The second of the two pieces below by Craig Sams went out on the Prakash AgBioView list today. The first was originally posted last December. As you'll gather, there is little evidence of its having improved the situation!
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A Plea to Set Aside Paranoia
AgBioView Post from: Craig Sams
President: Whole Earth Foods, Ltd.
December 7, 2000
As an organic food manufacturer of thirty years standing and an interested observer in the AgBioView forum, I feel that I must set out my concern at the paranoia and rage about the 'Organic Food Industry' and its imagined sneaky plotting in support of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to get them to do our dirty work for us and boost sales of our products. There is no doubt that environmental organisations have been effective, thanks to their broad membership base, in slowing down the onslaught of genetically engineered foods. Hendrik Verfaille, the President of Monsanto, has acknowledged that Monsanto rushed into the introduction of genetically-engineered food within sufficient concern for the impact on consumers, non GM farmers and organic farmers. At a meeting in London last year he and his team expressed concern at how much alarm and commercial damage Monsanto's actions had caused. CEO Robert Shapiro misjudged the market badly and put all his shareholders' eggs in the GM basket. Monsanto was only saved from collapse by a takeover.
Remember, it is the "Organic Food Industry" that has had to bear the burden of cost of analysis and testing to ensure that the integrity of its products could be maintained in the face of cross contamination and cross contact with GM foods.Nobody has offered any compensation for the massive disruption to the organic market that GM foods has brought. The market has been growing at an average 40% per annum for more than a decade, long before GM foods were introduced. Sure,some new organic consumers have arisen from the desire to avoid GM foods, but these are typically people who are also concerned about pesticide residues, artificial colorings, flavorings, preservatives, hydrogenated fat, aspartame, phosphoric acid, monosodium glutamate and suchlike, so they were going organic anyway to avoid these ingredients.
The "Organic Food Industry" nowadays includes Nestle, General Mills, Heinz, Safeway, major UK retailers own brands (Tesco alone has over 300 private label organic lines), Unilever and Mars, to name just a few of the leading lights of the industry.
These companies have reviewed the arguments, considered the market research, looked at the demographics of the organic consumer and the way the wind is blowing and either bought or created organic brands to reach this market. They have invested heavily to reach premium consumers who are generally no richer than the average consumer, but weight their purchasing decisions more heavily towards food and preventive health than towards cars, clothes, travel or other consumer areas. These companies do not want to see their investment undermined by careless planting and handling of genetically engineered crops and, like the average consumer, don't see what's in it for them. The fact is that many large manufacturers and retailers are distinctly uncomfortable at the prospect of a handful of biotech companies having a stranglehold on the basic elements in the food supply chain and their primary duty is to their own shareholders, not to Monsanto's or Syngenta's shareholders.
Craig Sams, President Whole Earth Foods Ltd
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From: Craig Sams <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Subject: Re: Responses to '10 Reasons Why "Organic Gardening" Opposes
Bob Goldberg's fiery rant against organic food demands a reply, particularly as he has accused Whole Earth Foods, the company that I founded in 1967, of being 'hypocritical' and of selling foods that are higher in pathogens. I will try to be as brief as possible as I am aware of your space limitations, but would like to address his points in the order he makes them.
1. Hypocrisy. Organic businesses 'are quite hypocritical'. I first became interested in sustainable farming as a 12 year old in my native Nebraska when I saw the land scarred by soil erosion. When my uncle Floyd explained to me about using feminising hormones in beef (this was 1960, so it was still stilbestrol, finally prohibited in the 1970s) I became more concerned. I started Whole Earth Foods in 1967 because a diet of organic and natural foods had helped me to recover from a particularly bad case of hepatitis that I contracted in India. To assume that all the people who have dedicated their lives to organics are just cynical money-grubbing hyprocrites is to fall into the same blinkered trap as that of anti-GM campaigners who assume that all scientists are just hired liars who are too afraid of losing research funding to tell the whole truth about what they do.
2, Health. Organic foods do not routinely contain pesticide residues, many of which have been banned in the past decade as evidence emerges of their health risks. They also never contain the 7000 artificial additives permitted for food use (a list also subject to many deletions in the past few decades), they never contain hydrogenated fat, artificial sweeteners, phosphoric acid or feminising growth hormones or growth promoting antibiotics. There is no case in the UK of cattle bred and reared on an organic farm developing BSE. (This is an important consideration for UK consumers).
3. Pathogens. There are no known cases of E.coli O157:H7 poisoning arising from organic production practices. Alex Avery admitted his allegations were statistically unsupportable on this website a few months ago. I am quite happy to rehearse the arguments, but it could be embarassing for all the scientists who repeated Avery's 'research' uncritically. (check the archive). The CDC is clear - most of the up to 200 fatal E.coli O157:H7 poisoning cases every year arise from unhygienic slaughterhouse and meat preparation practices, with slurry contamination of water a major secondary factor. The FAO has stated that the risk of E. coli O157:H7 in organic cattle is less than 1% of the risk in conventional feedlot raised animals, due to the high proportion of forage (60% by dry weight minimum) in their diets. There are no facts to support Prof. Goldberg's 'no-brainer.' Perhaps his description is more apt than he realises.
4. Pesticides: 48% of non-organic fruit and vegetables tested by MAFF in 1999 contained pesticide residues, as did 28% of all non organic processed foods. MAFF have announced that they believe pesticide residue levels are being underreported. Tests for pesticides only detect the original pesticide and not its breakdown products, which can also be dangerous. The Maximum Residue Level (MRL) of some pesticides has been progressively reduced over the years while other pesticides, such as most recently, Lindane and technazene, are being phased out. Nobody has properly researched the 'cocktail effect' of consuming a wide variety of pesticides, yet 86% of lettuces tested had up to seven different pesticide residues. One recent study showed that 3 pesticides consumed together produced harmful side effects equal to 100 times those of any of single pesticide consumed on its own. Sir John Krebs recently announced that the FSA will follow up this issue as a priority. Washing vegetables can help, but most pesticides are designed to withstand heavy rainfall and are often integral to the flesh of the plant or the fat of the animal.
5. Land - you recently reported on Jules Pretty's conference at St. James Palace, which I attended. The evidence that yields truly do go up on small scale sustainable farms is overwhelming. The direct benefit to local food supplies is dramatic. This is not theoretical projection, this is hard fact based on the study of actual cases covering 3% of the Third World growing area. There is enough land for the world to feed itself sustainably.
6. 'GM food is tested'. The tests on feeding GM tomatoes in 1992 were sufficient to cause FDA scientists to object to the 'substantial equivalence' idea, but they were overruled from the top down. Dr. Arpad Puztai's research has been criticised, but nobody has sought to repeat it. Feeding trials are the only way that we can fully satisfy public concern about the little research that has been done, which indicates that intestinal lesions are increased when GM food is consumed.
7 & 8 Bt insecticide and resistance. Organic farmers have been using Bt for 30 years or so and some resistance has developed. They use it as an occasional treatment, not as a routine spray. When Bt is engineered into crops it is likely that insect resistance will develop more quickly. Prof. Goldberg asks: 'Do we stop using antibiotics because bacterial strains have become resistant?' Yes, we do. In the UK 10% of all people who are hospitalised develop MRSA, and even Vancomycin, the 'last resort' antibiotic, is becoming ineffective. In Japan they have closed and sealed hospitals where MRSA has become ineradicable.
9 & 10 Pollen. Organic farmers livelihoods are threatened by cross-pollination, though it's encouraging to know that Prof. Goldberg has been working on suppressing the expression of GM traits in pollen for 15 years. Let's hope a breakthrough is imminent. By acknowledging that reduced pesticide use is a 'good thing' Prof. Goldberg is coming closer to the organic argument, which is that non-use of pesticides actually improves soil health and fertility and also contributes to biodiversity in the wider environment.
11. Nutrition. I find these arguments wearying, whatever their source. Good nutrition comes from eating a balanced diet, not from choosing only organic food or from eating the pathetically-enhanced-with-Vitamin A 'golden rice.' The colossal market failure of the Novartis functional food line 'Aviva' shows that scientists and nutrition make poor bedfellows. It is presumpuous and arrogant to regard humans as so many battery chickens to be fed foods developed by people who are remote from the realities of their lives.
12. There are hybrids and there are F1 hybrids. Farmers can plant hybrid seed and get good results. F1 hybrids quickly lose their characteristics. Organic farmers and gardeners understand this and decide accordingly. The ignorance that Prof. Goldberg castigates is a creature of his own imagination.
13. 'We live in a market system.' Would that we did! If the market for food had not been nationalised by the US and EU governments in the 1950s then genetic engineering would probably not exist and a much higher proportion of the land would be organic. Subsidies are an inefficient way to keep down the price of food and mask the low productivity of so-called 'production agriculture'. In Russia, where the state has withdrawn support for food production, it is now cheaper to import subsidised North American wheat than to grow it. Unsubsidised farmers around the world have to compete with inefficient North American and European producers who are lavished with taxpayers funds and then use the WTO to force their underpriced output onto free market economies.
Agribusiness (which includes agri-corporations, agrichemical manufacturers and biotechnology companies) is an ungrateful dependent on free market societies. Modern agriculture and biotechnology have nothing to do with a 'market system' and everything to do with the worst excesses of old style Soviet agriculture, which also liked putting small producers out of business and replacing them with giant agricultural enterprises that could never survive without State subsidies. The US spent at least $79 bn last year subsidising agriculture, the EU spend $50 bn, and this money goes disproportionately to the largest farmers. Monsanto famously raised billions on Wall Street and in subsidies to advance their miraculous biotech breakthroughs and then what did they do with the money? They bought up all the seed companies they could lay their hands on, thus limiting farmers' choice of what seeds they would plant. This also ensured a future for Roundup, on which the patent expired last year. Hardly the high-tech investment that Wall Street thought it was backing, but simply a crude effort to gain control of an existing distribution system.
14& 15. Allergies and toxins. All the scientific arguments for GM food being safe can appear convincing. So why is there such a reluctance to reproduce the results of the few feeding trials that have been performed? If the scientists who got those results are as incompetent as they have been accused of being, surely the answer is to reproduce those results.
16.and finally. Teosinte and wheat were not 'genetically engineered' by man. This deliberate blurring of the language to make a point is intellectually disingenuous. Gene splicing is not the same as breeding. However, genomics could deliver many of the results of genetic engineering by using conventional breeding techniques, backed by the awesome new knowledge that we have about the genetic structure of plants. Organic farmers have, through enhanced understanding of the science of farming, achieved results that dwarf those of traditional farmers just 50 years ago. Technology works for everybody. IBM never thought that Apple's microcomputers would be more than a nerd's toy. They were wrong. Modern technology, including genomics, can and will work in the service of sustainable and organic agriculture.
Professor Goldberg is right, talk is cheap. More research is needed. Happily, the organic food industry is growing at a rapid rate and, as more multinationals enter the arena, investment in research will accelerate. At the moment research priorities are distorted.
The US and EU govts have subsidised so much agribiotech and gene therapy research that they have a political stake in its success, despite the disappointing lack of results. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both eloquently described and practiced the withdrawal of the State from many sectors of the economy, with tremendous benefits in productivity. Agriculture is still waiting for the same treatment. Until it is denationalised, worldwide, nobody can confidently make assertions about what form it should take and, indeed, what systems will prevail.
Craig Sams President Whole Earth Foods Ltd.