Agrochemical genetic engineering (AGE) is the third generation of run-away industrial technologies. The first and second generation technologies were petrochemical and nuclear, emerging in the 1940s and 1950s, respectively. At their inception, these technologies were widely greeted as triumphs of industrial innovation with immense potential benefits for humanity. Needless to say, there was scant consideration for their possible ecological and public health implications, which as everybody knows, have proved extremely serious.
In striking contrast, there is, even at this early stage of the era of agrochemical genetic engineering, a wealth of scientific data which more than justifies an international ban on the new technology — a ban which would in any case be justified by social and ethical considerations alone. What makes the argument for a ban even more persuasive is that serious evidence of the value of these technologies for feeding the poor and the hungry has yet to be provided.
Government authorities simply cannot ignore the numerous studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals which point to the veterinary and public health hazards of rBGH milk. No serious studies have yet appeared to suggest that these hazards have been exaggerated. The biotechnology industry has of course reacted to these studies but only with biased press releases or unpublished critiques, by their indentured academic spokesmen. For this reason the scope of the AGE debate should be widened and extended to the international public health and independent scientific communities whose contribution to this relatively new issue have, so far, with singular notable exceptions, been minimal.
At the same time, rather than look at this new technology on its own, scientists and regulatory authorities should see it as motivated by the same commercial considerations that led to the development of the nuclear industry with all its empty promises (that it would produce electricity “too cheap to meter” for instance), and which has created large-scale and largely irreversible pollution problems throughout the world. They should note also that the development of the petrochemical industry, which has made possible industrial agriculture and hence the green revolution in the third world — with its equally empty promises — was similarly motivated. As is generally known it has left a legacy of erosion, desertification and pollution, forced countless million of small farmers off the land and into the slums and has undermined our health with its devitalized, pesticide-contaminated foods, whose consumption has made singular contribution to the growth of a number of chronic diseases, including cancer which now affects nearly one person in two.
Fortunately, there is evidence that the public is becoming increasingly aware of these issues, hence the phenomenal growth in the demand for organic food — not only so as to avoid having to consume pesticide-contaminated food, but also food that has been genetically manipulated.
(Reprinted with permission from The Ecologist, September-October 1998. Epstein is professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, Chicago.)
— Samuel Epstein
Volume 9, Number 12 June 1999
Leave a Reply