GE-Free Switzerland
The Swiss have had a referendum and have voted for a five-year moratorium on genetically modified crops. As the BBC reports:
Swiss voters have approved a five-year ban on the use of genetically modified crops, final results from Sunday’s referendum suggest. A total of 55.7% of the electorate voted in favour of the moratorium across all the country’s 26 cantons.
Supporters of the ban include farmers, who believe that the introduction of GM crops would undermine organic produce.
But it seems to me that it has to be much harder to physically protect and maintain a GE-Free zone in the mountains of Europe than it would be on the islands of the South Pacific.
Putting aside Kiwis’ own arguments about genetic engineering for a moment; does New Zealand have a responsibility to the rest of the world to stay GE Free?
Surely the Swiss gearing up to be an organics fortress is a sign New Zealand should gear up to be an organics lifeboat?
November 28th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
The MMC report said 55.7% of the electorate was in favour of the moratorium.
Other sources quote the turnout to be an average 42%, and that the 55.7% was not of the electorate but of those who actually voted.
“Supporters of the moratorium, mainly from the political centre-left, said their victory proved the power of the alliance between environmentalists, consumer organisations and farmers.
“In their campaign they had argued that GMOs are neither in the interest of consumers nor of Swiss farmers, and that a moratorium is an opportunity for farmers to improve their marketing or organic products.
“The government, the business community as well as the main centre-right and rightwing parties were all against the temporary ban.
They said the current law contains enough safety guarantees and a ban could be detrimental to biotechnology research in the country”
November 29th, 2005 at 12:16 am
“Surely the Swiss gearing up to be an organics fortress is a sign New Zealand should gear up to be an organics lifeboat?”
How does that follow? To me the godsend of this particular move is that we can see that if the Swiss can actually remain GE free despite sharing borders with 4 other countreis that are not, then it throws the whole all-or-nothing argument right out the window. If they can’t then it’s some kind of vindication for the moratorium. At least it’s evidence at someone else’s expense, someone who’s wealth is not mostly dependent on remaining at the cutting edge of agricultural science.
Does it even go further? Because if they are NOT GE free right now, it would prove you can go back. I don’t know what their current status is.
Then there’s still the issue of whether the ‘organic’ stuff really is actually better. I’m not convinced at all. Not in the slightest. The domain of GE is so vast it’s ridiculous to say that everything that comes out of it is bad. How is that possible? It’s almost inconceivable - it implies there’s some innate evil in GE that somehow jumps across and bites us, like in a zombie movie. Scifi stuff. But we will not learn much from the Swiss about that - better would be to look at the rest of the world and see if they’re getting all sick or growing extra heads or whatever it is that scares people. Can’t see it happening at the moment.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:24 am
Matter of fact the worlds biggest health scare story these days is a perfectly naturally forming flu virus that could kill millions of people. I’m all for GE if it can find a cure, however un-darwinian that may seem to be on a superficial analysis. I’ll fly to oz to get my shot if I have to, unscientific moralizing be damned.
GE has the potential to cure all sorts of diseases, massively increase agricultural productivity and extend our knowledge of nature hugely. It irks me that it’s difficult here. I don’t like to think of NZ as a backward superstitious place.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:31 am
There are much simpler ways to destroy the environment than by using GE. For example (1) introducing invasive species and (2) clearing land. Both are prime examples that probably account for the majority of environmental damage. (3) Pollution from farming, industry and cities probably follows closely behind those two. All of these cause far more damage than GE has or ever will. GMOs are far less dangerous than simple human stupidity and greed. Instead of scaremongering, politicians that care about the environment should prioritize their activities based on rational assessment of the evidence rather than fear of the unknown. GMOs are bad because of the way they are used by multinationals like Monsanto, not because they are “unnatural” or inherently dangerous. Globally there are thousands of examples of (1), (2) and (3), whereas there are precious few examples of serious environmental damage caused specifically through use of GMOs.
The fixation on GE is almost as crazy as the avian bird flu madness. China is going to vaccinate 14 billion chickens. The cost of such an operation beggars belief. That money could be much better spent elsewhere.
November 29th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Ben - “GE has the potential to cure all sorts of diseases, massively increase agricultural productivity”.. umm no, I think you’ll find the massive productivity increases promised have so far been the output of the marketing departments and in practice super-fast growing crops have brought their own issues of soil depletion etc.
I’m not staunchly against GE at all, but neither do I believe the nonsense it is hyped up to.
The biggest overall issue in my mind is that we’re experimenting on ourselves - that the pressure to commercialise a product, based on it’s market lifespan, means that no effective testing of long-term effects is realistically possible.
How long do you test a new foodstuff before you decide it’s safe? eg I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no link) that the effects of a particular type of GE soy showed up, not in the mice that originally consumed the product, but in their offspring. So how far down do you test?
Part of this is not an actual GE issue in my mind - I think that coincidentally with arrival of GE, development cycles have kept getting shorter and pressures to commercialise quickly get greater. The net result has been release of products with inadequate testing (eg BGH), and their is a consume backlash. And that is healthy…
November 29th, 2005 at 9:57 am
Still tilting at windmills, huh?
November 29th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Great News!!!
Here are a few good books to learn about GE:
The Food Revolution by John Robbins
Hard To Swallow-The Dangers of GE Food by Jeffrey Smith
Eating Safely In a Toxic World by Sue Kedgley
Check out the website for The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods (In the States) http://www.thecampaign.org
November 29th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Huskynut, I don’t think your crystal ball for the future of science is any more reliable than anyone else’s, sorry. I said it ‘has the potential’. You can argue all you like about the current situation, but the potential is clear.
And all medical and agricultural science is experimenting on ourselves. Tested on humans is usually the best test. After the animal tests, if that seems necessary.
How far should we test? Same as for anything we test. How long did we test kiwifruit for? How did we test it? How could we really be sure our great great great grandchildren won’t grow three heads because we eat kiwifruit?
Consumer backlash seems like a pretty good monitor. It applies to every other aspect of what we put in our mouths, much of which is very bad for us. And there is also the issue of consumer rights. Why can’t I decide for myself if GE apples taste nicer? I’m perfectly free to drink alcohol, which is a known poison, has caused many deaths and endless health and social problems. Seems inconsistent that I can’t eat an apple because it might harm my children, maybe, maybe not, who knows? Might be a good effect and I’ll end up with healthier children too, but it’s not allowed.
Poor mice being made to eat soy. Yuck. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
Dietary science is one of the most hotly debatable areas there is. Unless something is clearly immediatey toxic, it should be allowed. How else are we ever going to find out if it’s good? Sure, it should also be clearly labelled.
November 29th, 2005 at 11:55 am
The Swiss love their referendums. They held one two years ago. The question was; should we renew use of Nuclear Power for the next 25 years?, 90% of the population said yes. What is even more surprising is that the government followed the wishes of the people. That will never happen here in NZ!
November 29th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Ben
The fact that they voted to try to keep it out isn’t the same as succeeding. The jury is still out on whether voting that the tide should not rise will in fact keep your feet dry in this instance.
They are going to try, and if the experiences of others are any indication, they are going to fail.
“A federal testing program found traces of the banished grain, called StarLink, in more than 1 percent of samples submitted by growers and grain handlers in the past 12 months, government records show.”
- This is more than 3 years after it was “culled”. It simply isn’t that easy to ditch the genes once they’ve been introduced.
There is exactly one place on the planet as I write, which has the potential ability to keep the GMO out of the food chain for a while, and it happens to be here. We’ve been over this ground before.
“According to a recent report by Syngenta, herbicide-resistant superweeds will soon reduce the economic value of farmland on which Roundup Ready soybeans are grown by 17%. ”
Basically the factory farms and the monocultures tend to be self-annihilating. It takes a couple of generations crop and massive application of the herbicides, which is really the reason for the GE being done in the first place, and the insects go, the birds go, the bees go, the weeds get stronger and the crop yield goes back down… except now the soil is poisoned and depleted, the nitrogen fixing cycle is broken and the basic structure of the system that the farmers have relied on for a thousand years is broken.
Where GE works and there’s evidence that in some instances it does, there’s still no harm in our waiting a few more generations to decide whether to allow it into NZ. In the meantime we can keep a bit of the genome in its unaltered state and market our food free from GMO for a slight price advantage among the people who think it makes a difference.
I am in no rush to change this. Research is fine… but HERE it has to stay in the lab a bit longer than it might in a place like the USA or Argentina, where the environment has already been trashed. Nor is the chief advantage of most GE products (the ability to apply massive amounts of herbicide) particularly enthralling to me…
respectfully
BJ
November 29th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
BJ, we have been here before, but why not go it again? You have an outside chance of convincing me.
The Netherlands (and downtown Auckland) is living proof that you can keep the tide from getting your feet wet if you try. I will watch with great interest to see if Switzerland can reverse the existence of GE. But it seems to me that your bar is too high for that to be possible. You talk of traces being still detectable when you set forensic scientists on the job. Sure, and they could probably find detectable traces of ME in Switzerland too, if they look hard enough, but that doesn’t mean I’ve contaminated the place.
All aspects of practical behaviour involve statistics - if they have reduced in 3 years the presence of GE crops down to 1% from their cull then that’s a pretty good effort. What percentage does it have to be to satisfy you? 0.1% 0.00001%? It can never be zero because you can’t prove the absence of something without looking at the entire lot. Every single piece of wheat would need to be examined by the scientists.
Can you tell me in all honesty that all traces of human excrement are gone from apples you buy in the supermarket? Whether they’re organic or not, contaminants simply occur in food. You define an acceptable level and control it to that. The StarLink farmers could possibly have just been lazy, and it’s something that they can just readdress. Have you ever noticed that in a wheatfield there’s also often deadly nightshade growing? Strangely, despite it being extremely toxic, I’ve never heard of anyone dying from nightshade poisoning in their bread. Probably because extremely small quantities of contaminants *just don’t matter*. And that’s even if the Starlink stuff is actually dangerous.
I think you’re being overly philosophical in your assessment of the self annihilating nature of scientific farming. Science only ever progresses through it’s mistakes. So you have to be able to make them. Yeah some new methods don’t work. Change them. Adapt them. Adjust them. Recalibrate them. I really don’t think traditional human knowledge of farming has the drop on the best possible methods - nothing in human history has ever led me to believe that anything we’ve invented can’t be improved.
And to pin that philosophical wrangle on GE, but not on selective breeding, building fences, poisoning possums, irrigation, and any number of other brilliant inventions just seems, well, unjustified. How can you possibly know what we could acheive if we put our greatest minds on it? We could make NZ into even more of a competitor than it already is.
That is why I can’t accept there’s ‘no harm in waiting’. There is great harm in waiting - you lose the edge. NZ is heavily reliant on agriculture, and that edge is extremely important to us.
You have a point that maybe people will go for noGE stuff, and buy NZ made for that reason, and that’s a competitive distinction. But I really don’t think our biggest markets for agricultural produce are exclusively greenies. They’re only a small sector of almost every country in which they are found.
November 29th, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Genetic modification is inherently dangerous for the same reason bringing in any new organism is inherently dangerous. We do not know how it will interact with the present ecosystem. This is why GMOs are classified as “new organisms” in the legislation, and the same degree of risk assessment is required as for any other new organism.
GMOs are classified as new organisms because the insertion of a gene alters the genome, and therefore the phenotype of the organism in unpredictable ways. This is because the rather simplistic genetics I was taught that one gene = one protein = one trait, is false. Genes interact with each other, proteins are folded differently depending on the other genes and this alters their biochemistry, the vectors used to insert genes can aso alter the phenotype, and there are many instances of when this has happened.
This does not mean we should not let in any GMOs, ever, just that we must be extremely careful, in case we let in another possum, or a SARS like outbreak.
And bird flu is largely a result of the hideous attitude we have to other animals. If we treated chickens with more respect instead of trying to get as much protein from them with as little expense as possible, and bugger the consequences, then we would not have a problem. The same is true with the other flu pandemics and BSE. On the other hand I am not aware of a single infectious disease outbreak caused by guzzling too much plant protein.
November 29th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
Why is genetic modification inherently more dangerous than induced mutation, a technique that has been used in agriculture for decades?
November 29th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
kiore1: As far as I am aware the worst pandemic in history was the 1918 spanish flu which killed 20-50 million humans. I don’t think it had anything to do with battery hen farms. Cross-species transmissions do happen “naturally”!
bjchip: I agree with you that being circumspect about GMOs is a good thing. I also agree that there is no reason for NZ to lead the way in GMOs. Let the USA and whoever do that. I just think we should acknowledge GE as a legitimate tool for scientists that has inherent risks we should be aware of, like so many other things. Keep it in the lab until we are sure it is helpful. In the mean time there are plenty of things that non-scientists do in the world every day that are outright dangerous - like drink alcohol and drive. People are afraid of what they don’t know and care not enough about the shit they do themselves. It is not logical.
November 29th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
hmm, obviously had a bad word in that last post — maybe it will appear at some point — frog, feel free to replace it with a more appropriate word…
November 29th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
cytochem, isn’t it obvious? Because it’s newer! It’s ok to breed dogs of all shapes and sizes, to systematically select only the best crops for next generation breeding, but it’s simply evil to touch the sacred phenomes. We might get avian flu or BSE, or possums, or aids, or cancer. Oh, sorry, that’s right, those are naturally forming, so they’re ok.
Sorry to be flippant, but I can’t buy it. Nature itself can change alarmingly fast and you can’t legislate against that. Why hinder our own ability to adapt?
November 29th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
As one who has campaigned on GE for a while, I reiterate my base line; we don’t know what the effects on our children will be.
So Ben, if you had the choice, which of these illnesses would you like your child to have an increased sensitivity for;
asthma, food allergy, chemical allergy, diabetes (increased sensitivity to carbohydrate content of food), chronic heart disease, obesity, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, or one of the rarer genetically-linked diseases which I won’t go into.
There is already a measurable increase in the proportion of the population suffering from allergy-type illnesses, which in NZ is mainly due to our successes in keeping allergic children alive to adulthood, which enables the genes for allergic disease to continue in the population.
Diagnosis and treatment keep improving in quality; do we really want to stress an already stretched system by incrementally increasing the numbers of allergy-affected infants, children and adults?
The only choice is to keep it in the lab until it can be seen to be safe over multiple generations of the organism ingesting GMO; until then, the viral-transfer method of gene-splicing can only be regarded with scepticism by those who make our food safety laws.
November 29th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
katie, you said it yourself. We don’t know what the effects on our children would be. Could be a decrease in all said factors. We could even GE low allergy food, not inconceivable.
Your question back at you. If you had the choice, which illness would you like to not have any GE science working towards alleviating? asthma, food allergy, chemical allergy, diabetes (increased sensitivity to carbohydrate content of food), chronic heart disease, obesity, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, or one of the rarer genetically-linked diseases which I won’t go into.
I’m personally an eczema and asthma sufferer, and changing to expensive organic food didn’t do shit for it. But taking steroids helps enormously. Science over mumbo jumbo any day.
I don’t think that keeping it in the lab is the only choice. How about opting in? Why do you get the right to say I can’t eat something, drink something, smoke something, try a cure for something? You could be dealing generations, which is billions of people, out of potentially life altering discoveries, all from unjustified fears.
November 30th, 2005 at 11:10 am
My understanding of the causes of the 1918 epidemic was that contact with intensively farmed pigs was one causal factor. Though intensive factory farming of sick and malnourished humans in muddy trenches would have been another factor.
November 30th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
The danger of completely irresponsible GE would be that organisms with grossly different features and capabilities would appear without the rest of the world being able to adjust easily. The reason why the H5N1 is lethal to more than half the people who get it is that there has never been an H5N1 based virus before. The immune system doesn’t react and then overreacts and it is basically way too damned late. The gross differences are usually avoided in selective breeding. However, I think we should consider that GMO of human diseases is basically Biological Warfare research by another name. Not in our best interets, and also NOT what we are discussing.
The issue with a GM grain or a GM animal are the known and knowable side effects. We can accept that the targeted characteristic is achieved, or the organism isn’t viable. If the GM is simply something to permit weedkiller to be liberally sprayed everywhere it isn’t worth discussing here either. Chemical warfare is not accepted by the international community any more than Biological warfare. So the GM grain or animal has to be more productive, hardier or more resistant to disease for it to even be considered.
I am going through this to establish boundaries. We needn’t argue about things that we all agree are not useful, and I think the above limits are reasonable observations.
The question becomes whether GM of animals, plants or people is “just wrong” in some moral sense, “too dangerous” over time, or just fine lets do it. My contention is that the danger is what is unknown… that we could create a problem species, weeds and pests, or a gene that migrates… (they do move about some) and to what purpose really? We already have enough food here.
GE science is way different from GM organism releases. I don’t oppose the science, but I worry hard about the release of a GMO. So your argument about curing disease and other potential advantages is accepted, but not relevant to a GMO release.
Incidentally, I have some asthma and found that regular ingestion of chromium supplements reduces the need for the steroids. Damned if I know why. Cats still make my eyes itch and my sneezes still set off nearby car alarms but the really nasty wheeze seems to subside. Takes about a month to see the effect. YMMV.
Kate - I have to take Ben’s side. GE can help individuals if it is taken to its logical conclusion… those genes that make me susceptible to allergy may make me more stable in other respects though, and while mods need to be made with some assurance that the cure won’t be worse than the disease, they also could stabilize favorable traits that are otherwise linked too closely with a disease process. In other words, it CAN be good. Like most things, not good if done for profit.
Personally I think we were all taken over by a prior GM that made Tim-Tams addictive to the bulk of the population, but that’s another rant.
respectfully
BJ
November 30th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
BJ, I agree totally that GM research for biological weapons should be strictly banned. But I think it’s almost impossible to do that - weapons research will always continue unabated whilst we have wars, and the superpowers will always be above the law in this respect. The solution to that problem is, as you say, outside the scope of this debate.
As for release of GMOs you have a point I already concede - care is needed. I just disagree that we have to wait ’several generations of the ingesting organism’, ie 50 years or so. That’s insanely conservative out of all proportion to the risk. Medical science would still be in the ancient world if we took this approach, as would agriculture. I keep remembering a survival manual I read as a child, which advised if you are lost in the bush and starving to:
1. See what animals eat
2. Try a bit and see if it tastes of almonds, if so, spit it out
3. Swallow a bit and wait a while
4. Try a larger portion the next day if all seems well
which is pretty much how prehistoric man would have done most of his supermarket shopping. That’s testing in the state of nature, and I think we already do a far better job than that now.
Kiore, I know nothing about this pig epidemic, but I do know that millions of men were living in extremely squalid conditions in trenches, and moving at great uncontrolled speed all around the planet thereafter. But nowhere have I read that the flu was man-made. Perhaps it could be man-cured, though. Pigs live in squalid conditions too, often by choice, but I would think if it came from them it’s more a function of their unprecedented population size, on account of their tasty flesh.
I can’t buy any of this ‘natural is best’ argument. Natural is often really dangerous, as is man-made. The real difference is that man-made can adapt far quicker to new information. That is our strength as a species, and we should use it.
December 2nd, 2005 at 12:03 pm
Aside from my ethical issues about humans messing with nature, the most alarming factor for me in this debate is the gross lack of accountability corporations have to the public in regards to how they are engineering genes and being able to release those organisms without completely neutral independent scientific research into their effects.
A must see movie about this is “The Future of Food”
Link here: http://www.thefutureoffood.com/
Also our NZ scientist Dr Bob Anderson (of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Genetics) has just released a new book on this topic called “The Final Pollution. How Industry manipultates Science and gambles with your food and future.”
You can order it from his website here:
http://roberta-psrg.tripod.com/index.html
When so much of todays research science is being funded by companies, the bottom line is that we cannot afford to entrust the future of our food to corporate interests who’s dominant agenda is to make profits for their shareholders by controlling the food chain.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:16 am
Some more recent information from an email forwarded by Marianne Kuenzle at Greenpeace Switzerland:
GE and Switzerland
While the rest of the world wrestles with a biotech industry determined to own and contaminate the world’s food and fields, tiny Switzerland in its quiet, efficient and pragmatic way is eliminating GE from its fields, its food and its society.
11% of Swiss farmers are now organic. Supermarkets such as Coop carry as extensive a range of organic foods as you will find anywhere. They even have begun to carry organic food produced regionally - and labeled as such. A Coop fund is supporting organic research projects and the second largest Swiss retailer now also is launching SlowFood products.
While domestically labeled animal products have been produced with GE free feed for a while, more recently, Coop and the biggest retailer Migros have agreed to undertake the process of ensuring that all imported meat is raised on GE free feed, too. Smaller supermarket chains Denner and Spar have now done the same.
And one of the most conservative societies in Europe put this issue to its people in a referendum in November 2005 and overwhelmingly the public supported a 5 year ban on the growing of GE crops. The referendum vote was unprecedented in Swiss history. It is the first time ever that a referendum has passed in every canton, and it is only one of 14 referenda ever to be approved by the Swiss people.
No one would accuse the Swiss of being anti-technology. No one would accuse the Swiss of acting rashly. No one would accuse the Swiss of taking steps without ensuring that they will benefit.
At the same time, however, almost no one is recognizing how significant these steps have been.
As we all face the latest contamination - this time of rice, the world’s most important staple food, it is perhaps time to remember that we don’t need to find solutions to the problems of GE we only need to implement those that have already been found.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:04 am
Sepp Hasslberger:
Once again I admire the Swiss!
As a South Islander, I wish we would live up to the name that tourists often give us “The Switzerland of the South Pacific” … in much more than just scenery.
Instead of that our “free market” “international corporate” thinking, our watching of cheap TV programmes, and the fact that they speak English, lead us further into the American influence (no matter how inappropriate)!