in what was the first major industrial accident of the US chemical industry.
(CBC ARCHIVES NEWS CLIP) This is Larry Henderson speaking. This morning in Texas City, Texas, a ship in the harbour caught fire and blew up. Later a chemical plant near the waterfront exploded. The estimate of the number killed in the two explosions.
TOKAR: In 1947 a French freighter carrying ammonium nitrate fertiliser blew up at a dock near Monsanto's plastics plant which is outside of Galveston, Texas and this incident led to the death of over 500 people..
(NEWS CLIP): It reminds you very much of the great explosion that shook Halifax, Nova Scotia back in the first World War 1917, I believe it was. The force of the explosion through girders, timbers, steel, bricks miles away and it took along with it in the Monsanto chemical work which was situated alongside.
TOKAR: It was really only with their move into herbicides and carpeting in the 1950s and 60s that Monsanto became a major manufacturer of commercial products.
MUSIC: "See the USA in your Chevrolet …
TOKAR: In the 1950s, Monsanto made a chemical precursor for the fibreglass that was used to make the body of the Corvette and then there's Astroturf.
(NEWS CLIP)
Of course Astroturf has since become the symbol of the synthetic world with all its drawbacks. They had an arrangement with Walt Disney where they manufactured an all plastic house of the future which was an exhibit at Disney Land.
(NEWS CLIP)
Monsanto's role in promoting plastic as the centre piece of a modern lifestyle is similar to the role of the General Electric Company in promoting the use of electricity also in collaboration with Walt Disney. Monsanto's plastic house was promoted as a symbol of progress. The improvements in life that Monsanto was trying to convince us technology would bring.
(NEWS CLIP)
From the 1940s onward, Monsanto was claiming that PCBs were safe. They were selling them to many thousands of producers of electrical equipment around the world and it wasn't until the 1960s that we became aware of the fact that PCBs are in fact the most carcinogenic substance to be widely used in industry.
Probably Monsanto's most notorious product was agent orange. Agent orange was a mixture of two herbicides that was sprayed by the US Army to defoliate the rain forests of Vietnam during the 1960s. And although Monsanto was only one of seven major manufacturers of agent orange, Monsanto's formulation of agent orange had significantly higher concentrations of dioxin, which is the chemical contaminant responsible for most of the health effects of agent orange.
In the 1980s, Monsanto began shifting its research and development dramatically in the direction of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Monsanto has become the most aggressive promoter of biotechnology as the solution to a wide range of agricultural problems. They've used their purchases of major seed companies, Monsanto has bought seven or eight of the most important seed companies in North America as well as several in other parts of the world and this is part of an overall corporate strategy to basically make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that biotechnology is the future of agriculture.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: That was the social ecologist, Brian Tokar explaining the history of the biotech company, Monsanto. That's incredible Bob, that it had a part in so many of the chemical milestones of this century.
CARTY: Incredible eh? Larry Henderson back there in '47, isn't that great?
BENOIT: Unbelievable. Now that it's dedicated itself though to biotechnology and agriculture, what's become of all these chemical operations?
CARTY: In 1996 the company split. It actually separated itself in half ... it wasn't really a sell-off. It was just the separation and took all of its chemical operations and put it into a new corporation called Solutia. They live next door down in St. Louis, Missouri, but now all the chemical operations and I suppose the liabilities of that history belong to Solutia and Monsanto can call itself a life sciences company.
When I was down there visiting the company, it's fascinating. It's got an entirely new age corporate culture, very little hierarchy, team concept, people don't wear ties ... it looks like a campus, people in blue jeans and open shirts. They have an annual sustainability report on the environment. It's really quite an interesting corporation and once again I'm gonna give you a little bit more tape. Here' s Michael Montague again explaining how Monsanto re-engineered itself.
TAPE BEGINS
MONTAGUE: Monsanto is in the process of recreating itself. We couldn't become the great company that we wanted to be in the next century by remaining a chemical company. Frankly, the margins of profit on the chemicals that we were making was not high enough. It was also clear to us that the possibilities for improving the world were enormous. The ability to produce more food per hectare through the application of modern biology is intrinsically sustainable because the amount of top soil through agriculture is reduced. That means that amount of water that needs to be used on agriculture is reduced per unit of food. That means the amount of chemical that must be used to control weeds or insects is reduced and I actually look towards this technology as being the hope of the world to be able to sustainable produce the food and fibre that we will need to feed and clothe 11 billion people.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: That' s Mike Montague Avril, of Monsanto.
BENOIT: Now what do you make of that argument that their products can help feed and clothe the world?
MIKE: It's an interesting argument and they make it quite forcefully in the speeches by Monsanto president, Bob Shapiro for example. The logic is that not only can they increase yield, but also if they can have plants fight off the pests with BT technology for example - the plant has a gene in it that makes pests and bugs and corn bores die - then farmers won't have to put as much pesticides on it and consumers will like that. In addition, another kind of product, the Round-up Ready plants are biotech foods that resist the pesticide. So the pesticide can kill all the weeds and not the plant-like canola. The advantage there is Monsanto argues that you don't have to till the soil; that is because you can kill the weeds, you don't have to turn it over with a plough in order to get rid of weeds and pests and that reduces the loss of topsoil by wind and water erosion. So that's the sort of logic of the argument, critics say though that frankly hunger in the world is not a problem of technology. There is enough food in the world currently. There are problems though of distribution and there's a problem of poverty. People can't afford the food. Technology is not the answer they say and there are risks in that technology including risks that eventually pests will become resistant, weeds will become resistant and you'll end up using more pesticides in the end.
BENOIT: Well Bob, our time is up for today. This is just the first of a five part series. What is next in your series?
CARTY: As you mentioned, later in the week we're going to look at some of the science issues, some of the cutting edge in that area. We're going to look at public policy - the whole question of are regulators approving these products in the proper manner, is there enough public discussion and debate about it? Tomorrow we have Dave McKie, my colleague coming in. You're going to have a chance to talk with him about another issue. This is not just a series about the science of biotech, it's very much an issue about politics and power and economics and sociology and cultures. And tomorrow Dave McKie with you is going to look at Monsanto again and the approval process of the first product of the biotech revolution which was bovine growth hormones for cows.
So that's more or less the series. And of course there are other reports all this week on CBC Radio News and on local programming.
BENOIT: That's right. Well good work. Thanks very much Bob.
CARTY: OK Avril, talk to you later.
BENOIT: We'd like to hear what you have to say about genetically modified foods. You can drop us a line here at CBC This Morning, Box 500, Station A, Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1E6. Our fax line is area code (416) 205-6134. Our e-mail address is thismorning@cbc.ca and you can find lots of links about biotech foods, all kinds of links relating to our series on our website which can be found at www.cbc.ca.
FIELD OF GENES PART 2 - MAY 4, 1999
AVRIL BENOIT (CBC): Yesterday our Ottawa producer Bob Carty talked about the debate in Europe over genetically altered food and the company that's leading the biotech revolution. This morning we continue our look at Monsanto. Not about the science behind its bovine growth hormone, but about how the company convinced U.S. regulators to approve the hormone and how it hopes to do the same in Canada. The CBC's Dave McKie is in Ottawa. Hi David.
DAVID MCKIE: Hi there.
BENOIT: Now, you've been covering bovine growth hormone for quite some time, for the past year quite a lot. Why is it so important, this one hormone?
MCKIE: Well, Avril, it's important because the bovine growth hormone is the first product in what we're hearing more and more being called the biotech revolution. And as such it received a lot of scrutiny. And I think it also received a lot of attention because we're dealing with milk. And you've heard people, many people refer to milk as nature's purest food, and of course, who drinks milk? Well, children, and pregnant women. So I think that when you add those elements there were a lot of people who were watching this thing very closely, and it was really up to Monsanto to erase a lot of doubts that critics had.
BENOIT: And what stage is it in the approval process in Canada?
MCKIE: Well, it hasn't been approved by Health Canada. They've turned it down for now, saying that it's too dangerous for the cows and so on. But it has been approved in the United States and Latin American countries and Monsanto will always talk about all the countries that have approved this, but it's important to point out here that the United States is the only industrialized country that has approved the bovine growth hormone.
Now, Monsanto says that it has a good product, the regulators within the Food and Drug Administration in the United States say it's a good product. And many farmers in the United States have been using it for about five years. They love it, it's increasing their production.
But you know, when you talk to critics, they point out that Monsanto has a cozy relationship with regulators within the Food and Drug Administration. Those critics talk about the pressure that Monsanto was able to put on journalists who'd write negative stories about the bovine growth hormone. And we'll hear a really intriguing case a little later on about that.
BENOIT: Okay then. So what is the essence of the sales pitch that Monsanto uses to sell the product?
MCKIE: Well, that's a question we had, and so we went to St. Louis to find out. That's where Monsanto is based. It has two huge... they're almost like college-like campuses there. And we talked to scientists. They really talked about the science that was involved in this, the safety of the product and so on. We talked to their market analysts, and we talked to Gary Barton, who we'll hear from later on, who showed us around.
But you know, we talked to critics who painted a very different picture of Monsanto than the one that we saw in St. Louis. Those critics say that, you know, for example, Monsanto here in Canada offered Health Canada officials a bribe to get the product approved back in 1990 and we'll hear about that in a few minutes.
But first, we're going to visit a farm, because we wanted to find out, well, what's the big deal. What are farmers saying about this? So we asked Gary Barton, the PR person for Monsanto to take us to a farm. So this farm is about an hour and a half west of St. Louis. We drove through beautiful rolling hills, it was late in the afternoon. The hills were bathed in the afternoon sunshine and so on. And farmer Rick Sheer was there welcoming us, and he was cradling his daughter Elizabeth in his arms.
TAPE BEGINS
RICK SHEER: Eleven weeks.
MCKIE: Oh my God.
SHEER: Out enjoying the beautiful weather. (Laughs)
MCKIE: What's her name?
SHEER: Elizabeth.
MCKIE: Eleven weeks.
SHEER: She likes the cows though … Well, what can I show you? This is us in our working clothes. We didn't clean anything up, I mean, this is we look everyday...
MCKIE: Rick Sheer is a boyish looking farmer who milks almost 100 cows a day with the help of his wife, his mom and his dad. Still, he has time to meet requests from the Monsanto company to tour guests around his farm, explaining why he injects the cows with the bovine growth hormone which also goes by the trade name POSILAC.
SHEER: Just this morning I gave the doses and I gave 79 doses out of a total of 96 cows right now, that are in the barn. So I've been impressed with the production. It falls right in line with what's been reported. I've seen five to ten pounds, usually eight to ten pounds, increase over what they had been before.
MCKIE: Inside the milking room the cows are steered towards suction cups. The milk goes through the cups, through rubber tubes and into jars. There's no question that the bovine growth hormone forces these cows to produce more milk.
SHEER: Well, we try to take advantage of technologies that allow us to do it in a timely fashion and in a way that the cows work for us and we don't necessarily work for the cows. I need to watch my bottom line. I need to watch my feed costs, and I need to do the things that improve production and improve my bottom line by increasing production, and for our operation one of those tools that we used was POSILAC.
MCKIE: Rick Sheer has heard all about the controversy surrounding the bovine growth hormone, but he says his cows are just fine. Still, some critics have doubts. Health Canada rejected Monsanto's product because some cows were getting more udder infections, becoming lame and infertile. In Europe some scientists are expressing similar concerns and worries about links to cancer in humans who drink the milk from cows treated with the hormone. Monsanto insists it's right and its opponents are wrong. And someday it'll get the regulatory authorities in Canada and Europe to change their minds.
That determination has drawn a lot of criticism ever since the company started testing the bovine growth hormone over 15 years ago.
MARGARET HAYDON: I'm Margaret Haydon. I'm a veterinarian and I guess I started working on the bovine growth hormone about 1984. I'd heard of it before and it sounded sort of intriguing and so lo and behold the files were assigned to me for these particular drugs.
MCKIE: Margaret Haydon is a veterinarian at the Health Protection Branch. She is shy and she's known as a meticulous drug evaluator who takes detailed notes and asks lots of questions. Margaret Haydon is an unlikely whistle-blower. Her bosses ordered her not to criticize the department in public. Margaret Haydon is going to Federal Court to fight for her right to speak publicly. But she feels so strongly about the way the bovine growth hormone was reviewed that she agreed to defy the gag order and special publicly right now about a meeting with Monsanto that happened nine years ago.
At the time she gave a statement to the RCMP. She read part of that statement for us.
HAYDON: I believe the discussion concerned deficiencies in their data from U.S. studies. The Monsanto company offered $1 to $2 million with a condition that the company receive approval to market their drug in Canada, without being required to submit further studies or trials.
MCKIE: Margaret Haydon and two of her superiors attended that meeting. They, too, interpreted Monsanto's offer as a bribe. The RCMP were called in, but decided there were no grounds for a criminal investigation. Still, the fact remains that Monsanto representatives did offer money to conduct research if the bovine growth hormone was approved by Health Canada officials.
HAYDON: I guess at the time it didn't hit immediately, but I thought, wow, I've never been a room where this sort of offer has been made before. So, when reality sort of hit, yeah, that's what I considered it to, a bribe.
MCKIE: That's not the word Ray Mowling uses. He's president of Monsanto Canada.
RAY MOWLING (Vice-President, Monsanto Canada): I wasn't at the meeting, but the way we operate, and our professional status as a company and our sciences depends on that, we have to be very upfront. We stand by the science that we put forward and because we're science-based in everything we do. So that's the way we operate.
MCKIE: Was there talk of $1 to $2 million?
MOWLING: I understand there was some conversation about research and the value of that kind of research that would be required to support a file, but this is normal conversation about what it would take to demonstrate a file's safety, the efficacy of the product, human and animal safety.
It's amazing to me this thing continues to come up. This is one individual's opinion about what happened.
HAYDON: Well he wasn't there, and I guess he can say whatever he wants, but my interpretation of it was a bribe.
MCKIE: Margaret Haydon's story was corroborated by two other officials who attended that meeting. They even joked about being bribed. Her bosses rejected her characterization of the event as a bribe and accepted Monsanto's version of the story. But still, there was even more controversy.
In 1994 Margaret Haydon claims her office was broken into and files containing notes she took during that meeting with Monsanto were stolen.
HAYDON: That was a real shock. You know, when you keep cabinets locked and then you walk in one day looking for something else and discover that things are missing. I felt very angry after that. A lot of things were missing. Just by the space that was left. And I don't even know to this day just how much of my files are missing.
MCKIE: Health Canada's internal security agents called in the RCMP. The investigation was focused inside the department. The RCMP didn't turn up enough evidence to advance an investigation. For Margaret Haydon the whole experience was disillusioning. The notes she took during that meeting with Monsanto are still missing.
HAYDON: I was no longer assigned any bovine growth hormone submissions after that, and I guess you just keep moving on. I had no choice. Well, I don't think they had any concerns about individuals. I think the push is to get this drug approved and anybody that stands in their way look out. I'm probably one of those people that stood in their way.
BENOIT: Ah David, that's an incredible story. What is Margaret Haydon doing now? Is she still with Health Canada?
TAPE ENDS
MCKIE: Well, as you can hear that was Margaret Haydon, Avril, who was talking about her being one of those people who stood in the department's way. And it was really interesting, you know, when you talk to her. She was at the point of tears when she was going through her account of the events.
Now, she still has a lot of concerns. As a matter of fact, she testified yesterday with other scientists in front of the senators who have studying the bovine growth hormone. She talked about some of the lacks that she sees in the approval process within Health Canada. And other scientists, her colleagues, they talk about the way in which they were pressured to alter controversial bits and pieces about the bovine growth hormone. They were forced to alter, water down, if you will, reports that the hormone wasn't safe. And so that kind of evidence has been coming out over the last little while. And I have that evidence in documents, and have done a lot of stories about that.
BENOIT: Right. Now what is happening in the United States?
MCKIE: Well, there it's really interesting. Because they're watching what's been happening in Canada. And in the United States there is a possible lawsuit against the FDA based on the work done by the scientists. There are renewed questions about the whole approval process within the Food and Drug Administration and Monsanto's influence. And you know, you may be wondering, well, why is it important to look at what the FDA is doing? Well, that's important because you have to realize that the FDA works very closely with Health Canada. The two agencies share information. And according to a lot of documents that I have it's clear that in justifying their decisions to approve certain drugs, Canadian regulators point to the FDA and what the FDA has done.
BENOIT: Right. Now how has Monsanto been able to exert so much influence over the FDA?
MCKIE: Well, in a number of ways. You've got... they've got political friends that go right up to the highest political office in the land, and we hear a bit about that later on. They also can get tough with journalists and we'll hear a bit about that as well.
But first, I'm going to talk to John Stauber. He's a really interesting guy. He... back in 1990... the late eighties, he was a consumer activist who was really leading a campaign against Monsanto because at the time Monsanto got permission from the FDA to release test milk onto the market. This was years before the FDA gave its final stamp of approval. And John Stauber was an activist who was leading a very spirited campaign and I'm going to let him pick up the story from here.
TAPE BEGINS
JOHN STAUBER: It's a cut-throat, litigious company that's, in my case, hired the world's largest public relations firm, Burston-Marsteller, formed a phoney consumer group called the Maryland Citizens Consumers Council and actually infiltrated a meeting of farm and consumer activists that I organized in 1990. I found out some months later that this organization didn't exist. The people who made it up were employees of Burson-Marsteller, their client was Monsanto and they were spying on farmers and consumers opposed to and concerned about bovine growth hormone. So it's a company that uses dirty tricks to get its way when necessary. And it's a big mean powerful chemical/genetic engineering firm.
TAPE ENDS
MCKIE: At the time a spokesperson for Burston-Marsteller was quoted as saying that the company couldn't control what its employees did on their spare time. For its part Monsanto denies these allegations. The company says that it has always depended on solid science to win the FDA's approval, not dirty tricks. Monsanto says Stauber is a man with an agenda to discredit the company. John Stauber says he has documents to back up his claims of dirty tricks. And he doesn't stop there. He and many other critics say former Monsanto employees who eventually ended up at the FDA, played a key role in approving the bovine growth hormone. First, there was a top scientist who was on Monsanto's payroll. Then there was a Monsanto lawyer, who after a stint with the FDA is now back with the company.
TAPE BEGINS
STAUBER: The revolving door that sees people go from being political representatives one day to being lobbyists for Monsanto the next day is a tremendously broad corruption of our democratic process, and Monsanto probably plays this game better than anyone else, but it's all a very sad comment on the demise of democracy here in the States.
GARY BARTON: I'm Gary Barton. I'm the director of biotechnology communications for Monsanto company. I work in the agricultural sector of Monsanto. Good administrators have many job opportunities and in an area of public policy and science there's a number of job opportunities, both in the private and public sector. There was nothing improper about their actions.
MCKIE: Gary Barton has also had to field questions about the politics of Monsanto. His chief executive officer, Bob Shapiro is a friend of President Bill Clinton's, and according to a reporter who recently wrote a series of in-depth articles about Monsanto for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the company was able to use its influence to convince President Clinton to push the French government into accepting American biotech products. And then there's Monsanto's relationship with journalists. Critics say the company aggressively goes after reporters who produce negative stories about its products. And that's exactly what happened in Tampa Bay, Florida. The protagonists in this story are two former investigative television reporters for the Fox station there. In recognition of their battle against their former employer and Monsanto the husband and wife team received an award last year from a Washington-based advocacy group associated with the American consumer rights activist Ralph Nader.
UNIDENTIFIED: The 9th Annual Joey Callaway Award for Civic Courage is hereby presented to Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, journalists in the public interest. Little in their experience prepared them for the searing year at the Fox network affiliate Florida TV station WTVT. The lawsuit and its process of disclosure will give people a detailed look at Monsanto's specific intimidation tactics and their consequences for free news organization. (APPLAUSE)
JANE AKRE: Thank you very much for the award. We really do appreciate it. We've gotten a lot of criticism lately, and so it's nice to be among friends. With a two-year-old who had a new affinity for ice cream and myself knowing I should up my calcium intake, I had a personal interest in finding out why this story dropped off the radar screen.
STEVE WILSON: When they hired Jane and I they made a big deal about we were the team that wasn't going to say no. They had us go out in a dark alley one night and they filed a commercial, and we were the investigators, and I swear, they hired a fog machine and they had us walking down this dark alley and we were the investigators who weren't going to take no for an answer. Well, I know I don't need to tell you this, but things aren't always as they appear.
MCKIE: At first it appeared that the station was going to run the four-part series. The advertisements had already run, the air date was set. The programs were all set to go.
(SOUND OF COW MOOING)
AKRE (Excerpt from news report): Critics, including the Massachusetts state agriculture commissioner in 1989, have called it crack for cows, because what POSILAC effectively does is rev up a bossy so she gives more milk.
MCKIE: That excerpt you've just heard never made it to air. Instead, Jane and Steve posted the four stories on their website. And here's why the stories never aired. Monsanto lawyers sent two letters to the station complaining about bias. Fox pulled the plug and forced Jane and Steve to rework their stories.
AKRE: They also had problems with a line in there, critics call it crack for cows, because after all, crack is an illegal substance and this is not an illegal substance. They had a great deal of problem with that.
WILSON: I mean, this wasn't anything new. When you write things like that you know they're not going to like it because it isn't very flattering. It is a rather colourful way of explaining in pretty simple terms that this is a product that revs up a cow and speeds up its metabolism, and that's why we used it, not to embarrassed them.
AKRE (Excerpt from news report): But apart from potential suffering for the animals there's the biggest concern for many people. What effect might the drug have on us, or our children when they drink milk from treated cows?
WILSON: Where we got into trouble with these people was they would say, we want you to put in there the bite, the sound bite, the comment from the Monsanto person that the milk has not changed. It is the same, safe, wholesome product we've always known. They wanted that in and they wanted us to take out all of the other scientists who had good credentials who made the point that the milk is not the same, and the difference in the milk could be significant and could lead to cancer. That's where we drew the line.
MCKIE: Steve Wilson and Jane Akre rewrote their stories 83 times. Still, the station was nervous. Fox eventually fired the two of them. They're suing. The case is expected to go to court sometime this year. As for the station, well, it eventually hired another reporter to do three stories about Monsanto and the stories included a critical scientist Jane and Steve were going to use in their stories. The two former Fox reporters say the stories the other reporter produced were more friendly to Monsanto. Gary Barton, the company's director of biotechnology communications says the conflict has nothing to do with his company.
BARTON: Monsanto is not involved in this at all. This is an issue between two reporters and their station. And I'm sure if they wrote a good, accurate piece of journalism that's an issue between them and their station. We certainly have no... we talk with hundreds of journalists. I have no control over the program that you air and our interview. We have no control over their program.
AKRE: Oh Gary, Gary, Gary, you're misspeaking again!
WILSON: I hold in my hand a letter, the gist of it is that Monsanto is attempting to pressure Fox to come after Jane and me.
BARTON: We were trying to be a bit proactive in the sense of not waiting for a piece that, from all appearances, seemed to be moving in a direction that was not going to be a balanced piece of journalism. And I think to sit quietly behind, or aside, and see something progress that is not balanced, is not appropriate and not giving a fair representation for the audience would be inappropriate on our part.
MCKIE: Let me ask you this, you've been in this business for how long now?
BARTON: Twenty-five years.
MCKIE: In that 25 years have you ever seen the company write letters like that to a media outfit complaining about something that is about to go on the air?
BARTON: I haven't been involved in any other.
MCKIE: So would it be fair to characterize it as a fairly unusual move for the company to make?
BARTON: Well, it's unusual from my perspective.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: Okay then, so that's one example of Monsanto putting pressure on journalists. David, are there other examples? How many others are there?
MCKIE: Well, there are many examples, but I'll give you two quick ones. There's The Ecologist, this is a British magazine. And what Monsanto did was it didn't like the content of a particular edition so it had a printer... it basically forced a printer into reconsidering its decision to print the magazine, otherwise there would be consequences. There's also the New York Times. There's a reporter there who used to write a lot of stories about Monsanto and John Stauber, who we'll hear from in a couple of minutes, talks about pressure that was put on that reporter to basically stop reporting about Monsanto.
BENOIT: Now Monsanto is one of many companies that are in this line of product. Why is it so important... Bob Carty was explaining how they're just more high profile. Why is it so important for us to understand Monsanto's history?
MCKIE: Well, Monsanto is a big player. It recently opened up a $10 million crop development centre at the University of Manitoba. It's got a lot of other products in the regulatory pipeline. So there's more to Monsanto than just the bovine growth hormone. And so I think that as such it's important for people to realize that this company has a history, it has a history with regulators, and not all of that history is to, you know, Monsanto's liking. So it's important for people to realize that. Now, I'm going to give the last word to John Stauber. He now runs a centre in Wisconsin that monitors the way companies lobby governments and he says that Monsanto has learned a lot of its tactics from its days as a chemical company.
TAPE BEGINS
STOBBER: The commitment to biotechnology in agriculture, I think, mirrors the commitment that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agri-business industry showed to promoting chemicals in the fifties and sixties. It's the same single-minded commitment to get these products onto the market as quickly as possible and deny consumers any say in the matter.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: There you go, last word to John Stauber. Dave, this is the end of your report for today. What are we going to hear tomorrow as the series continues.
MCKIE: Well, Bob is going to continue tomorrow and he'll look at some of the cutting edge science with regards to genetically-engineered foods, the impact on the environment. It's an intriguing debate, but the jury is still out, so Bob is going to take us for a walk through a bit of that debate.
BENOIT: Okay, we'll listen to that. Bob Carty tomorrow. David McKie this morning, thanks very much.
MCKIE: You're welcome.
BENOIT: Bye bye. David McKie is a CBC Radio reporter based in Ottawa.
FIELD OF GENES PART 3 - MAY 5, 1999
AVRIL BENOIT(CBC): Hello again, I'm Avril Benoit with Michael Enright.You're listening to This Morning, here on CBC Radio 1. We now continue with our series on genetically modified foods. With the look at some of the science involved. This Morning producer Bob Carty is in Ottawa. Good morning, Bob.
BOB CARTY: Hi, Avril.
BENOIT: Now the science of genetic engineering is complex. It's an immensefield and 25 minutes can't possibly cover it all.
CARTY: It's given me a few headaches in the past few weeks.
BENOIT: How are you planning to approach this?
CARTY: Well, I think we have to narrow it down because it is such a wide field. There are issues of resistance of pests and weeds, and super-weeds. There' are questions of environmental diversity, about possible spread of these biologically changed organisms into other organisms. There's even concern about increased antibiotic resistance because antibiotics are used as markers inside genes. All of that we're going to put aside, and today, look at something that's really quite new just in the past year. And that is some evidence, very preliminary evidence that there might be some human health concerns. Now, I should make a couple of caveats here. The regulators - Health Canada, the FDA in the United States, and the regulators in England, and the biotech companies themselves - insist and they're quite right, there is no proof as yet. There's no solid evidence of human health dangers from these kinds of new foods - the soya, the corn, the cotton, the potatoes, the tomatoes, et cetera. But there is some intriguing new evidence and it arises out of sort of a new, more modern concept of genetics.
BENOIT: Well, the traditional concept is what? That they're the building blocks of life, the blueprints that give plants, and animals, and people their characteristics.
CARTY: And people say that with a sort of a mechanistic kind of view. You know, that one gene produces one kind of trait. One gene in us produces blue eyes or...
BENOIT: Right.
CARTY: In my family's case, a big nose, I guess.
BENOIT: And that's not true?
CARTY: Well, it is in part. It's partly true. But it's not just as simple as saying, one gene gets one trait. It's how they act together. The new understanding of genetics is how the gene operates in relation to other genes. And where it sits inside the DNA structure. An individual plant might have 40,000 genes. If the gene you put in is at the beginning, it's going to do something different to the plant than if it's at the end or the middle of it. If it sits on top of another gene. So this is a much more of an ecological view of genes. One thing always affects the others, if you want. In the ecology, we saw the example of rabbits being introduced in Australia some years ago, and they had no natural predators so they just went wild and destroyed tremendous amounts of grass lands. Now, they were trying to put something positive into the environment, but they changed many, many other things in the environment as a result. That's the new understanding of the insertion of genes - that it can be unpredictable.
BENOIT: Right. Now these scientists, how do they actually insert the genes?
CARTY: There actually is a gene gun. I actually saw one. And it bactually has a little 22-calibre casing for a little shot to go in. That's one of two ways that genes get into cells. The hurdle is that cells don't want foreign material inside them. They have natural defences. So there's two ways. One, is you take a little gene gun and the shot you're using is in effect tiny, tiny, tiny pellets of gold or tungsten that are coated with genetic material, with DNA. And the gun goes off and splatters into a piece of root or a piece of stem, or a leaf of a plant. And the material physically goes inside those cells. The other way is using bacteria, because bacteria can also be invasive. They are pathogens, they're diseases. They actually can go inside other cells and leave genetic material behind.
BENOIT: And you would insert that how? With a syringe or something, or?
CARTY: You would basically culture the bacteria and develop your gene, the gene you want. You can isolate the one gene you want to put in. And you put it inside the bacteria and let the bacteria go to work on the other cells, just in a petri dish. And so that's how they get it in. I tried to think of what that would sound like on the radio so, maybe you'll indulge me just for one moment? This is more or less how I imagined the insertion of genes would work. Have a listen.
(SOUND EFFECTS)CARTY: There we go.
BENOIT: Oh Bob, you're out of control.
CARTY: Courtesy of Warner Brothers, and too many cartoons.
BENOIT: Now what were you trying to do there? What was that about?
CARTY: You didn't get that image?
BENOIT: You know, my imagination was working in overdrive. But I kept seeing cartoon figures bouncing around.
CARTY: Yeah. What I imagined happening, and it actually comes from a discussion I had with a geneticist about this process. It's a random process. It's like imagining trying to get a beautiful statue, a priceless piece of art, say a Michelangelo, wanting to get that into a museum and putting it on display. And doing that by putting it on a catapult and hurling it across the street, through the windows of the museum, and hoping that it lands upright without damaging itself and without destroying any other priceless artefacts in the museum. So, let me demonstrate if... play that sound again.
BENOIT: Okay.
(SOUND EFFECTS)
CARTY: Okay, here's the gene, the statue, okay? There's the catapult, that'sthe gene gun being put into the cell. Here it goes.
BENOIT: It's flying through the air now? Across the street?
CARTY: Across the street. And it crashes the cell lining, there it goes, and it lands inside. But we don't know where and how and what damage it does and whether it's okay.
BENOIT: So for all we know, it's upside down. That's wonderful. It sounds like a random process.
CARTY: Yes. If you talk to both sides of the debate, the pro and con side of the genetic engineering debate, everyone agrees that there are certain things that are fairly predictable and other things that are not. It's predictable that you can isolate individual genes. But once you put them in by either of these two methods we have so far, the bacteria method or the gene gun method, we won't really know where it lands up in the chromosomes, where it lands up inside cells. So, the biotech companies, in effect, get a lot of what they call undesirable cells. They use that word rather than say maybe a more crude word. They get a lot of mutations, a lot of mutants in the cells they develop. And their hope is that one out of a million lands in the right place, the statue standing upright without hurting anything else. And the trick is really how to eliminate all the others undesirables. That's what they do at Monsanto. I went down there to have a look at how that process of weeding out really works. The gene gun process or the bacteria insertion process are done at a rate of about 10,000 cells at a time. What happens is, those cells start replicating. They put them into environments where they will reproduce really quickly. And of course, you're probably worried about that tungsten and gold earlier? Remember that?
BENOIT: Yeah.
CARTY: Well that's left behind in the original cells. But all the offspring ofthat cell have those new genes inside. And they grow them up in petri dishes,sort of like you know, you have a cutting of a plant and you put it in ajar of water on your window sill, right? And it eventually grows roots and
everything. Well, they do that in petri dishes, and get more and more bigger, bigger stuff.
Eventually, you see a plant emerge. And they throw out all the bad stuff. So, at Monsanto in St. Louis, I took the tour to understand this and here's a bit more explanation from two Monsanto people. One is Dr. William Kosinski, he's a microbiologist. And the other is my tour guide who you'll hear first, Ron Condray..
TAPE BEGINS
RON CONDRAY: We're now in the heart of the Agriculture Research Centre. Literally, almost as far as the eye can see, are growth chambers. As we do tours of visitors and we have some of the academicians, university professors, they may have one or two growth chambers. And they see our vast array of growth chambers and they think they've come to heaven. There it is. This is one of our growth chambers that's set up for warm room purposes, or incubator purposes. This is wheat, we're beginning to actually culture the wheat, has all the genetic information to produce a wheat plant but it doesn't look like a wheat plant. It looks like just a mass of tissue. And what our tissue culture people then do, is take bits and pieces of that growth, put it in various enzyme systems, other systems, to stimulate root growth, leaf growth, and eventually, will produce like you can see here, a little wheat plant that has that characteristics.
DR. WILLIAM KOSINSKI: And we look at these plants in the tissue culture stages, and the plantlet stages, and the growth chambers, and the greenhouses. We go through a rigorous field trial evaluation. And even after we have a commercial product, we are constantly, continually evaluating. These are safe products to eat.
CONDRAY: This is one of our more sophisticated growth chambers. In this chamber, we are simulating a rather cool but sunny day in a wheat growing field. We have a soya bean growth chamber next door. We can show some of the soya bean there that's not looking very good. And it's not because of the environment, because these growth chambers provide an ideal environment. So when something goes wrong, our scientists know it's something that they have done, not the environment.
KOSINSKI: Our guests will ask what type of a crop plant is this? And when we look out at the plants, what we see, it looks basically like a standard corn plant, or a soya bean plant. And our answer has to be, we don't know.
CARTY: Could something get by you with all this screening?
KOSINSKI: If you're a religious person, God is perfect. Let me tell you this, I can predict that 99.99999 % surety that you will take your next breath... And you just did. But I cannot predict that with 100 % surety.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: Avril, that was Dr. Bill Kosinski. And earlier, Ron Condray, both of Monsanto in St. Louis.
BENOIT: Now what happens if they make a mistake? What are the consequences?
CARTY: Well, they say they don't. They do insist that this is a very carefulprocess with a lot of very advanced science. And it does take 10 years to bring a cell along to eventual commercial crop. So they say they basically don't make mistakes, that they get what they plan. There was, however, an interesting incident in 1997 where some cotton - Monsanto cotton - which was resistant to the cotton bore. It worked quite well in resisting cotton boar. But the cotton bolls fell off and a lot of farmers were upset and got some payment from the company in return. That was unexpected. Now on the human health side - and again, there is no proof there havebeen any incidences of genetically modified food causing human harm - but some say there is a sort of smoking gun and it's tryptophan.
BENOIT: Which is what?
CARTY: It's a health care product that's been around for some time, made naturally from bacteria. And tryptophan is sort of an enzyme. It's a precursor to seratonin, as you'll hear, and it's a sedative. And it's used by people because it was natural rather than a sleeping pill. And most tryptophan has been a safe product. But there was one batch in the late 80s that was made with genetically engineered bacteria. And it resulted in a terrible human tragedy that's still largely unknown in Canada and North America. I asked two people, Avril, to tell this story. One you'll hear from is Brian Goodwin, he's a Canadian-born geneticist and genetic theorist who now teaches at Schumacher College in England. First though, telling the tryptophan story is one of the tryptophan casualties. And she is Karen Johnson from Abbotsford, British Colombia.
TAPE BEGINS
KAREN JOHNSON: My name is Karen Johnson. I'm 47 years old. I have three children, two grandchildren. I used to go snow skiing, I used to bowl, I used to play baseball, I used to have energy. I used to be able to come home from work and quickly do my housework so on my day off tomorrow type of thing, I wouldn't have to do anything. Ten years ago, I had trouble sleeping. I've always had trouble sleeping. And I started reading these articles in health food stores, books about L-tryptophan. When I first started taking L-tryptophan, it worked wonders. I took it for insomnia and it worked. And I thought well, this is good, it's better than taking sleeping pills or whatever, you know? It's natural.
BRIAN GOODWIN: Tryptophan is a food additive that's viewed as kind of mild sedative. It's a precursor of one of the neurotransmitters in the brain call seratonin which puts you to sleep, or relaxes you. Production of tryptophan depended upon the use of a bacterium and they simply knocked out the control gene. And the result was that the bacteria then overproduced this product. They produced much more of it than they normally would have. But the consequence is that there appears to be a toxic by-product.
JOHNSON: I got up one morning and I could not lift my head off the pillow. My body was in excruciating pain. After a couple of weeks, these various changes started happening in my body. I swelled up, my face was swelled up. I wasn't recognisable by any of my friends. I started getting these skin lesions and the pain was incredible. When I went to bed at night, it was like laying on a bed of hot needles. And every time you rolled over, those needles just stabbed you throughout your body.
GOODWIN: Nobody believed simply producing a perfectly safe substance,tryptophan, that that would lead to a toxic substance which was simply two ofthese molecules stuck together. Now, I have to insist that that's a hypothesis.But it's a very, it's a very convincing hypothesis. And the evidence, I think, points in that direction. This had the result of causing the epidemic known aseocinifiliamiolgea syndrome. A minimum of 37 deaths from this, and a minimum of 1,500 people who suffered various types of pain, disability, and it continues. It has continued for a long time.
JOHNSON: I was eventually diagnosed with Eosinophilia-Myalgia syndrome, EMS. It's a blood disorder and it destroyed my life, you know? Like I have no life. I'm too tired to do anything, I'm too tired to go anywhere. My life is not anywhere near as bad as some people. And many people have died, many people are paralyzed, all because of L-tryptophan.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: So that was Karen Johnson of Abbotsford, B.C., and geneticist Brian Goodwin of Schumacher College in England. Now Bob, how would these health problems compare to say the bad side effects from taking pills?
CARTY: Well in a sense, there is a similarity in that different people react differently. Not everybody got sick. And some people got much more serious consequences and died. On the other hand, this was a case where the actual product tryptophan wasn't the problem. It was that there was something else put in as a result, totally unexpectedly, of the genetic engineering of the bacteria which were like the manufacturing plants. Now, we have a little link on our web page, by the way, to the survivors of that tragedy. And they say there's been over 2,000 cases now litigated with the company that was responsible. And they've paid out over two billion dollars because of those impacts to people. Again, it's not quite proven because much of the evidence was lost or destroyed, but the key concept is the hypothesis of Goodwin, that this was the result of genetic engineering.
BENOIT: Now, how do you know that this factor of unpredictability hasn't been taken into account? You know, by the biotech companies and the regulators who are supposed to be looking through all of these things.
CARTY: But they do take it into account. But I think that they manage thatrisk quite adequately, and so do the regulators. The critics of course saythat they don't adequately enough. The newest science that has come into this debate comes from Scotland, that's the Pusztai, the Arpad Pusztai affair. He's a scientist at the Rowett Institute. He did this experiment with rats. He was putting lectin in rats because it's a possible insecticide. It could fight against nematodes, little worms, and little flies, that it would have great potential. He fed rats some of lectin that was genetically produced, and some that was just naturally produced. He thought the results would be the same, that is there'd be no harm to the rats. But the rats with genetically modified potatoes were injured.
BENOIT: Right. Now... and tell me more about him. What's his reputation as ascientist?
CARTY: He's a Hungarian, escaped the revolution, the repression in 1956. He went to England, he's been with the Rowett Institute for 35 years, published 275 peer-reviewed research papers.
BENOIT: All right. Okay...
CARTY: Pretty, pretty impressive man. But when he went on TV - and he didn't give the details - but he said on TV last year, that people are being used as Guinea pigs. Oh! His employers forced him into retirement. He was not allowed to speak out because of his contract. He subsequently had a heart attack, was in depression. Now however, he's been sort of rehabilitated, the House of Commons in England is interested in his testimony, and he's speaking out. He's... he says he's not a prophet, he's not a radical, he's just a researcher. Here's Arpad Pusztai.
TAPE BEGINS
ARPAD PUSZTAI: Please don't think that I was hostile to this technology. I expect the scientist working at Los Alamos during the Second World War were probably in the same situation. They were so heavily taken up and concentrating on the job in hand, they didn't have really much time to think about the implications. And I probably was in the same situation.
CARTY: Dr. Pusztai, your research was in the area of lectins which are substances that protect plants from insects. What did you find that surprised you there?
PUSTAI: What I found was very surprising. And we could not explain a great deal of it. In fact even now, we couldn't explain a lot of it. But facts are facts. Young, rapidly growing rats which are developing their internal organs, they are preparing for life, and we found that there were problems with the development. The liver was depressed. Some of the tissues indicated to us that there will be some problem with the immune system. Totally surprising. Now, I have to say it again. It was not the gene which we expressed in the potatoes. But it was how it was introduced, or how it was incorporated into this construct. There is no other explanation for it. But we still don't know what the explanation for it. But no matter what the biotechnology industry say, I don't mind if they stand on their head, I would say that I would state my professional reputation on it, that we do see these changes and these changes have to be taken into account. You can only reject them at your own peril. Guinea pigs are... should be in the lab, and not should be running on the street.
CARTY: On of the criticism people have made of your work, Doctor, is that you put it forward in the media rather than in a peer-reviewed journal.
PUSTAI: Look, I published 275 papers, so I know something about how to publish a paper. Now this process takes about a good two years. Now, we were at a point when the project was coming to an end because we had no money. That's it. The money is at the bottom of everything. Now, we agreed with my director and with Rowett that the best way to make some sort of impact is to go through the media. Everybody does it. Those people who know me and they know that I never over-claimed anything in my life. And people who believe in biotechnology, they regard me as the scum of the earth. I mean, they've destroyed my scientific credibility. I'm regaining it slowly. But you see, that for example, one of the charges leveled against me was … so why haven't you published it? You know that that when I was gagged, I couldn't even say who let alone write a paper. And even now, if I write a paper, it will have to be approved by my director, the very same director who said that it is rubbish. I mean, he has an absolute veto over me.
CARTY: What do we need to do now?
PUSTAI: Some form of biological testing is absolutely necessary. There is no science done. I mean, there is one paper in the Journal of Nutrition in 1996, a contract work done for Monsanto. They introduced a new technology on the back of one paper. The second paper will be my paper on genetically modified peas in July in the same journal. I mean, you can't really call that rigorous testing. I'm not saying that I said the last word, I didn't even say that like Moses, brought down the tablets from Mount Sinai. If there is anything to credit us that was when we did see the results, which were not to aid in my or other people's expectations, I did see them and I did say that I did see them. From here, the world will have changed.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: Avril, that's Arpad Pusztai, the former science researcher at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen Scotland.
BENOIT: All right. And as he describes it, there are people who have reasonsto dismiss his research. We can only speculate really on what they are. But what are, as far as you can see, the implications of the research?
CARTY: As he put it, there's not enough science but, above all, the problem may not be the actual gene that's going in, but how it's going in and what it's going in with.
I didn't mention this other complicating factor, Avril. When this genetic material goes in, it goes in with vectors. There is the bacteria that carries it in, but the genetic material that you want to put in also carries with it a promoter that sort of turns it on. It's like a switch and makes it work harder. And it also has a marker, DNA material, to identify which cells actually accept the new gene. So, these packages of DNA material go in all together. And those packages, in addition to the gene, are often made up of bacteria and viruses, which are pathogenic. They can be diseases. He's worried that this might be a very, very important avenue of research which might lead to well ... if it's the case in rats, could it be the case in young children who are also young people preparing for life? You know, that they could be injured by genetically altered food.
BENOIT: Yeah, it's certainly alarming. But Dr. Pusztai hasn't published hisfindings yet.
CARTY: He says it's coming, it's being peer-reviewed right now at the Lancet Magazine, a very reputable publication. We'll see how they do. Ithink it's important to say that replication of his work is quite important. And it's also important to say that other scientists in his field are not so excited about his findings. They don't think it's that significant. One of them is Brian Fristensky, he's a plant geneticist at the University of Manitoba. He does admit that Mr. Pusztai's work is interesting, even deserves more work, more attention, more investment. But Dr. Fristensky questions how much importance too attached to it.
TAPE BEGINS
DR. BRIAN FRISTENSKY: From any one study, it's very hard to draw hard conclusions. So you really need to do additional experiments and to reproduce the experiments. For example, compare different varieties of potatoes and see if you get as much difference from variety to variety, as you did between the transgenics and the untransformed. And of course, rats are different that humans so again, you have to be careful drawing any conclusions from that. Maybe the best way to put it into perspective is to say that if you have a disaster like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, you don't see everyone giving up their cars. We don't eliminate an industry simple because we see one thing that we may not like. What we do, is we work to improve it. Most of the people working in our field don't feel that there's any real intrinsic safety problem with genetically modified plants that would be any different than you would get with traditional breeding.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: Now Bob, you've drawn a picture here of unpredictability in thescience of this food. What are people supposed to make of it? What... whereare we supposed to go with this as consumers and as people who buy and eat food?
CARTY: I guess we're really in a quandary because the food is not labelled.And so you don't really have, as yet, much choice. And I think that there's movement on that front. We're going to talk about it in the coming days. But, because of the lack of labels as a consumer walking through the grocery store, we can't choose. If we decide that we want to be cautious about this now, the other factor of course that we talked about the other day, is how much faith we have in our regulators and in the producers, the companies. Individuals will have different appreciations and different risk assessments of that. But if you want to have the choice, we're really limited. The other problem, of course, is that if - and it's a big if - if there are some problems with genetically modified foods for humans, because they're not labeled, you can't do epidemiological studies. So it comes back to a set of regulatory questions, and we're going to look at those a bit tomorrow. And on Friday, we hope to have the Minister of Agriculture, Lyle Vanclief, who has been a supporter and promoter of these foods, and also is responsible for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
BENOIT: Very well then. Thanks very much, Bob.
CARTY: You're welcome, Avril.
BENOIT: Bye, bye. Bob Carty is This Morning's Ottawa producer.
FIELD OF GENES PART 4 - MAY 6, 1999
AVRIL BENOIT (CBC): We continue now with our series on genetically modified foods this morning, with a look at how government regulators determine what turns up on our dinner tables. Our producer Bob Carty is in Ottawa. Good morning Bob.
BOB CARTY: Hi Avril.
BENOIT: Now, in the last couple of days we've looked at the international debate over biotech good and some of the corporate players like Monsanto and some of the new and contentious science concerning genetically modified foods. And all of these issues seem to point to a prominent role, doesn't it, for thgovernment regulators?
CARTY: Absolutely. And a traditional role. Consumers want their governments to do some good science for two reasons. One is that the science is rather complex and very detailed and beyond most of us lay people. We talked about that a bit the other day. And secondly because, frankly, the companies involved, be they manufacturers of drugs or of novel foods, have vested interests. And we need to have some security that some objective regulator looking over their shoulders.
There's a trend though in the last 15 yeas in both North American countries, the United States and Canada, as well as a bit in England, towards industry self-regulation and less direct science by government departments. There's also been, in some countries like England, a great scare over mad cow disease, which has really scorched the credibility of regulators. People just don't have confidence in them over there. Here, I would say most of us, most Canadians do have confidence in our regulators, though that has been hurt by the scandals at the Health Protection Branch, which we talked about last fall. All of this though still points in the direction that regulation is needed, and it's needed actually more so because there is a new wave of genetically modified foods coming into the market called nutraceuticals.
BENOIT: Nutraceuticals, sounds like a cross between medicine and a healthfood component.
CARTY: Or a cross between maybe a food with a health additive. There's a formal definition the government has on it. They say nutraceuticals, or sometimes they're called functional foods, are: "foods that provide demonstrated physiological benefits or reduce the risks of chronic disease above and beyond their basic nutritional functions."
BENOIT: I see.
CARTY: Now, we have this first generation of genetically-modified foods, the ones that are resistant to corn bore beetles and the ones that are resistant to certain pesticides. Well, these don't have anything in it for the consumer, quite frankly. They have what are called agronomic benefits, supposedly, for the farmer, to help improve his bottom line.
But the next generations are designed for the consumer and it has both the food industry and the biotech industry very, very excited. I have a little piece of tape here. This is Kim Nill, he's deputy director for international marketing of the American Soybean Association. And he's talking about what genetic engineering can put into the lowly soybean.
TAPE BEGINS
KIM NILL: They will be able to genetically engineer soybeans and canola,for that matter, to contain a new biodegradable plastic. This plastic is allbut edible, it breaks down fast. The day will come where a farmer will growthe soybeans, plastic will be processed out of them and we'll have a renewable and biodegradable plastic on which to benefit the environment. There are terrific things coming in the next five years as far as value-added trade soybeans that will confer greater health benefits. Some will actually be able to prevent cancer. Another thing coming is conjugated linoleic acid which is another recently discovered anti-cancer ingredient, that can be put into soybeans, and again, through eating soyfoods literally we'll be getting healthier with every bite we eat.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: Kim Nill, the deputy director for international marketing for the American Soybean Association.
BENOIT: Boy that is reason, though, isn't it, to be excited. But they reallythink they can make plastic inside a soybean plant?
CARTY: It's amazing. They can... and also from canola and corn. And ofcourse, Mr. Nill told me that companies like McDonald's are very, veryinterested in this, because right now they have a tremendous cost inseparating garbage. Everything that's Styrofoam and non-biodegradable and all the foodstuff. If they get this kind of plastic in their fast-food outlets they could just throw everything into one stream of garbage. It'd be a tremendous cost-saving. There's also in the pipeline things like putting a vaccine, say a cholera vaccine inside a banana, or adding vitamins or calcium, or making your french fries absorb less fat because you genetically engineer the potato to absorb less fat. They might even be able to take allergies out of certain foods and make certain foods even tastier. All of this is exciting to biotech companies and to food industry people because it changes the balance of risk assessment by the consumer. If genetically modified foods are a bit of a hard sell now they become an easy sell, they believe, with these new products.
BENOIT: When they have positive attributes.
CARTY: Exactly. It changes the risk assessment. If you have in your hand a can of Diet Coke in one hand and a can of regular Coke, one has a 120 calories in it and one has one calorie. Now you may not like that artificial sweetener Aspartame, you may have some questions about it, but if you think about how many people die of obesity or heart attacks, you might go for that Diet Coke. It changes the risk assessment and the industry feels this is going to really be a tremendous boon for genetic engineering.
BENOIT: Well, right now these genetically modified foods aren't labelledthough. We don't have bottled water that says recommended to reduce the risk of cancer, which is the latest news here. But if they have positive attributes consumers would want to know that.
CARTY: Exactly. And the industry wants to have labels, and this is a bit of a contradiction they found in themselves, at least philosophically, because the biotech companies have opposed labeling for the negative traits that are in genetically modified foods right now. Those pesticide genes and so on. But they want it for positive ones because they can sell that kind of canola or soybean or corn with those cancer-fighting elements in them, they can sell those at a premium. So I think that means pretty definitively that labeling is coming for sure.
BENOIT: Right. It brings it back though to the government regulation of this kind of thing. What are the implications here for this new wave of genetically engineered nutraceuticals?
CARTY: Well, exactly, and labeling is one implication for governmentregulators, because they'll have to determine what are fair health claims in these new nutraceuticals. There's also a clear need for some more policy because there's no explicit regulations in the Canadian approval system for nutraceuticals, so they have to work on that, and frankly they've been talking about the need for a tremendous increase in staff, because of the tidal wave of new products that are coming. There's a question though as to whether the government will be doing adequate science screening, or are there still some of the risks that mistakes could get through.
BENOIT: In your series last fall, which was about drug approvals at theHealth Protection Branch, there were some concerns that the government scientists were becoming lapdogs of industry, not watchdogs. How do they compare with the government scientists who are supposed to study biotech foods?
CARTY: In effect the biotech foods and novel foods are studied simply much,much less, and that's because they're assumed to be the same as normal crops. That is, the starting point for this kind of approval process is a determination by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or CFIA, as to whether or not these new crops are substantially different or equivalent then the old potato. And generally they've decided up to date with the 39 or so approved products that they are substantially the same. So if they're the same, a potato is a potato so why look at it, why even study it. When they do look at it a bit they take the information on it from the studies provided by the corporate sponsor. That's okay, as long as the producers, the companies, provide good information.
BENOIT: And what if the industry doesn't provide good information, accurate information?
CARTY: There's the problem. Because the regulators don't do their own science, don't do very much basic science at all. So if the biotech companies are less than honest we have a bit problem. There was the case that we saw late last year about the bovine growth hormone, BGH, where some scientists did talk about that lack and gaps in the analysis that companies put forward about bovine growth hormone. So this can happen. And I've got another cautionary tale, that's not directly about biotech, but it does involve Monsanto, the big biotech firm, formerly a chemical company. And it involves dioxin and a whistle-blower by the name of Cate Jenkins. A couple of things before getting to the tape. We know now that dioxin is very, very carcinogenic, extremely bad stuff. But as recently as ten years ago humans were told not to worry because studies done by Monsanto and used by regulators in the United States showed that Monsanto workers did not have higher levels of cancer. And so, as a result, regulators allowed for generous limits on dioxins and a lot of lawsuits were lost by people complaining of having cancer because of dioxins.
BENOIT: And Monsanto workers were exposed to a lot of dioxin.
CARTY: Yes, in a particular plant down in Nitro, West Virginia. But what happens in this little story is that about ten years ago an EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, environmental chemist by the name of Dr. Cate Jenkins finds out that Monsanto's studies were not accurate. So here's Cate Jenkins explaining how those early studies on dioxin betrayed the victims of that toxin.
TAPE BEGINS
DR. KATE JENKINS: The studies that served to show, supposedly, that dioxin caused no harm in humans, was conducted by the chemical producers. Monsanto was the generator of a number of studies. Unfortunately, the government is bound to use these studies, even though they are generated by the chemical producers of dioxin, because there are no other studies.
NEWS CLIP: Dioxin scare in Missouri. A whole town may be covered by the highly toxic chemical.
JENKINS: Dioxin was the chemical of concern in Times Beach, and that caused the evacuation of a whole community and that particular area that's contaminated with dioxin is still evacuated today.
NEWS CLIP: The people of Times Beach have been frustrated and angered by a series of federal warnings that their town is not safe to live in. Dioxin, a deadly chemical, has been found in the soil at levels 100 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency...
JENKINS: Dioxin is a manmade chemical. It's an unwanted by-product that's created as a contaminant when people make things like Santophen, which was the active ingredient in Lysol, weed killer, Agent Orange, that was a defoliant that was sprayed on trees during the Vietnam War so that we could see ground troops on the ground for bombing.
NEWS CLIP: The Monsanto plant at Nitro, West Virginia. For 20 years this plant manufactured the herbicide 245T, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the stuff the Americans sprayed all over Vietnam. A by-product of 245T was dioxin. Monsanto denies that 245T affected the health of its workers, other than to give them a rash...
JENKINS: At the time Monsanto was very worried about the impact of being sued by Vietnam veterans. So they were worried about lawsuits. They published a press release during the suit by Vietnam veterans saying our studies show that dioxin does not cause any cancers in humans.
NEWS CLIP: Bizarre defects in many of the Vietnam veterans' children is terrifying. The father of this mongoloid child was actually sprayed by Agent Orange. The baby has no eyes.
JENKINS: The studies were paid for by Monsanto. The bottom line is that the Vietnam veterans were denied compensation for their cancers, their birth defected children. You could not win a court case when you sued a chemical company for exposures to dioxin. Say around Times Beach, or around some other chemical company. I am a chemist environmental scientist working for the Environmental Protection Agency since 1979. I was able to examine the actual statements of the scientist who had conducted the studies for Monsanto. And those were quite revealing. My evaluation of the studies, I would use the word, rigged. They designed a study to get the results that they wanted. The unexposed population that was supposed to be dioxin free actually did have exposures. Also certain key cases of cancers were eliminated from the Monsanto study for spurious reasons. There were many other problems. So I forwarded the information to another part of the agency. Initially they did start to really investigate the Monsanto fraudulent studies. They dropped that in favour of investigating me and retaliating against me. Monsanto wrote letters to EPA complaining. EPA wrote letters back apologizing for any harm that was done to Monsanto by my statements. I was transferred to another branch where I was essentially given no duties. I believe that looking at the way Monsanto and these other chemical corporations have acted in the past that it behooves the governments to essentially cough up the money, conduct your own science. There's an attitude here in the United States, oh, we need to contract out all of this government work, or oh, we are too large a government. No! We need to fund our own independent research and stop relying on just all of these outside sources. It costs money, but we need to do it.
TAPE ENDS
BENOIT: What a story. Kate Jenkins, a scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. What happened to her after she was transferred?
CARTY: She was harassed for two and a half years inside the EPA. The Secretary of Labour of the United States government had to intervene three times to tell the EPA to stop harassing her. It's really quite a story. There's an internal study done, it's a fascinating study, it's on the Internet, about the whole case. It concluded that perhaps what had happened here is that some of the government scientists at the EPA were too interested in later leaving the EPA and getting jobs in industry and that's why they were more sensitive to the company than to Kate Jenkins. I do have to confess my own respect for people like that, those whistle-blowers. They're just fabulous.
BENOIT: What about the original Monsanto dioxin studies? Were they ever disproven?
CARTY: Yes, the EPA now has clear evidence that dioxin is a human carcinogen. The National Institute of Health has done other studies. But for years the consequence was that those Vietnam vets that we've heard about suffering from Agent Orange dioxin effects had to accept what were little more than nuisance value settlements, compensation. And you have to wonder how many lives might be different if the science had been better.
BENOIT: Let's bring it back to Canada now. How good is our regulatory system in assuring that new biotech foods are safe for us and for the environment?
CARTY: Well, that's a question we can put tomorrow to the Minister of Agriculture Lyle Vanclief. But for today I went to talk to Brewster Kneen. He's an economist and a theologian - has degrees in economics and divinity. And he also was a sheep farmer for some 15 years. For the last couple of decades though he's been a food critic, the author of several books, the editor of a newsletter, and he's got a new book out called Farmaggeddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology. So I went to Brewster Kneen to talk to him about the regulatory system, but I just had to start off by asking him about why he called his book Farmaggeddon.
TAPE BEGINS
BREWSTER KNEEN: As I delved into biotechnology, genetic engineering, it's kind of the showdown. We thought nuclear was a showdown, but I'm not sure that biotechnology isn't. And that's why "Farmaggedon" is a kind of play on things, that we're playing with forces that we really have little understanding of, and could be apocalyptic. We're creating an environment in which we don't survive. So I'm kind of looking at it from a human perspective saying, okay, maybe it'll be an apocalypse for us. It's also a direct comment on the kind of hubris, the arrogant pride that seems to dominate the biotech industry and a lot of our technology, that oh, we know what we're doing and if we make a mistake we'll correct it with another technology.
CARTY: You used the word human hubris. What is so different about what is being done today by biotech companies, and what farmers have always done. A farmer is very much an intervening factor in nature, and you've been a farmer.
KNEEN: Yes, and certainly we intervened, and interestingly, over the years, 15 years of farming, we learned to intervene less and less because most of our interventions weren't very successful. We learned that allowing a pasture to grow what it wanted to grow and then working with that was really the best way to proceed, and that's a radically different process than saying from a board of directors, we'd like a canola oil with a certain characteristic, give the instruction down the line to the lab, say okay guys, go to it. We want a plant with these characteristics, without regard to species barriers or any kind of natural processes creating that. I think it just is a very different kettle of fish than baking bread or making beer or breeding animals or selecting seeds traditionally.
CARTY: Brewster Kneen, your book Farmaggedon does address some of the regulatory issues, which pose themselves after this week of examining biotech goods. How are genetically modified foods regulated in Canada?
KNEEN: I guess I could say quite simply, rather poorly. We've had a strange kind of situation where the mandate of Agriculture Canada and Industry Canada from 1983 was to push biotechnology, genetic engineering, as a driver of the economy, with a lot of hype and a great deal of public money to subsidize it.
CARTY: And why would governments be doing that? That'd be an interest of promoting jobs I assume.
KNEEN: Well, that was their rhetoric. You define genetic engineering as a technology, you define genes as information and kind of neuterize and neutralize the whole field so you can manipulate it at will without any kind of moral second thoughts. The assumption of the regulatory process, and we have to remember that the regulators started out as an office inAgriculture Canada, have had a dual responsibility of regulators and promoters and the promotional side of it and getting new products to market has been a part of their mandate from day one. Okay, they've had this conflicting mandate. So what they've done is said, well, okay there's a couple of principles. The first thing that was established was - and you see this is ideological from the beginning - one, there is nothing new about biotech. Therefore we can utilize existing regulations and so on, we don't need to come up with anything special, because there's nothing special about it. Well, that biased the regulatory process right from the beginning. And then they came up with a doctrine called substantial equivalents.
CARTY: That means that these products, the new genetically modified potato is the same as the old potato.
KNEEN: Yeah, they look at it and say well, let's see, it looks like a potato, tastes like a potato, Monsanto tells us it's a potato, so I guess it's a potato. So substantially equivalent to something we're very familiar with, so therefore go ahead and put it out on the market
CARTY: With what kind of regulation?
KNEEN: None really. I mean, initially you're supposed to do various trials, but the problem is, all of the research that is supplied and on which a decision is made, is supplied by the company seeking to commercialize a product.
CARTY: So we don't do any firsthand research.
KNEEN: Not really. Nothing to speak of.
CARTY: Should we?
KNEEN: Yes, I think quite unequivocally we should be doing some. Because one could do spot checks as you do with automobiles and so on, to say wait a minute, is this really what it says it is. And it's interesting, it came up a couple of years ago, there was a canola that got onto the market. In fact, there was a whole lot of it seeded out. It was grown in Alberta. It was out west, it was two years ago. Before the company that was selling it realized that whoops, that was the wrong gene in that. Now Agriculture Canada had approved that, without actually knowing what the gene construct was that was in the seed that was released. Then the farmers that had planted it had to plough it up.
CARTY: You suggest the government department Agriculture Canada is responsible for both promoting these products as well as regulating them. How is that a conflict?
KNEEN: I think the regulator - a public regulator, the Food Inspection Agency - has a primary responsibility to the health of Canadians, And that they are not allowing anything to be intentionally (we could do a lot of things unintentionally) introduced into the food system without knowing what the consequences would be and particularly for people who aren't so-called normal. As a white aging male I'm probably quite normal and I'm quite healthy. But there's a lot of people older than me, or people with compromised immune systems, or nursing mothers, or infants in the womb, that are not what we call normal and what is the effect? We have no idea.
CARTY: Brewster Kneen, are these products in any way regulated internationally?
KNEEN: There is an effort through Codex Alimentarius, which is not a regulatory agency. But it was established in 1962 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN to, in its words, to guide and promote the elaboration and establishment of definitions to facilitate international trade. Now those are voluntary standards, and still are. So they're trying to say, okay, if I order a kiwi from New Zealand I'd like to know what I'm getting. So you have agreed international standards and it's voluntary and that's fine. But what's happened now is that the World Trade Organization has decided that this agency should become a compulsory rule maker to enforce the trade regime that it wants. And now we're into the labeling question which was just recently up in Ottawa at the meeting of the Codex Commission on Labeling. For example, the issue here is, you cannot label genetically engineered foods as such because that's a violation of trading principles. This is an obstruction to trade. And people say, well, I want to know what I'm going to eat. And that's where it becomes... it changes character all together, from establishing standards to establishing the rules of how a food economy should function.
CARTY: Brewster Kneen, you travel across this country talking about farm issues. What's your sense of the public mood about genetically modified foods?
KNEEN: Well, I've been on this for about 12 years now, and it's been an uphill battle for a long time. But somewhere in the course of the last 12 months I think the tide has turned and the public is beginning to have a great many questions about what's happening to our food and who is doing it? Because the question of control in all this is paramount and they look at that and say well, we've only got two supermarkets left and I can't buy local produce and I'm not sure I like what I'm eating anymore. It doesn't taste very good. And I'm not sure about residues and now this genetic engineering. And I think we're seeing a big wake-up call coming.
Besides, I just don't think it's a good idea. In fact, the whole idea of genetically engineered food in the hands of transnational corporations whose primary commitment is to their shareholders, that all gives me indigestion. I just don't think I want to eat it, period.
TAPE ENDS
CARTY: And Avril, that was Brewster Kneen. He's the author of Farmaggedon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology which is published by New Society Publishers.
BENOIT: Well, you make some interesting points there. Can you elaborate a little bit on this organization, this agency, Codex Alimentarius. We've talked about it on the program, but why is it so important now?
CARTY: It's very obscure, and hard to say - anything in Latin is hard to remember, even though my Jesuit teachers tried to pound a bit of Latin in. But Codex Alimentarius just means food rules. It used to be an agency. Now it has the power of being a referee because it's the referee for the World Trade Organization. The consequences could be a loss of sovereignty in a sense because, for example, in the hormone war right now going on between... over beef between the United States and Europe, Codex has said the American beef is safe. The Europeans don't agree, but Codex allows the Americans to retaliate. So it's gaining tremendous importance in a whole range of issues and in regard to health and safety. And genetic foods will be a battle ground for sure.
BENOIT: All right. Well, tomorrow is the last day of this particular series. Maybe you could talk about what's ahead.
CARTY: Well, it's a little chat with you and the Minister of Agriculture Lyle Vanclief will be with us and he, of course, is a farmer, and has been... and very interested in this industry and sees it as a boon to Canada. But also wrapped up with some of the issues we've talked about safety and trade.
BENOIT: Well, some of the issues you raised in the series will be putting to him tomorrow. Thanks very much, Bob.
CARTY: Okay, you're welcome, Avril.
BENOIT: Bye bye.
CARTY: Bye bye.
BENOIT: Bob Carty is This Morning's Ottawa producer. And we'd like to hear what you have to say about genetically modified foods. You can write us a note, drop us a line. Our address is This Morning, Box 500, Station A, Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1E6. Our fax number is area code 416-205-6134. And our e-mail address is thismorning@cbc.ca . And Bob Carty has put a number of links about biotech foods on a special CBC Radio 1 website which can be found at www.cbc.ca . Just click your way. You'll find the icons right there on the screen.
FIELD OF GENES PART 5 - MAY 7, 1999
AVRIL BENOIT (CBC): Now we'll wrap our series on genetically modified foods, and we turn to the question of the role of government in ensuring the safety of Canadians. My guest is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Lyle Vanclief. He's been a supporter and promoter of biotech industries in Canada. At the same time, he is the Minister responsible for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which enforces food safety for consumers. He is in Ottawa.
Good morning.
LYLE VANCLIEF: Good morning, Avril.
BENOIT: I appreciate you coming in.
VANCLIEF: Great. My pleasure.
BENOIT: Well ,we've been covering many, many issues over the course of the week, and I know that you left farming in Ontario for political office in 1988, well before all these genetically engineered crops came along. You must shake your head in wonder sometimes, at what they can do on farms these days?
VANCLIEF: Well, not really, Avril. I mean, the science has been advancing the ability of producers all over the world to produce food for an ever-increasing population for many, many decades. We've always had science moving things forward and science is still moving and using its ability in many different ways.
BENOIT: But the pace of science has increased over the last few years, has it now?
VANCLIEF: The pace of science and agriculture, and the production of agriculture products and food has increased over the last number of years, but I think when we look at the pace of research and technology in any sector of our economy it's moving very rapidly as well. But there's no question, in all fields it's moving much faster than it, can I say, probably was not that many years ago.
BENOIT: Well, that's the thing. Many farmers in Canada are using genetically modified crops. Can you tell me approximately how many, how important, for example, this industry is to Canada's economy right now?
VANCLIEF: Well, the whole agriculture and agri-food industry is about nine percent of the Gross Domestic Product, but for me to break it down to say what percentage of all production in... or basic production in Canada has any involvement with any genetic enhancement I'm not sure. I know that in some crops, such as canola, there's a fair percentage of it that has... is being planted now using genetically enhanced varieties. In corn there is certainly some. In others there is very little, and in some...a lot of them there's none.
BENOIT: Well, there's certainly more here than we find in Europe. We began our series on Monday with a look at how Europeans have reacted to biotech foods. It's been described as a meltdown in public confidence and in some countries nine out of ten consumers say they won't buy biotech foods. What are the consequences of this European position, mindset, for Canadian farmers who are trying to export?
VANCLIEF: Well, I think we need to be very careful and responsible in all of this, Avril, and that we make and we base decisions based on science rather than based on emotion. There's information that's out there, concern that's out there, that is not always based on science. And it doesn't matter whether it's this issue or anything else. We have to base it on the best technology and the best science that's there.
BENOIT: Right, but big grocery chains in Europe, grocery stores, are refusing to stock any genetically modified food because their customers don't want it.
VANCLIEF: Well that's a business decision that they're making. And they have a right to do that. There's no question of that. If a consumer doesn't want a buy product X or has indicated that to a grocery chain, well then the grocery chain makes a business decision not to take up shelf space to put that product there. But you know, we have, and you said at the outset of the show that I was a promoter of biotechnology. I'm not a promoter of biotechnology. I'm a promoter of anything that we can do that is based on sound science. And based on a regulatory system which we do have in Canada, which is one of the best in the world; one that the rest of the world is coming to see and find out how we do this, and that regulatory system is based on science, and based on safety. Safety to the environment, safety to animals and safety to humans. And that is the important thing. Now if people, as a result of that, wish not to buy a product I mean, there are other products, whether they're food products or not, that people make a decision that even though they're deemed to be safe as a piece of equipment or whatever it is, they say they don't wish to buy that product. But the safety aspect is reviewed, and must be reviewed, based on the best science that we have available to us today.
BENOIT: Well, we've looked into how the science is reviewed, and much of it comes from industry data. And that is why the public increasingly is starting to reject the claims that it's absolutely safe. They're listening to those other scientists, those who seem to be on the outside of the system, who say, look, there hasn't been enough research done.
VANCLIEF: Well, when the results of research is... or a product, and I've referred to it as that, is someone comes forward and wants to register that product for sale, then that research is reviewed by a group of scientists, experts from a diversity of disciplines and it is reviewed based on national and international expert advice. If they do not come forward with the information that is required and that information is not satisfactory if there's any question of the validity and the soundness of the research and the results of that research that is put forward, the product just simply isn't registered. You can't get a more sound system than that. And as I say it, I keep repeating this, that's based on the most sound science that is available today.
BENOIT: In business terms though, the impact of... you call it sound science, European consumers don't seem convinced by the science that they are able to read up on, to the extent that the Canadian canola, for example, that you mentioned, cannot be sold in Europe in so many of these countries because we can't seem to separate the non-genetically modified from the genetically modified. What could be done to actually sell our products over there in a non-genetically modified form?
VANCLIEF: Well, it's a decision that they have made, that they have not accepted the science. Through the WTO, for example, they cannot continue to do that unless they can demonstrate that the science is not sound. And to that extent they have not done that yet. They have simply just made the statement so far that they refuse to accept the products there. The other case in point is the beef hormones, the beef produced with assistance. The European scientific community and committee have said that there is no basis for the rejection that the...
BENOIT: For... you're talking about bovine growth hormone.
VANCLIEF: That's right. And that there is no basis for that and that the food produced in that way is not harmful to humans.
BENOIT: But don't they have the right to refuse food they don't want to eat?
VANCLIEF: They have the right... they don't have to pick it up off the shelf, no. They don't have to. They have that right. They certainly do. But... and that's an individual decision that they have, and I don't have... and I have the right not to purchase a certain automobile if I think it may flip over or I don't think it will suit me in the use that I want, whether that be human consumption or another product. That doesn't mean to say that the automobile has not passed all of the safety standards that are being used at that time.
BENOIT: But I guess there's some... is there some concern that the safety standards have not been applied as they are in other cases? Or as people would expect that they would be. That there's public rejection, it could spread to Canada.
VANCLIEF: Well, the public has the right to reject, there's no question of
that whatsoever, Avril. They have the right to reject. But I can assure you that we have the most sound regulatory process for the review of the science-based, as I said, on the review of that, on national and international expert advice. I don't know how much further anybody can go on that, and then science... scientists from a broad diversity of disciplines review that. And if there's any question whatsoever in the validity of that, if all of the answers are not given by that, then the product is not registered.
BENOIT: So based on all this science that you cite, you are a 100 percent confident that it's safe?
VANCLIEF: There's no such thing as a 100 percent confident in, Avril, absolutely never. We can base it on the best science today, and then what you do is if science changes tomorrow, if the science changes next week, you review that. But there's no such thing in life as 100 per cent risk free. It doesn't matter what it is.
BENOIT: So how confident are you?
VANCLIEF: I'm very, very, very confident.
BENOIT: There is some new science from England. Dr. Pusztai has found that genetically modified food damaged the immune system of rats. He's alarmed by that, he'd like to see more research done. Will your officials review those findings?
VANCLIEF: Well, the first thing I want to point out is that the potatoes that he was working with shows that the system does work. Those potatoes were not registered for production. So that shows that the system works. And so I don't know what more I can say. If somebody wants to come forward and science comes forward and says that he was wrong, or the research was wrong and that they are, then science and all those reviewing it will take a look at it. But the bottom line is that as far as I'm concerned this is blown out of proportion because nobody says that as a result of the work that was done and the review of that, that product was not registered. So the consumer can rest comfortably that they weren't registered.
BENOIT: But other potatoes are registered, and he says that he found significant differences, for example.
VANCLIEF: Certainly there are significant differences between two potatoes. I know lots of people that say they don't want to eat anything but Yukon Gold potatoes. I see other people that don't want to eat anything but a red-skinned potato, or whatever the case. And because there's differences in potatoes, there always have been differences in potatoes, difference in flavour, different in texture, and that's because the nutritional makeup of those potatoes and the quality of those potatoes are different. An apple isn't an apple. There's certainly a difference between a McIntosh apple and a Red Delicious apple.
BENOIT: Yeah, but we're talking...
VANCLIEF: Yeah, but the genetic makeup is different between them. But you know, so the science has to check and if there is a... if there is a change to the genetic makeup the regulatory process reviews that change, and if it is deemed by the scientific community, reviewing the science, that the product is safe, then the registration is given. But if it isn't deemed to be safe then the registration for the production of that product is not given.
BENOIT: One of the concerns that has been raised as part of our series is that your department works so closely with biotech companies, not only receiving money from them in terms of the work that you're supposed to do in research, but also in co-ordinating public relations messages about biotechnology. What is your relationship to these companies?
VANCLIEF: We, through a program called the Matching Investment Initiative, we have programs with... for research in collaboration. If an individual organization, whether it be the Western Research Foundation or the Ontario Corn Growers Association, or a private enterprise comes forward and says that there's a requirement, or they feel that there's a requirement for research and development in a certain area, whether that be with... in reflection to a herbicide, whether that be in reference, for example, to pharmaceuticals,meaning working on a species of a plant or something to make it more healthy for humans. That is reviewed. And in that program there is joint funding if the process... if there's a contract that's signed on that.
BENOIT: But you collaborate not only in the messages, but in terms of the... so you're working with these companies to help them get their messages about biotechnology out there, and you're working to allow for the approval of their products, and yet you're also the regulator. You're supposed to be looking...
VANCLIEF: We help them... we help them and work with them in the research and when the end of the research is done if there's a result of that, that is deemed by them to be request... let's say a request for registration of that product, then there is a review by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency which is, yes, is responsible to the Minister of Agriculture, but is not connected in any, way shape or form...
BENOIT: Do the other roles.
VANCLIEF: To the other roles.
BENOIT: Then, in your mind, whose interests come first, the biotech companies, or the people.
VANCLIEF: The safety... neither one... well, the people. It's the safety of the results of anything that's requested for the people.
BENOIT: That's absolutely your priority.
VANCLIEF: Absolutely, total priority. Absolutely. Canadian Food Inspection Agency checks and reviews the science for the safety of the use of the product for animals and for the environment and the Minister of Health checks for the safety of the product for humans. And then if a product is registered, or whatever is done, then the Food Inspection Agency monitors and enforces the regulations that are put in place.
BENOIT: What is your position on labeling then?
VANCLIEF: My position on labeling is that what we have at the present time in Canada, the producers and marketers of food can put on the label anything they want.
BENOIT: The government doesn't require labeling of genetically modified foods. Why not?
VANCLIEF: The government... the government requires labeling of genetically modified foods in Canada if the nutrition of the product has changed or if there's an allergenic reason for doing so.
BENOIT: But if there are unknown consequences because they have not been in our diets for very long, if there haven't been enough studies of what the impact of these foods are on us, why wouldn't that be on the label?
VANCLIEF: Well, Avril, nobody knows, for example, what is going to happen if we, 20 years down the road, 10 years down the road. As I go back to the same thing as I said at the beginning, we have to base the decisions based on themost sound and the best science we have available today. If science changes then we have to... and we always do review any decisions that have been made in the past. Producers of food and marketers of food can put on the label voluntarily whatever they want. If a consumer questions the legitimacy of that label then the role of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is to review the claims that have been made on that product by the manufacturer of that product, and if it's been fraudulently done then the enforcement is taken through the proper channels.
BENOIT: Mr. Vanclief, I'm sorry, we have to let you go. The news is coming up, but thank you very much for your time.
VANCLIEF: Okay, thank you very much, Avril.
BENOIT: Bye bye. Lyle Vanclief, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. He was in Ottawa.
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