BEN LILLISTON

CounterSpin: Genetically engineered crops provide substantial environmental and economic benefits to American farmers, declared an April 14 New York Times story, pronouncing that as the primary finding of a new assessment released by the National Research Council. Though the piece noted there were concerns about problems stemming from overuse of the technology, these were held against the lower production costs, higher outputs and reduced need for harmful chemical spraying readers were told GE crops provide. Forget about the future, genetically engineered food is the present: Does this research mean we should basically be happy about that?

Ben Lilliston is Communications Director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and co-author with Ronnie Cummins of Genetically Engineered Foods: A Guide for Consumers. He joins us now by phone from Minneapolis.

Welcome to CounterSpin, Ben Lilliston!

Ben Lilliston: Thanks for having me.

CS: Well, not every report offered quite as sanguine an overall rendering of the NRC assessment as the New York Times; others seemed to come away with more questions. What for you, first of all, was the most significant takeaway, if you will, from this new report?

BL: Well, the big news in sort of the agriculture community was the rapid growth of weed resistance to genetically engineered crops. This is something that in the scientific community as well as sort of farm advocates and nonprofits and others have been saying this is going to happen for a long time. And so, essentially, there are now nine different species of weeds in the United States that have developed resistance to one of the types of genetically engineered crops used primarily for corn, soybeans, and cotton. And then the other main type of genetically engineered crop, which actually puts the herbicide inside of the crop itself and is designed to address pests—two different types of pests have developed resistance to these. So, you know if you listen to the press conference, which I did, of the researchers announcing this report, that came out loud and clear, and they were really trying to issue a warning that this technology is losing its effectiveness and is going to cause some real problems moving forward.

CS: Well, I did see, a little in the Times piece and also in the Kansas City Star some space given to this idea that of course planting these herbicide-resistant crops has sped—as you're saying: it's already happened—the evolution of weeds that can't be killed that way, and that is going to erase the gains that the GE crops provided. But the way I've seen that information that you've just talked about presented, at least in the Kansas City Star, was called literally "too much of a good thing," that's the problem. That doesn't seem to me to quite characterize this resistance problem you're describing.

BL: Well that's absolutely true, it doesn't really get it. And another really interesting finding, I thought, of this report is that part of their mission was to look at 15 years of genetically engineered crops and find out okay this is good for farmers, this is good for the sustainability of the farm, and this has never really been done, which is kind of remarkable. You introduce a technology on the market, which when it was introduced had very few regulatory hurdles to overcome, and you do it in a way that's somewhat secretive because genetically engineered foods are not labeled, so consumers don't know about them. And then you don't really monitor what the effect is on the farm. And so this is the first time for them to kind of go back and look at the data and their main sort of finding there was that we don't know. We don't have enough data to determine what this kind of weed resistance and pest resistance means for farms. We don't know what the effects are on water systems, whether good or bad. We don't know the effects of this technology on choices for farmers, in terms of buying seeds, and particularly choices for farmers who are not using genetically engineered crops. This is a big, big issue in agriculture, where a lot of farmers want to buy non-GMO, conventional seeds, and they can't find them. And then the other part of that is organic farmers who are really trying to obviously not plant any GMO, and they not only can't plant genetically engineered crops, but they can't have any kind of genetically engineered material in what they produce at all, zero percent, and so they are required to do a lot of testing that they have to pay for, a lot of really stringent cleaning and segregation. So none of that has really been looked at in the introduction of genetically engineered crops in this country. And this report really highlighted that: that we just don't know overall whether this is a good thing.

CS: And here we are 15 years or so in. Well, the Times states "The rapid adoption of the crops is evidence that American farmers see the technology as beneficial." But gee, as we recall, this stuff was marketed pretty intensely, wasn't it? I mean don't we have to compare what we know or don't know now against the sort of promises that were made by Monsanto and others about the boon that GE technology was going to provide?

BL: That's absolutely true. The technology does provide some benefits for farmers and you know one of the big benefits is that it doesn't require as much work, it doesn't require as much treatment for their fields, and so forth. So it really does allow—it's kind of a time saver in many ways, and allows a lot of farm families to take off-farm jobs and a lot of the agriculture community will say that's one of the biggest benefits of this. But if you look, you know, over the past 15 years, you know, we've lost a lot of family farmers. There may be some benefits to the ones who've remained. But if you look at the bigger picture now, when you're seeing increased weed resistance, so farmers are having to pay more and more to treat their fields, so their cost of production is going up. Another really important factor that they highlighted was that genetically engineered crops, and the introduction of these seeds, has really consolidated the food industry. So you have fewer and fewer companies controlling the germplasm of what's available out there for farmers. And the Justice Department actually has initiated an investigation right now of Monsanto because of these concerns. When you have only a few companies controlling that germplasm, they've really jacked up seed prices, and so a lot of farmers are losing the benefits, if there are such benefits, they're losing that because they're having to pay more and more just for their seed. There's just a lot of really open questions about this technology.

CS: Well, and finally, we usually hear that the "market rules" in this country, and reporters often claim to be speaking from the perspective of the consumer. You touched on this earlier, but certainly we know that people have expressed a lot of aversion and concern to GE foods, and yet here we are with 80 percent of soybeans, corn, and cotton being genetically engineered. What is drowning people out in the public debate?

BL: Well, it's real simple. When they first introduced this technology they forbade and really blocked efforts to label it, and so consumers don't have a choice when they go into the supermarket. The choice that they do have is to buy organic, and they know that that's non-GE, but otherwise, you know, they don't know. Now they do argue that there's some level of consumer acceptance, but I think if you look at where they were at the beginning and, as you said, all the promises that were made 15 years ago, and how many have not panned out. For example there are really only three main crops that are genetically engineered right now: corn, soybeans, and cotton. And those, corn and soybeans primarily, are not foods that we eat directly. It's not the sweet corn that you would buy in the supermarket; it's corn used for animal feed and corn that's used for processing high fructose corn syrup and stuff like that. Soybeans are also used primarily for animal feed. And so what you haven't seen, and when they first introduced it they said look we're going to have GE tomatoes, we're going to have wheat, we're going to have all kinds of fruits and vegetables out there...

CS: We're going to feed the world...

BL: ...people are going to get all these nutritional benefits out of it. None of that has happened. And there's a reason: it's because there's still that big consumer stigma out there, and they know that: that if they introduce a type of genetically engineered food that people are actually eating and can buy in the supermarket, that there's going to a backlash. So they're sticking with these crops that sort of slide in under the radar and enter our food supply in an indirect way.

CS: Lots of issues and questions there for journalists to follow up on. I'd like to thank you very much. We've been speaking with Ben Lilliston; he's Communications Director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. You can find their work on GE foods, and other issues, on the web at IATP.org.

Thank you very much for joining us the week on CounterSpin.

BL: Thanks so much for having me.


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