Industry Peddles Myth That 'Frankenfoods' Will Solve Hunger

by Scott Harris

The escalating controversy over "Frankenfoods," as they're labeled by some critics, has caused many American farmers to have second thoughts on planting these altered crops due to the shrinking market where they can be sold.

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Peter Rosset, executive director of the Food First, also known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy, in Oakland, Calif., who examines the safety of genetically engineered foods and the assertion that only these crops can supply the world's hungry enough food to eat.

Peter Rosset: Probably 90 percent of all genetically altered food available anywhere in the world comes from the U.S. Perhaps one of the most common ones are dairy products coming from cattle who've been fed "bovine growth hormone," which was genetically engineered by Monsanto, to double the dairy output of cattle.

Other genetically modified food products include corn; close to 50 percent of all corn planted in the U.S. now is genetically modified, and these become corn products: corn starch, corn syrup, corn meal, corn flour, going into all kinds of processed foods. Close to half of our soy beans, as well -- we get soy flour, soy protein, soy lecithin and many processed foods. Another is canola; most of that comes from Canada, the number two source in the world for genetically modified food products. And canola oil is in all kinds of food products. So basically when you buy non-organic, processed food on the supermarket, you're getting an unknown proportion of genetically modified corn, soy or canola product and it's not labeled as such. And the same is true when you buy any kind of a dairy product that's not organic or from the small number of dairies who refuse to use the bovine growth hormone.

Between the Lines: The scientists on the payroll of the big agribusiness companies who develop this genetically engineered food say, "It's perfectly safe, everything's fine, don't worry, be happy and eat the stuff." What are some of your concerns?

Rosset: I had some environmental concerns about what happens when these crops are planted in the field. And, economically, it's facilitating a huge degree of concentration in the food industry. It's basically giant biotech and chemical companies taking over seed companies and penetrating more and more of our food chain. The problem is that the U.S. government has decided against mandatory health and safety testing. So all of this which is essentially new -- not just new to us, but new to the planet, new to the universe -- has suddenly gone from being absent in our food supply to virtually dominating it in the last few years. The only way you can be sure you're not eating it is to buy certified organic, which of course, costs more.

BTL: Now genetically engineered food is being sold with the idea that somehow genetically engineered foods will benefit mankind by producing a bumper crop to feed all the hungry.

Rosset: The principal companies who are producing these products are Monsanto, Novardis, and others which were leading pesticide companies in the past. For example, Monsanto brought us Agent Orange amongst other wonderful products. PCBs were another one. These companies have now recreated themselves in their advertising imagery as life sciences companies. They say that we need genetically engineered foods in order to produce enough food to feed the world's population, to end hunger. But we have an excess of food production in the world. Farmers are going out of business because crop prices are too low. There's more food than anybody could ever eat available on the planet, yet, more than 800 million people are hungry. Thirty-six million according to the USDA, right here in the richest nation on earth.

The cause of hunger is not a scarcity of food. Only by attacking inequality and poverty, the real causes of hunger, could we actually get at hunger. Too many people are too poor to buy all this food that is already available. So genetic engineering is irrelevant here. Yet it's the main reason that the industry uses to justify why we shouldn't be regulating it, why we shouldn't be doing any health tests, why it should be grown all over the world because "we need it to feed the hungry." Basically, it's a lie.