Twenty Basic Facts
About Genetically Engineered Foods

BY ARRAN STEPHENS, FOUNDER/PRESIDENT, NATURE'S PATH FOODS

Organic Certification forbids the use of GMO's in the cultivation or production of organic food, but organic farmers can't prevent genetic drift. Because of the drift of pollen from nearby genetically altered crops, even certified organic food can no longer be guaranteed 100% GMO free.

The following are 20 basic facts about genetically engineered foods

1. Genetic alterations of this magnitude have never occurred before in the 5 billion year history of life on our planet.

2. We have no idea what the long term effects of the release of GMO lab experiments into the field will be.

3. This kind of mass experimental feeding study on a human population has never been done before.

4. All the leading industrial countries in the world, except for the U.S., and Canada, have opted out of a massive public GMO study. Europe, Japan, and now Australia and New Zealand have either banned, or put severe restrictions on the import of any food or food ingredient that contains a GMO.

5. Many of the developing countries of the South are now taking steps to protect their indigenous agriculture and germplasm from the incursion of GMO crops.

6. The genetic material from engineered crops can spread ( genetic drift) to effect other plants and animals.

7. Pollen from GMO corn can be carried up to 8 miles by the wind to infect other corn varieties. Perhaps even farther by pollinators like bees.

8. Scientists have found Monarch butterflies dying after eating milkweed that has been pollinated from a genetically engineered corn with pesticides cloned in.

9. In Europe, the large biotech companies faced a major public backlash when they attempted to introduce American biotech products into the supermarkets.

10. The insertion of specific new genes into an organism is an imprecise and uncontrolled process that may influence biological functioning in unpredictable ways. "Genetically engineered crops may disrupt the ecosystem by reducing bio diversity, damaging soil fertility, inducing the development of new pathogens, pests, and weeds." Dr. John Fagan.

11. Genetic "engineering" can be described as about as precise an engineering process as shooting a shotgun shell filled with assorted nuts and bolts in an engine block to see what will happen.

12. The biotech industry is well aware that the North American public would reject any food labeled as genetically engineered. Industry polls tells us that 80% to 95% of North Americans would reject these products if labeled.

13.US Government regulators are calling genetically engineered foods "substantially equivalent" to natural food, but are not requiring substantial testing. Because the concept of "substantial equivalence" has no scientific dimensions, it cannot be used as a predictor of which genetically engineered foods will require substantial safety testing in animals, in humans and in the ecosystems of the planet.

14. Scientists from the US Food and Administration disagree on GMO safety. According to the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, the FDA's internal reports and memoranda reveal it declared genetically engineered foods to be safe in the face of disagreement from its own experts . all the while claiming a broad scientific consensus supported its stance.

15. The willingness of U.S. public health and regulatory agencies to act in the face of documented risks in GMO food demonstrates that government regulators are more concerned with political science than with sound science.

16. Already, people have died. In 1989, Showa Denko K.K. marketed tryptophan that had been produced in genetically engineered bacteria as a nutritional supplement in the USA. When this product was placed on the market, it made thousands of consumers ill. Of these, 1,500 people were permanently disabled and 37 people died.

17. Scientists cannot answer the $64,000 question : If some time in the future we realize that the harm any one of the millions of GMOs pose is unacceptable, how do we recall it.

18. We don't have another planet to run the required scientific control tests on.

19. Nature always bats last. We humans can't circumvent 5 billion years of evolution with a clever new lab technique that promises to make a few people very, very rich.

20. You have a choice.