Former genetic engineer now speaks out against GMO risks

 By Ken Roseboro
Published: May 31, 2013
Category: GMO Health Risks 

Thierry Vrain is a former scientist with Agriculture Canada
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The “conversion” of former anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas to GMO promoter has garnered huge media attention, but Thierry Vrain, Ph.D., a former genetic engineer who speaks out against the risks of genetically engineered foods, has far more credibility—and a far more important story to tell the public.
Thierry Vrain’s career has spanned the full range of agriculture—from being a proponent of “chemical” agriculture and genetic engineering to being an advocate for organic farming and an opponent of GMOs.
A native of France, Vrain earned an undergraduate degree in plant physiology from the Université de Caen and a doctoral degree from North Carolina State University. After moving to Canada he taught plant physiology at Université du Québec in Montréal. Then he worked for 30 years as a research scientist for the Canadian government in Québec and British Columbia where he conducted research on genetically modified potatoes, among other projects. He was director of the biotechnology department at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland, BC.
After 35 years of research and teaching of soil and molecular biology, Vrain retired to a small farm in Courtenay, BC called Innisfree. Today, Thierry Vrain is a gardener, a teacher, and a passionate speaker about organic gardening—from soil health to GMOs.
Tell me a little more about your background.
Thierry Vrain: I worked in three research institutes in Montreal, Vancouver, and Summerland. I was the head of a research group using molecular biology tools. We worked on food crops. I was genetically engineering small fruit and potatoes for nematode resistance using the snowdrop lectin gene.
The genetically engineered apple (now under regulatory review in the US and Canada) originated in our group though I wasn’t involved with the research.
Did you speak publically in favor of genetic engineering when you were at Agriculture Canada?
Vrain: Yes, I just took it on as my job. I explained the safety of the technology to the public and did a good amount of lecturing, educating small groups.

What led you to change from a supporter of genetically modified foods to an opponent?
Vrain: I have some difficulties with how the controversy is handled. If you aren’t a scientist you don’t understand the science. If you are a scientist and discover things that are of concern, then you are accused of doing “pseudoscience” and often viciously attacked by the industry and academics on the payroll. This has happened many times, for example to Arpad Pusztai in England and then Ignacio Chapela, who discovered GMO contamination in native corn in Mexico. He was attacked and almost fired from his post at the University of California. A year later his findings were confirmed.
There are now quite a number of research publications, in peer reviewed journals, showing concerns from feeding GM corn and soy to rats. Those studies are ignored and shouldn’t be. Federal agencies should repeat the studies and must test these crops for safety.
Research scientists from the US Food & Drug Administration made it clear in the early 1990s that there could be indirect effects from eating GM crops, such as toxins, allergens, and nutritional deficiencies. Those warnings were ignored. Now a good number of publications are confirming the predictions of the FDA scientists.
It troubles me that money and the bottom line are at the root of the use of the technology.

You say that the science behind genetic engineering is based on a misunderstanding. Please elaborate on this.
Vrain: When we started with genetic engineering in the 1980s, the science was based on the theory that one gene produces one protein. But we now know, since the human genome project, that a gene can create more than one protein. The insertion of genes in the genome through genetic engineering interrupts the coding sequence of the DNA, creating truncated, rogue proteins, which can cause unintended effects. It’s an invasive technology.
Biotech companies ignore these rogue proteins; they say they are background noise. But we should pay attention to them. It must be verified that they produce no negative effects.
A key point is that the concern about genetic engineering should be about the proteins. Many plants and animals are not edible because their proteins are toxic or poisonous. To test for the safety of Bt crops, scientists have mostly fed the pure protein to rats, and there may be no problem. But it’s different if you feed rats the whole GM plant because they are getting these rogue proteins that could cause harm.
How do you explain published papers describing how rats and mice suffer organ damage from eating GM corn or soy? It’s too easy to dismiss those as pseudoscience. Rats and mice are the canary in the mine, and we should be paying attention to what happens to them.

Why don’t more people recognize the misunderstanding behind genetic engineering?
Vrain: The human genome project is only 10 years old. How long did it take for people to recognize that the earth is not flat?
And there are many scientists that promote genetic engineering of foods.
Vrain: There are a lot of people on the payroll and a lot of grant money flowing from biotech companies to academia. I used to be employed by Agriculture Canada. I did my job, and didn’t question things too much.

What are some of the other risks you see with GMOs?
Vrain: When I hear we need genetic engineering to feed the world, I cringe. It turns out that there is no increase in yield, no decrease use of pesticides, and the process is of highly questioned safety.
Even if genetic engineering was perfectly safe, I still question it because of genetic pollution. Organic crops and foods are becoming contaminated.
I’m also concerned about contamination of the environment with antibiotic resistant genes. Every GM crop has these genes. The preliminary evidence we have is that bacteria in the soil and in the human gut are capable of picking those genes up. Considering the alarm I hear from medical people about losing antibiotics, I think this should be a serious concern.

What about the GMO apple that may be commercialized?
Vrain: There’s no research or toxicity tests to show that it’s not toxic.
I question whether it’s useful. It’s not different from what other biotech companies do, which is to put out a product and make money.
Apple growers, conventional and organic, are very concerned that people will reject their products if a GM apple is introduced.
The apple is a symbol of health. An engineered apple does not have the same health appeal, and the industry knows that.
What led you to favor organic agriculture?
Vrain: I used to be a soil biologist and focused on fertilizers and pesticides. When I retired I started to look around and, quite frankly, the organic side of soil biology made more sense than what I had taught.
Industrial agriculture relies on inputs that are good for the chemical industry. Unfortunately, we have evidence that inputs are degrading soil biodiversity. Industrial agriculture completely ignores the ecology of the soil.
When I was a soil biologist I would look at the biodiversity of the soil. I would see a big difference between industrial farms and organic farms, which had far more species of soil microfauna, microscopic “animals” and nematodes, what I call biodiversity.

Tell me about the work you’re doing now with Innisfree Farm.
Vrain: It’s a small farm, a demonstration garden. My wife is an herbalist, and we grow medicinal plants. Young students come and learn about medicinal plants and organic growing.
It’s my retirement project. I say I’m atoning for my sins.

© Copyright The Organic & Non-GMO Report, June 2013

 

SOURCE: http://non-gmoreport.com/articles/june2013/former-genetic-engineer-speaks-against-gmo-risks.php

NEWS : Bt Cotton responsible for suicides in rain-fed areas, says study

Updated: June 21, 2015 12:26 IST | Vidya Venkat
The Hindu

Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt Cotton adoption, say scientists. File photo: Kamal Narang | The Hindu

The cultivation of Bt cotton, a genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton variety, is a risky affair for Indian farmers practising rain-fed agriculture, according to a latest study published by California-based agricultural scientists in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe.

Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt cotton adoption, say the study’s authors Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Luigi Ponti, Hans R. Herren, Johann Baumgärtner and Peter E. Kenmore, who are associated with the University of California, Berkeley, and the Centre for the Analysis of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, California. 

Revisiting the raw annual suicide data for Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Maharashtra during the period 2001–2010, the authors found 86,607 of 549,414 suicides were by farmers, and 87 % were males with the numbers peaking in the 30–44 age class. Total suicides per year per state were regressed singly on states averages of proportion of area seeded to rainfed cotton, average farm size, cotton growing area, area of Bt cotton, proportion of area with Bt cotton, and simulated average yield/ha that includes the effects of weather. Excluding the proportion of area seeded to rainfed cotton, linear multiple regression shows suicides decrease with increasing farm size and yield but increase with the area under Bt cotton, the authors note. 

The study is significant for two reasons: first, most cotton cultivation in India is rain-fed. Second, between 2002 and 2010, the adoption of Bt cotton hybrid went up significantly to 86 per cent of the total cultivated area of cotton in India, according to International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.

Though cultivating the Bt cotton variety may be economic in irrigated areas, the costs of Bt seed and insecticide increase the risk of farmer bankruptcy in low-yield rain-fed settings. Further the inability to “use saved seed and inadequate agronomic information trap cotton farmers on biotechnology and insecticide treadmills,” the authors note.

The study also challenges the common assumption in economic analyses that cotton pests must be controlled to prevent monetary losses, thus encouraging Bt cotton adoption. The annual emergence of the key cotton pest pink bollworm in spring is poorly timed to attack rain-fed cotton and large populations of the pest fail to develop in non-Bt rain-fed cotton, the authors note. This reduces and usually prevents the need for Bt cotton and disruptive insecticides. The authors recommend that high-density short-season cottons could increase yields and reduce input costs in irrigated and rain-fed cotton.

Bt cotton has been shown to improve cotton yields by past studies, such as the one conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2012. This study, examining the contribution of Bt cotton adoption to long-term average cotton yields in India in nine cotton-producing States from 1975 to 2009, showed that Bt cotton contributed 19 per cent of total yield growth over time, since its introduction in 2002.

However, experts have responded to the new Berkeley study with concern. Former Union Environment and Rural Development Minister and Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh told The Hindu that India, now being the second largest country in the world cultivating Bt cotton, cannot afford to ignore the findings of this new study. “These findings call for serious discussion relating to the GM crop’s long-term sustainability in Indian agriculture,” he said.

Agricultural expert M.S. Swaminathan said the merits of Bt cotton adoption remain debatable as some have approved it for giving better yield, while some question the claim. “However, I support the adoption of higher yielding crop varieties as most of our cotton farmers are small farmers who need better yields to earn profits. Back in 2004, I had advised seed companies selling hybrid cotton to farmers to also sell insurance schemes alongside, so that if crops fail for reasons beyond the farmer’s control, they can recover losses. But these recommendations remain to be adopted widely.”

SOURCE : http://m.thehindu.com/news/national/bt-cotton-responsible-for-suicides-in-rainfed-areas-says-study/article7337684.ece

ARTICLE : Pier-reviewed study on Bt cotton in India - cause of suicides

 

Authors : Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Luigi Ponti, Hans R Herren, Johann Baumgärtner and Peter E Kenmore

 

Environmental Sciences Europe 2015, 27:12  doi:10.1186/s12302-015-0043-8

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.enveurope.com/content/27/1/12

Received:	31 October 2014
Accepted:	22 April 2015
Published:	17 June 2015

© 2015 Gutierrez et al.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.

Conclusions

In the light of this more thorough holistic agro-ecological analysis, recommendations by international agricultural economists [20, 44] and some Indian government official to implement the Bt technology in cotton (and other crops) as a solution for pest problems become questionable. Worldwide, the use of pesticides to solve pest problems promised short-run economic benefit but instead led farmers onto path dependency [56, 91] that increases system complexity by inducing pest outbreaks (iatrogenic effects) that may cause crop losses (idiopathic effects) [34, 47, 92] and increase costs (see Additional file 1). In his 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics lecture titled “The Pretense of Knowledge” concerning larger economic issues, F.A. von Hayek stated “…[economists]…have… little cause for pride: as a profession [we] … made a mess of things” [93]. In biotechnology, agricultural economists have pushed forward agendas without understanding the ecological bases of the crop production problem and in the process they often wrongly filled the information gaps created by corporate intellectual property constraints on field research on GM crops [76]. The adherence to doctrines that exclusively accept or select observations and disregard fundamental ecological principles for supporting scientific claims imposes serious limitations on their conclusions and has been a hindrance to progress in agricultural research [85]. In India and elsewhere, subsistence farmers often lack a clear understanding of pest control issues that trapped them on a pesticide treadmill (e.g., [11]) and now onto a biotechnology treadmill [33] and that ignores the impending collapse of ground water levels for irrigated cotton [26]. Subsistence farmers, especially in areas with low but high variable yields can ill afford the high costs of industrial farming technologies that contribute to bankruptcy and in some suicide cases.

In review, PBW has been a chronic severe problem in long-season irrigated Indian cotton and can provide inoculum for infestations of rainfed cotton during late summer amplifying feedback and creating an inherent conflict between the two systems. When insecticides became available for control of PBW and other pests, outbreaks of highly damaging bollworms (and other pests) were induced, and F1 Bt hybrid cotton that discouraged seed saving was introduced for control. Prior to the onset of heavy pesticide use, bollworm was not a major pest in Indian cotton [48]. As a percentage of the total revenues, the costs of the Bt and insecticide technologies decrease with increasing yield making it an acceptable assurance option in high-yield areas, but not in areas with low yields with high variability where the high costs increase the risk of bankruptcy (and suicide). Suicides in rainfed areas of south-central India are inversely related to farm size and yields and directly related to area of Bt cotton adoption, or more likely the combined high costs of Bt seed and insecticide. Short-season high-density cotton is a viable solution in both irrigated and rainfed cotton reducing the need for the Bt technology. Even where irrigation is available, short-season cotton could be grown rainfed allowing the irrigation water and the period prior to the monsoon to be used for the production of other food crops. This would promote development of diversified and sustainable, including organic agriculture. A recent report shows that despite near complete adoption of Bt cotton in India, insecticide use was higher in 2013 than in 2000 and now targets induced outbreaks of hemipteran insect pests [69]. Last, assuming no change in rainfall, increases in temperature due to climate change during the monsoon season would increase productivity <8 % in rainfed cotton in central and south India. The above results amply illustrate how policy makers need holistic analyses before new technologies are promoted in agricultural development.

 

Authors’ information

A.P. Gutierrez is a professor in the Graduate School in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, CA, and CEO of CASAS NGO. He has more than 40 years of experience in agro-ecosystem analysis and bio-economics with extensive experience in field research in cotton and other crops worldwide.

L. Ponti is Marie Curie Fellow and a research scientist at ENEA with expertise in modeling and GIS.

H. Herren is World Food Prize Laureate and CEO of the Millennium Institute.

J. Baumgärtner is retired full professor from the University of Milan with expertise in modeling ecosystems including cotton with interest in philosophical aspects of agricultural systems study and management.

P.E. Kenmore has worked over the past 33 years in India, holds an Honorary Doctorate from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and was formerly head of FAO Plant Protection globally and then head of FAO (Representative) in India.

 

SOURCE : http://www.enveurope.com/content/27/1/12

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-015-0043-8/fulltext.html#