Although biotechnology has produced greatly improved, widely accepted drugs, there is still enormous controversy over the development of genetically modified crops that increase yields, lower costs, and offer better ways to feed the world, the director of science policy at the American Medical Association has said.
Speaking at a New York press briefing last week, Dr Barry David Dickinson, director of science policy for the American Medical Association, said that biotechnological advances had improved human insulin, growth hormone, monoclonal antibodies, tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), and more.
"Why, then, is there controversy over genetically modified crops?" he asked.
The seminar was funded by an unrestricted grant from the Council for Biotechnology Information, a group of six biotechnology firms and two trade associations. They included Aventis Crop Sciences, BASF, Dow Agrosciences, EI du Pont de Nemours, Monsanto, Syngenta, the American Crop Protection Association, and the Biotechnology Industry Association
Genetically engineered medicines offer lifesaving benefits, but biologists are thought to be tampering with natural, God given foods, said Dr C S Prakash, director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University in Alabama, United States.
However, the developing world desperately needs to produce more and healthier food, without cutting down rainforests for farmland, he said. Africa must increase food production by 300%, Latin America by 80%, by 2050. Biotechnology could increase local food production (as imports seldom reach those who need them), increase nutritional content of food, decrease the loss from pests, and decrease use of fertilisers and pesticides.
Already, he said, improved foods had halved the percentage of undernourished people in the past 20 years, and food consumption had increased globally.
Dr Martina McGloughlin, director of the biotechnology programme of the University of California, said that recombinant DNA technology could improve plants, just as Native Americans developed modern corn by cross breeding over thousands of years, and durum wheat was developed by radiation mutagenesis.
In the past 20 or 30 years, recombinant DNA technology has been able to modify plants by transferring a gene from one plant to another, improving nutritional content and reducing pesticide used in cultivation.
Speakers defended the safety of genetically modified foods. Leonard Gianessi, senior research associate of the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy in Washington, DC, said that genetically modified crops in the United States were released only after rigorous study by the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Department of Agriculture. Americans trusted their regulatory agencies, he said. Europeans might distrust their regulators because of mad cow disease.
European farmers, he asserted, used far more insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides than Americans. They sprayed wheat up to 30 times more per acre than US farmers, thus getting wheat yields of 100 to 200 bushels per acre, compared with 25 or 30 bushels in the United States.
Bacillus thuringiensis, which is present in certain types of corn is found naturally in the soil and has been used as a spray since the 1960s to control insects, even by organic farmers, Mr Gianessi said.
Although no speakers put the views of the lobby against genetically modified crops, Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace in the United Kingdom, said that he hoped the American Medical Association’s stance had not been influenced by the funding for the seminar.
"Greenpeace oppose all release of genetically modified crops into the environment and their use as human food because the effects are so unpredictable."
In May 1999 the BMA called for a moratorium on the commercial planting of genetically modified crops and said this should continue until a scientific consensus is reached about the potential long term environmental effects.
Further information is available at the Council for Biotechnology Information's website (www.whybiotech.com).
|
If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org |