1.RE: AGBIOVIEW'S WORLD OF GAMMON AND SPINACH
2.Biotech boss smears organic in the New York Times
3.The Soil Association's Craig Sams Debunks Dennis Avery on E. coli Risks in Organic Food
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1.RE: AGBIOVIEW'S WORLD OF GAMMON AND SPINACH
GM Watch
Following yesterday's post about AgBioView's 'distract and attack' campaign of gammon and spinach, up popped AgBioView's latest GM bulletin. The diet was entirely as before - very little about GM but lashings of spinach, manure and DDT.
Here are yesterday's headlines:
Today in AgBioView from www.agbioworld.org: September 25, 2006
* A chain of weak links on spinach
* E. coli also a concern for home gardeners
* Spinach from Natural Selection Foods
* Fresh leafy greens Are they safe enough?
* Israeli company develops bug-resistant bananas [tissue-cultured not GM]
* Monsanto and Syngenta to expand testing of GM cotton in Burkina Faso
* ITSSD: IP-Based Innovation, Not IP Opportunism, is in Brazil's Best Interests
* DDT's return is a good thing. Really
The third item on the list - a letter in the New York Times from Elliot Entis of Waltham, Massachusetts - says it all.
Entis claims that "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and its British counterpart have both gathered statistics suggesting that there is a substantially greater likelihood of contracting E. coli-based and similar illnesses from organic produce than from conventionally grown produce." (item 2 below)
This is nonsense:
1.Manure use is a common agricultural practice for both conventional and organic food production, so why the attack on organic?
2.The British statistics referred to here are totally unknown to us and we challenge Entis to produce them.
3.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is on record as disassociating itself from the evidence Entis attempts to lay at its door.
According to Dr. Mitchell Cohen of the CDC, "Since 1982, most of the outbreaks of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 have been associated with foods of bovine origin (e.g. - ground beef). In recent years, a wider spectrum of foods, including produce, have been recognized as causes of outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not conducted any study that compares or quantitates the specific risk for infection with Escherichia coli 0157:H7 and eating either conventionally grown or organic/natural foods. CDC recommends that growers practice safe and hygienic methods for producing food products, and that consumers, likewise, practice food safety within their homes (e.g., thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables). These recommendations apply to both conventionally grown and organic foods."
http://ngin.tripod.com/averylies.htm
The claim that CDC evidence shows that organic produce is more likely to harm consumers, stems not from CDC but from Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, a fervent supporter of biotech, pesticides, irradiation, factory farming and free trade.
Not only has CDC disassociated itself from his claims (as above) but Avery's statistical manipulations on CDC data have been repetaedly debunked - see, for instance, item 3 below.
Even Gregory Conko, the co-founder with Prakash of AgBioWorld, has commented critically on Avery's dubious use of statistics which, Conko says, "doesn't seem to be convincing anybody who doesn't already have a predilection to believe you in the first place."
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=31
When the journalist Andy Rowell carefully analysed who was behind the attacks on organic farming, he came to the conclusion it was a loose network of rightwing think-tanks (usually caught up in climate-change denial too), supported by agribiz and biotech corporations (not to mention tobacco firm Philip Morris) and working together with GM supporting scientists, such as CS Prakash and Tony Trewavas who've both been involved in the latest deluge from AgBioView. (ORGANICISED CRIME)
http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=47&page=1&op=1
Elliot Entis may also have reasons for advancing these misleading claims in the New York Times. Although he somehow fails to mention it to the Times or its readers, Entis is the President of the Massachusetts based biotech firm, Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc., which for several years has been trying unsuccessfully to bring genetically engineered salmon to market.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=1426
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2.Biotech boss smears organic in the New York Times ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/opinion/l25spinach.html
To the Editor:
The spinach from Natural Selection Foods that has been implicated in the E. coli outbreak was produced to supply the organic foods industry, whose standards demand the use of supposedly safe natural fertilizers like sterilized cow manure. But the use of that manure - as opposed to the use of presumably less safe manmade fertilizers - could well be the source of the current outbreak.
In fact, from a fertilizing perspective, there are no chemical differences between the two fertilizers, but the sterilized manure has been implicated in far more disease outbreaks than manmade fertilizers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and its British counterpart have both gathered statistics suggesting that there is a substantially greater likelihood of contracting E. coli-based and similar illnesses from organic produce than from conventionally grown produce.
As a consequence, any attempt to ameliorate disease risk from produce must investigate farming practices like those employed by organic farmers.
Elliot Entis
Waltham, Mass., Sept. 21, 2006
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3.The Soil Association's Craig Sams Debunks Dennis Avery on E. coli Risks in Organic Food
http://www.ewg.org/reports/givemeafake/craigsams.html
I have spent considerable time in the past year seeking published evidence that organic food is not safe and, apart from the unscientific statistical manipulations of Dennis Avery at the Hudson Institute, there is no serious evidence.
My criticisms of the Avery argument are as follows:
1. Dennis Avery chose one single year to assess CDC data - 1996. If he had chosen any other year between 1984 and 1998 he would have found no E. coli O157:H7 cases associated with organic food and could therefore have interpreted this as statistical evidence that organic food represents an infinitesimal risk of E. coli O157:H7. If he had chosen to analyze the figures for the entire period from 1984 to 1998 he would have found a disproportionately low risk of food poisoning from organic food.
2. Dennis Avery then chose to lump together some cases involving unpasteurized apple juice in order to more than double the total number of cases in 1996 on which he based his calculations. Many foods are unpasteurized - the fact that apple juice made from apples grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with various pesticides was not pasteurized does not make the apple juice organic. Unpasteurized foods include common items such as eggs, beef and carrots. Pasteurizing eggs may well be a sensible risk-reducing safety measure, but has nothing to do with whether the eggs themselves are organic.
3. Dennis Avery chose to ignore the fact that the contamination of the organic lettuces in 1996 came from the use of water to clean the packing plant which had been contaminated with manure slurry from a nearby non-organic dairy farm. It thus bore no connection to the use of manure as a fertilizer to grow the lettuces. Salad vegetables and cole slaw from non-organic sources have also been implicated in quite a number of E. coli cases recorded by the CDC and the overall conclusion has been that tighter hygiene based on a recognition of the infectivity vectors is the most appropriate response to this risk.
Dennis Avery may be looking in the wrong place for the cause of food poisoning. It is not field crops, whether carrots, corn or lettuces, that are the predominant cause of E. coli0157 poisoning. The CDC figures are clear - beef and dairy products are the main vectors. Agronomists who specialize in vegetable crops are clear that the risk of finding E. coli in a field crop is greater from contamination with bird droppings than it is from manure applications. This is because of gravity: bird droppings fall downwards onto a crop whereas it is difficult for manure to rise to a height where it can contaminate beans, grains, or other crops that grow on stalks or on trees. Root crops could, theoretically, be contaminated, but evidence for food poisoning arising from this food source is not, to my knowledge, in existence.
The USDA has established that E. coli O157:H7 originates exclusively in the digestive systems of intensively-reared cattle fed on concentrated food such as soy and corn. It can be cured by placing the cow on a 6-day diet of hay or grass. Organic regulations require that a cow must have a minimum of 60% dry weight in its diet from forage (grass, hay or silage). E. coli O157:H7 is a novel and virulent infection that causes high levels of death and illness, with fatality rates ranging from 60-200 per annum in the USA alone, according to published CDC data.
While the use of this deadly new bacterium to lambaste organic food may make sensational reading, it ignores or trivializes the genuine grief and suffering that individual consumers experience as the direct result of the drive to produce beef and dairy products more cheaply. No one can reasonably dispute that there has been a completely legitimate social choice to accept the tradeoff between these economic and public health issues. This is an essential characteristic of democratic societies and represents the acceptance of a degree of risk that must inform any such debate, whether about genetic engineering or organic food standards.
What grates is the use of patently unreliable statistical manipulation which distorts and disguises the real issues behind the increase in food poisoning that is characteristic of all modern societies which have adopted intensive animal-rearing methods.
Dennis Avery's recommended solution to E. coli and other such risks is irradiation and I have to agree that it probably represents the only truly effective solution to the food safety problems that arise from intensive food production. As with genetic engineering, irradiation is not permitted under organic food standards, thereby necessitating the more extensive (and expensive) production methods embodied in organic regulations. ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice,’ as the saying goes. That's the vital essence of capitalism and free market economics - consumer choice.
It therefore really is time for this particular canard originating from the Hudson Institute to be laid to rest. When it was used in submissions at a recent British Medical Association inquiry it undermined the validity of the rest of the biotechnology advocates' arguments. Informed lay persons and scientists find it difficult to take seriously any representations from people who are prepared to uncritically include such stuff as a part of their argument. If your weaponry backfires on you, why keep on using it?
Craig Sams