SENT: 13/12/2012 to Ron:
Question: I am thinking that it would be worthwhile to forward the information I sent you, to other people in Bhutan. Would that suit you? (INSERT: Ron responded – he agrees but is over his head with work at the moment.)
Reason for sharing the information further:
You received untrue arguments from Dr. Peter Raven (Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus Missouri Botanical Garden) to undermine your confidence that there is any harm in chem/biotech agriculture.
Because of experience with this industry here in Saskatchewan, I think it is possible that you are not the only person in Bhutan who will receive the untruths, nor will Peter Raven be the only proponent for chem/biotech who is working to undermine faith in the organic approach.
A whole COUNTRY (Bhutan) that announces it will use organic agricultural methods is a threat to the chem/biotech industry. It becomes a magnet for their propaganda, the same as my province became a target when we tried to get a bylaw passed in the capital city, to eliminate the pesticides that are used solely to keep lawns looking pretty (kill the dandelions, ignore the impact on the health of children and others).
The industry efforts will be to undermine faith in what Prime Minister Thinley (with the support and wisdom of the 4th (and 5th?) Kings) is trying to accomplish.
Prince Charles (Britain) has long conducted his estates on an organic basis. He is scathing in his remarks about the chem/biotech corporations. He knows from experience their manipulative and corrupt ways.
A NAME YOU SHOULD KNOW: CROPLIFE
CROPLIFE INTERNATIONAL and its national bodies (e.g. CROPLIFE CANADA) are the lobby machines for the chem/biotech corporations. When they perceive a threat to their interests, they immediately dispatch a team to deal with it. They work behind the scenes using whatever means they can to thwart the public interest in decreasing the chemical/biotech poisons going into the environment.
I do not know how it came about that Peter Raven was in touch with you, and that he is on the Working Group for the organic agriculture project in Eastern Bhutan. If you contacted him, then I would worry less that there are deliberate efforts to derail Bhutan’s attempts to do organic agriculture.
A FURTHER NOTE:
The industry sells huge amounts of chemicals for the spraying of orchard and forest “pests”, also for golf courses.
I hope that the mountainous terrain of Bhutan, coupled with the Government’s resolve to protect the environment will save the country from efforts to eventually bring your fruit trees and forests under chemical spraying. There are very good books that document the terrible health effects from this spraying, and the inability of Americans (in particular) to stop the spraying of vast tracts of public forests. It is related to the spraying of forests in the Viet Nam War. The industry has a product (Agent Orange); they needed a market for it when they were forced to withdraw from Viet Nam.
Maybe Bhutan would like to get rid of those pesky leeches in the forests? – – so the line of reasoning would go.
As you may have seen from the counter-arguments I sent to you earlier: it is very difficult to stop the poisoning once the financial interests have gained a foothold. They have large amounts of money which buy influence, and they are without scruples.
Do you see any problem if I make some changes to what I sent to you, and then forward it to some others?
I would also like to post it on my blog (at SOME point, not right now): as of today the Premier of the Govt of Sask, the President of the Univ of Sask, and the CEO of Potash Corp have announced a new Global Institute for Food Security.
It is not necessarily a good thing. The University Dept of Agriculture has been a major teacher and promoter of chem/biotech agriculture, for decades now. Their idea of how to accomplish “food security” is corporate-based, not public-interest based. Many of the arguments put forth simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Sandra
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From: Ronald Colman
Sent: December-12-12 2:47 AM
To: sabest1 at sasktel.net; ‘Nancy Strickland’
Subject: RE: GMO correspondence
Many thanks Sandra for the two delightful photographs and for this excellent information on GMOs.
Interestingly, I have not had a response from Peter Raven to my letter, and maybe things will rest there. But in case he does respond, or if the issue arises in our upcoming working group deliberations, then I’ll certainly draw on the first-rate information on GMOs you have supplied here. I really appreciate your taking the time to compile it so assiduously. . …
Very best wishes,
Ron
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From: Sandra Finley
Sent: December-12-12
To: Nancy Strickland; Ronald Colman
Subject: RE: GMO correspondence
Dear Nancy and Ron,
. . . The remainder of this is response to GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) question.
RE GMO’s:
Ron – you did a great and diplomatic job of challenging statements made by Peter Raven, based on your general (reliable!) intuitive understandings.
Please see appended. I have taken excerpts from his communications to you (starting with his first email) and offered specific responses, largely referring to information collected by my network when we were working on GMO’s.
Much more could be added, but I think there is easily sufficient to show that Raven has no basis for much of what he claims. He is relying on people “not knowing” and his “credentials”.
If it will be helpful, I can go through the paper he submitted and document in similar fashion. Just with a quick scan it is possible to identify bogus arguments similar to what he set out in his emails.
I couldn’t help but notice, probably nothing more than coincidence: Peter Raven and the Missouri Botanical Garden are in St Louis, Missouri which happens to also be where Monsanto is head-quartered.
Cheers,
Sandra
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APPENDED
GM = Genetically Modified. (Equivalent terms used: “GE” = Genetically Engineered. And “transgenic”.)
For the most part, GM crop seed is patented. It is “owned” by a chemical/biotech corporation. The corporations use the threat of taking farmers to court if there are GM plants on their property and the farmer has not paid a licensing fee to the corp.
GM crops, by and large, are crops that have been engineered to be resistant to the chemical that the particular corporation sells. Hence, chemical and biotech (GM) go hand-in-hand. You cannot separate the consequences of one from the other.
The crops are designed by the criterion that they can be sprayed with the chemical(s) and not die from the application. Everything else on the field (“weeds” or “pests”) will die.
STATEMENTS BY PETER RAVEN, AND RESPONSE
NOTE:
- For the links – – after clicking, SCROLL DOWN past the headers at the top of the page to see the content of the link.
- Much of the documentation is related to Monsanto and its GM crops. That’s because it has attracted more attention through bad judgment. The other chem/biotech companies are just as bad, but not as flagrant. BASF and Dow come to mind.
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The statements below by “Raven” are excerpted from the emails he sent to Ron Colman. They appear below, in the email chain.
The responses are mine (Sandra Finley), drawing mostly upon work done by my network, circulated by email and now posted on the blog www.sandrafinley.ca under the category in the right-hand sidebar, “Genetically Modified”.
RAVEN: there is no scientific evidence that GM crops have any intrinsic problems (the method doesn’t cause any problems).
RESPONSE: Two “small” (?) examples
A. GM RICE
For details of the GM rice fiasco, click on:
2011-03-19 A HUGE WIN! GMO: Riceland Awarded $136.8 Million In Suit Against Bayer CropScience
EXCERPT:
We saw (that) when Bayer’s transgenic seeds contaminated a third of the US rice supply, causing the European Union to close its market to US rice. Bayer has faced 6,000 lawsuits due to that contamination and market closure. On top of lawsuits already lost or settled, last month, Bayer lost a $137 million lawsuit by Riceland Foods. The new suit notes that, “The worldwide total economic loss due to the [2006 GM rice] contamination event was estimated at $741 million to $1.285 billion.”
B. GM FLAX
Another tragic story, click on 2009-09-10 “Triffid” GM flax seed coming to you, compliments of the University of Saskatchewan
EXCERPT:
Canadian flax seed has been shut out of its largest market after traces of Triffid — a genetically modified form of the crop ordered destroyed 10 years ago — was found in shipments. The European Union, which buys 70 per cent of Canada’s flax, has a zero-tolerance policy regarding genetically modified organisms and has been turning away shipments. … “
Officials say Canada’s entire $320-million industry is threatened.[14] . . .
Canadian tax-payers footed a huge bill.
The industry response: the Europeans are the obstacle. And so they have attempted to use the WTO (World Trade Organization) to overturn laws that have been enacted in European parliaments, and other methods to interfere with democratically-made decisions.
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RAVEN: problems with health (there has not been a single reported case of any health problem with millions of people consuming them regularly, and essentially all beer, cheese, and very many medicines, such as insulin, are made by genetically modified organisms, with nobody spending a second worrying about them)
Academies of science throughout the world are unanimous on these points and all by a very few scientists who actually work on molecular biology are too. So the negative arguments are just as anti-scientific as those attempting to deny global climate change.
RESPONSE:
In North America there is no labeling of GM foods, as there is in Europe. People don’t know what they are eating. It is impossible to establish cause-and-effect. (You’d think that if GM food was so wonderful, the industry would WANT it to be labeled.)
Citizens in North America tried to get mandatory labeling but the industry “bought out” the decision makers. The most recent attempt for labeling was in California, November 2012.
see items #3 and #4:
(3) MONSANTO’S GLYPHOSATE (ROUNDUP): IMPACTS ON HUMAN HEALTH AND PLANT LIFE
(4) THE TRAGIC HUMAN CONSEQUENCES OF GLYPHOSATE SPRAYING OF GM SOY (ARGENTINA)
EXCERPT:
“. . . As Justice Story wrote in 1817, to be patentable, an invention must not be ‘injurious to the well being, good policy, or sound morals of society,’” notes the complaint in its opening paragraphs, citing Lowell v. Lewis.
The suit points to studies citing harm caused by Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, including human placental damage, lymphoma, myeloma, animal miscarriages, and other impacts on human health.
Plaintiffs condemn Monsanto for prohibiting independent research on its transgenic seeds and for its successful lobby efforts to ban GM food labeling. Many raise the specter of allergic reaction to GM foods, proof of which is hidden by lack of labeling.
The suit also confronts the propaganda that transgenic seeds improve yield and reduce pesticide use, citing reports on failure to yield and increased pesticide use. The complaint mentions a 2010 lawsuit by West Virginia after several studies contradicted yield results claimed in Monsanto’s ads. And, it notes the growth in glyphosate-resistant superweeds.
“Thus, since the harm of transgenic seed is known, and the promises of transgenic seed’s benefits are false, transgenic seed is not useful for society.”
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RAVEN: If herbicides are sprayed on GM plants, then there problems might arise with weed formation and the like, but the same would be true whenever herbicides or other pesticides are used on anything, , GM doesn’t cause mass industrial agriculture, which was there long before these modern methods were applied to crop improvement In fact, the use of GM crops and associated no till agriculture has cut down the massive doses of pesticides applied worldwide
RESPONSE:
Don Huber: I have been doing research on glyphosate for 20 years. I began noticing problems when I saw a consistent increase in “take-all” (a fungal disease that impacts wheat) where glyphosate had been applied in a previous year for weed control. I tried to understand why there was an increase in disease with glyphosate. . . . .
. . . There are a lot of serious questions about the impacts of glyphosate that we need answers for in order to continue using this technology. I don’t believe we can ignore these questions any more if we want to ensure a safe, sustainable food supply and abundant crop production.
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RAVEN: has cut down . . the carbon dioxide loading associated with agriculture hugely worldwide.
RESPONSE:
EXCERPT:
“ . . . The results are in from a 30-year side-by-side trial of conventional and organic farming methods at Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute.
. . . Importantly, the Rodale study, which started in 1981, found organic farming is more sustainable than conventional systems. They found, for example, that:
. Organic systems used 45 per cent less energy than conventional.
. Production efficiency was 28 per cent higher in the organic systems, with the conventional no-till system being the least efficient in terms of energy usage. . . . “
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RAVEN: Anyway, the short story is that GM technology development is no more than moving genes precisely from one set of chromosomes, DNA instructions, in one cell, to those in another. In a crude way, it’s like moving notes for a piano score from one score to another. What they do there depend on what they are and what characteristics they produce. The is not a single academy of sciences in the world, with all their studies, that believe there’s any danger in this method at all, and only a very few scientists who are really working on it of the many thousands who are.
RESPONSE:
2011-01-10 Enviro-Pig = pig genes + E. coli genes + mouse DNA. Seriously. Coming to your favourite restaurant and you will never know the difference!
EXCERPT:
There is no way of tracking the health impacts of pork produced from “enviro-pigs” with their E. coli and mouse DNA, themselves raised on a diet of GM corn and soy because the Government regulatory system bowed to industry demands to require no labeling.
Remember: corn and soybeans are two of the largest bioteched crops. People may remember GM “smartstax” corn: inserted into it is material related to EIGHT different biocides to produce resistance to various chemical applications for “weeds”, insects, fungi, etc. Yes, the problems are created because the animals are being fed materials they have not evolved to eat. The same is happening with cattle in intensive livestock operations, as with pigs.
You think that we have an epidemic of childhood obesity, diabetes and cancer? Wait until the full effects of the introduction of GM meat are experienced. But it will be impossible to establish cause-and-effect because the interactions are complex, and because there is no labeling. (in North America)
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RAVEN: The fact that virtually all beer and cheese in the world, and very many medicines, are produces from products of GM organisms, yet they’re all exempted from labeling or further scrutiny by the rich industries that they represent ought to give a clear idea of what people actually think about the dangers.
RESPONSE:
EXCERPT:
“. . . The country’s leading group representing farmers and ranchers, the National Agrarian Convention, said that by this measure Peru “defends its biodiversity, its agriculture, its gastronomy and its health.”
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RAVEN: It is basically political theater being played at the expense of hundreds of millions of hungry people by popularizers and organizations without scruples. and remember, as you read it that no scientific bodies in India doubt the facts either.
RESPONSE:
I refer you to this documentation from 2006. Six years later there is more that could be added:
Click on 2006-05-01 CONTEXT: Corruption of the companies. Public Record.
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RAVEN: scientists can now routinely move genetic material between unrelated kinds of organisms, a relatively rare process in nature. To the best of my knowledge, all GMOs obey the fundamental laws of nature, and as such meet an objective criterion for being “natural”.
RESPONSE (Ron):
You (Ron) replied to Raven: But to me, something “rare in nature” does not intuitively qualify as “natural”. Which reinforces my concern about “manipulating in nature in all its complexity” as expressed in my first note to you on this.
RESPONSE (Sandra):
There is nothing “natural” about what they are doing in the GM field:
Over and out!
Sandra
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Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012
From: Ronald Colman
Subject: GMO correspondence
To: sabest1 AT sasktel.net
Dear Sandra,
Many thanks to Nancy for passing on your email address, and great meeting you both yesterday. Hope you are having a good trip home today. Here, as promised, is the latest correspondence with Peter Raven. I’ve attached his pro-GMO talk that he sent me, plus two attachments that I sent him. This is ongoing….. Very best wishes and Bon Voyage.
Ron
From: Ronald Colman
Sent: November-22-12
To: ‘Peter Raven’
Cc: ‘rcostanz AT gmail.com’; ‘tashi.choden79 AT yahoo.com’; ‘Ida Kubiszewski’; pem.lama AT gmail.com; Meg Hart (meg AT megahart.com); robert.costanza AT anu.edu.au
Subject: RE: Talk as delivered to ISBGMO
Dear Peter,
Now it’s my turn to apologize for the delay in responding to you. I’ve just been so busy and the workload here so heavy in recent weeks that it’s only now I’m starting to catch up on piles of accumulated correspondence and notes, including reading key materials sent by you and other outstanding scientists and scholars. As you say below, “we all have excuses” for our response delays, but for what it’s worth, that’s my excuse. I’ll at least say that yours was the first set of key-materials-awaiting-reading that I now read. And I want to start by thanking you greatly for what you sent. I particularly appreciate the ecological/biodiversity perspective you bring to the GM issue, and you’ve made me think deeply about my own feelings on the issue. I also want to say as prelude that I appreciate your note to Bob that your primary work and concerns are much wider than the GM issue, and have to do with biodiversity, conservation, and species preservation on which we greatly look forward to your contribution. And yet you have expressed yourself passionately on the GM issue, and you sent me your materials on that subject so that I would read them, which I promised to do and finally have…. And thus this belated response.
First I want to confess that I am not a scientist and have not studied the science of GM closely, so I am not responding as an expert. At the same time, I hope you will not consider my concerns to be “politically driven” as you characterize many objections to GMOs. But your presentation (ISBGMO), letter to the Indian PM and more have prompted me to try to list three core concerns:
1) Because I have not studied the evidence, I am not disputing what you say in your ISBGMO presentation that “there is no scientific evidence that the process of transferring genes from one kind of organism to another poses intrinsic negative consequences.” And yet, your response to my worry on the very short 15-20 year period of scientific experimentation and evidence has deepened and not assuaged my original concern.
On 14th October, I’d written: “I wonder if we really have the evidence we need at this very early stage of GM technology development to make any decision either way on this question. This may be a question that applies not only to GM but to all attempts to manipulate nature in all its complexity. What worries me is that, during generations of burning fossil fuels with abandon, there was also no “scientific evidence” of climate change till it was way too late, and till our built infrastructure and habitual patterns had so locked us into fossil fuel dependence that it’s become incredibly difficult to change. By instinct therefore, I tend to find myself being highly “conservative” and cautious on such new technologies.”
On 5th November, you responded to my climate change analogy as follows: “Arrhenius, a Swedish Nobel prize winner, laid out the principles of climate change as a result of greenhouse gasses produced by humans in 1895, and scientists have been aware of the problem ever since. It was perfectly obvious to the climate community by 1980 that we were changing the climate. That’s precisely why I don’t want the anti-science people defeating the truth with respect to GM crops any more than I want them to do it for global climate change or, for that matter, evolution.”
But this is exactly what worries me: The “principles” of climate change may well have been laid out in 1895. But, as you correctly point out, it took nearly a hundred years before the science became “obvious to the climate community”, during which time humankind innocently and unknowingly did irreparable damage to the planet. And with GMOs we are talking only 20 years. Climate change is not the only worrying example. We were emitting CFCs and creating a serious hole in the ozone layer long before we knew CFCs were harmful. We were merrily over-fishing long before we had the scientific evidence of the impending collapse of key fish stocks. And more…. Often the science isn’t known till after the damage is done.
On a related tack, I may be misunderstanding something you said to ISBGMO, and if so, please excuse my ignorance and correct me. You said: “scientists can now routinely move genetic material between unrelated kinds of organisms, a relatively rare process in nature. To the best of my knowledge, all GMOs obey the fundamental laws of nature, and as such meet an objective criterion for being “natural”. But to me, something “rare in nature” does not intuitively qualify as “natural”. Which reinforces my concern about “manipulating in nature in all its complexity” as expressed in my first note to you on this.
You’ve cited Bt cotton as “an amazing success” in India. But I read recently that the government of Andhra Pradesh banned the cultivation of Monsanto Bt cotton, that the seeds are very expensive for farmers, that initial high yields may be followed by much lower future yields, and that Bt cotton may compromise long-term soil fertility and health. I know you don’t have a high opinion of Dr. Vandana Shiva, but she is on our working group, and so I’ve attached here the results of a Navdanya study indicating deleterious effects of Bt cotton on a range of soil organisms. I have not studied the facts and am not vouching for the accuracy of all this reporting. But it does seem there may be another side to the story arguing that claims of “amazing success” might possibly be premature or at least need to be qualified. At the very least, such reports might reinforce the case for caution.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming scientific knowledge nor disputing the scientific evidence you cite nor disagreeing with your stated case for profound changes in agriculture to meet the growing food needs of a burgeoning planetary population. I am only saying that my inherently cautious instinct and respect for nature’s complexity raises concerns that we may unwittingly be establishing a huge and irreversible new reality on the ground before we know its true effects.
2) But in response to this kind of cautious approach, you quite roundly criticize the “excessive oversight of GMOs” and of biosafety procedures as taking insufficient account of the increasingly pressing need to meet the rapidly growing food needs of a sharply expanding global population. Your facts and figures on this are well taken, and I accept that it is incumbent on cautious folk like me to address the specter of hunger and malnutrition that you raise. You approach this question primarily from the standpoint of quantity of production, but all I have read points to the reality that hunger and malnutrition are largely the consequence of mal-distribution rather than insufficient supply. Again, I claim to be no authority, but it seems that hunger and malnutrition can be greatly ameliorated by:
• Reducing excessive consumption and waste among the rich, and concurrently ensuring adequate food distribution to those in need. In your ISBGMO address, you cite the figure of 1 billion malnourished in the world. But the latest figures I have seen are that the 1.1 billion currently under-nourished are matched by 1.1 billion obese and overweight. I don’t have the food wastage figures handy, but they are staggering.
• Reducing excessive meat consumption. I recently read from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences that, “Each year an estimated 41 million tons of plant protein is fed to U.S. livestock to produce an estimated 7 million tons of animal protein for human consumption For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein.” So even considering only the grain crops, the animals were fed more than 3 times the human-edible grain than what their bodies produced in meat.
In short, meeting the world’s food needs may be as much a matter of “fair distribution” (one of the explicit core dimensions of the new development paradigm on which we are currently working) as increasing supply.
3) The third big issues is the one that Bob raised – on corporate control of the seeds. This is a big issue here in Bhutan were “good governance” is one of the four core pillars of the country’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) development philosophy. Thus, greater self-reliance, as might be achieved through seed saving and seed banks, would be seen as a dimension of good governance, whereas increasing reliance on multinational corporations might undermine that self-reliance….. to say nothing of the major debts that farmers have incurred in India and elsewhere in becoming dependent on external inputs (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides) from the large corporations – debts that are said to have fuelled the wave of farmer suicides in India over the past decade. But the debt/suicide issue aside, which I know is controversial, there is still the ‘governance’ issue of whether a shift to GMOs increases farmer dependence on external sources and reduces self-reliance, which is major concern among GNH proponents in Bhutan. The Prime Minister of Bhutan addresses this governance issue as one of his core reasons for wanting to move Bhutan to 100% organic production. I’ve attached his statement here.
It’s likely that email is the worst possible medium to have a proper discussion on such deep issues, let alone for proper education of a non-scientific person like myself who does not claim to be well-informed and yet wishes to understand better. I have voiced my key concerns but do not regard any of this as a matter of dogma, ideology, or politics leading to closed mind. On the contrary I do have an open mind on the subject, appreciate the context in which you have presented your own arguments, and am willing to keep learning. I hope you accept my statements of concern in that context. Very best wishes, and many thanks again for your kind offer to contribute your work on biodiversity and conservation to our present project.
Ron
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From: Peter Raven [mailto:Peter.Raven AT mobot.org]
Sent: November-05-12 3:30 AM
To: Ronald Colman
Cc: rcostanz AT gmail.com; tashi.choden79 AT yahoo.com; Ida Kubiszewski
Subject: Talk as delivered to ISBGMO
Dear Ron,
Sorry to be late in responding, but we all have excuses! Anyway, the short story is that GM technology development is no more than moving genes precisely from one set of chromosomes, DNA instructions, in one cell, to those in another. In a crude way, it’s like moving notes for a piano score from one score to another. What they do there depend on what they are and what characteristics they produce. The is not a single academy of sciences in the world, with all their studies, that believe there’s any danger in this method at all, and only a very few scientists who are really working on it of the many thousands who are.
The fact that virtually all beer and cheese in the world, and very many medicines, are produces from products of GM organisms, yet they’re all exempted from labeling or further scrutiny by the rich industries that they represent ought to give a clear idea of what people actually think about the dangers. The fact that hundreds of millions of people have been consuming foods from GM plants for 15 years or so, without a single case of a health problem reported and no mechanism for causing one even having been suspected, pretty well finishes the story, I think. It is basically political theater being played at the expense of hundreds of millions of hungry people by popularizers and organizations without scruples. I send separately a letter I wrote recently to the Prime Minister of India, and remember, as you read it that no scientific bodies in India doubt the facts either.
If we want to save biodiversity and feed people, who are being added to our dinner tables at 200,000 net per day, with a billion already malnourished and 100 million on the edge of starvation at any time, we need agriculture to be as productive and sustainable as it can be on the very limited supply of fertile land that we have. There is no time for the kind of anti-scientific nonsense that is used to oppose the idea that the world’s climate is changing, an issue in which I am also quite involved. Incidentally, Arrhenius, a Swedish Nobel prize winner, laid out the principles of climate change as a result of greenhouse gasses produced by humans in 1895, and scientists have been aware of the problem ever since. It was perfectly obvious to the climate community by 1980 that we were changing the climate. That’s precisely why I don’t want the anti-science people defeating the truth with respect to GM crops any more than I want them to do it for global climate change or, for that matter, evolution. I care too much about the environment, biodiversity, and people.
All best wishes,
Peter
Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus
Missouri Botanical Garden
P. O. Box 299
St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, USA
314-577-9577
Fax: 314-577-9596
peter.raven AT mobot.org
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From: Ronald Colman
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012
To: Peter Raven
Cc: rcostanz AT gmail.com; tashi.choden79 AT yahoo.com; Ida Kubiszewski
Subject: RE: Talk as delivered to ISBGMO
Dear Peter,
Many thanks for your detailed explanation below and for the talk on the subject that you sent. I am just en route back to Bhutan and shall definitely read what you sent.
I am not a scientist, but I have one major (non-scientific) concern in all of this that I’d like to run by you to have your response as I try to wrap my mind round this question. Namely, I wonder if we really have the evidence we need at this very early stage of GM technology development to make any decision either way on this question. This may be a question that applies not only to GM but to all attempts to manipulate nature in all its complexity. What worries me is that, during generations of burning fossil fuels with abandon, there was also no “scientific evidence” of climate change till it was way too late, and till our built infrastructure and habitual patterns had so locked us into fossil fuel dependence that it’s become incredibly difficult to change. By instinct therefore, I tend to find myself being highly “conservative” and cautious on such new technologies.
Anyhow, I’m not a scientist, and have an open mind to what I learn here. I also don’t want to distract you from your main interest on biodiversity, which must certainly be a major focus of our upcoming work. But your own expressed concerns about key members of our WG, and our need to be working in harmony and tandem as we move forward, leads me to ask this question.
Many thanks and best wishes,
Ron
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From: Peter Raven
Sent: October-13-12
To: colman AT gpiatlantic.org
Cc: rcostanz AT gmail.com
Subject: Talk as delivered to ISBGMO
Dear Ron,
Thanks for your note. I’m attaching my latest paper on the GMO issue, and hope you find it of interest. Basically, there is no scientific evidence that GM crops have any intrinsic problems (the method doesn’t cause any problems) or problems with health (there has not been a single reported case of any health problem with millions of people consuming them regularly, and essentially all beer, cheese, and very many medicines, such as insulin, are made by genetically modified organisms, with nobody spending a second worrying about them). Academies of science throughout the world are unanimous on these points and all by a very few scientists who actually work on molecular biology are too. So the negative arguments are just as anti-scientific as those attempting to deny global climate change.
If herbicides are sprayed on GM plants, then there problems might arise with weed formation and the like, but the same would be true whenever herbicides or other pesticides are used on anything, GM doesn’t cause mass industrial agriculture, which was there long before these modern methods were applied to crop improvement. In fact, the use of GM crops and associated no till agriculture has cut down the massive doses of pesticides applied worldwide and the carbon dioxide loading associated with agriculture hugely worldwide.
Concerning “organic,” it was in my opinion a huge mistake driven by cause-oriented people without much knowledge of the scientific facts to classify GM crops as non-organic in the U.S., since that drives a lot of unnecessary residual cost in the industry. When we have a situation where it is “organic” to broadcast Bt toxin on crops when it’s been freeze-dried and concentrated, by the ton, and then “non-organic” to build it into plants so that it affects only the organisms that are actually a problem in eating the crops and the “organic” treatment clearly kills every insect of the group targeted whether they ever come near the crops give rise to what I consider a kind of Alice in Wonderland situation. Anti-corporate campaigning also makes people want to fight GM crops, but the products don’t need to come from big or foreign corporations and making your campaign on that basis really does miss the target and increase hunger by decreasing yields.
What we all ought to be talking about in agriculture is sustainability and environmental friendliness of the practices rather than who made the products we use. How would that work with cell phones or any of the other products that dominate the modern world? With some 50,000 people a day being added to the population of India alone, 500 to 600 million in the next 40 years, almost all of these people poor, it seems to me that it’s truly immoral to use political arguments to “prove” that modern methods of crop improvement shouldn’t be used to make the crops grown more productive. I just wish the world didn’t have to go through this phase, but the directions are clear and if we really want to promote sustainable agriculture in Bhutan or anywhere else we really can’t afford not to use all the tools at our disposal and to pretend that only past breeding methods, crude as they were, were really fine and what we do now is really scary! I just don’t think we can or should be unscientific in this highly-charged political area which is so simple to understand and use without the politics.
My main interests on NDP Working Group, however, are biodiversity, the knowledge of what’s in Bhutan being so awfully incomplete, and to help the country get into place modern GIS maps for the country running nationally to feed the needs of all the relevant agencies. I’ve spent the major part of my professional life trying to conserve biodiversity, and I do hope that Bhutan might emerge as a find exemplar of what has to be done to get there worldwide. The GMO problem is far from my major interest, but when I looked over the composition of the committee I could just see that we might be heading for a big mistake there, and I really would hope that our conclusions can be as objective as possible.
Do you live in Nova Scotia? I’d love to hear more about your group too, but I guess that’s all available on the web really.
May I ask with which group in Bhutan does Tashi Choden work? I want to understand the parts to equation as well as I can to make the best contribution of which I am able.
All best wishes,
Peter
Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus
Missouri Botanical Garden
P. O. Box 299
St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, USA
314 577 9577
Fax: 314 577 9596
peter.raven AT mobot.org
