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Elisabeth Rosenthal
GENEVA Some are smokers. Some drink too much. Some admit they love red meat. But virtually all shoppers here at the Migros Supermarket on the bustling Rue des Paquis are united in avoiding a risk they regard as unacceptable: genetically modified food.
That is easy to do here in Switzerland, as in the rest of Europe, where food containing such ingredients must be labeled by law. Many large retailers, like Migros, have essentially stopped stocking the products, regarding them as bad for public image.
"I try not to eat any of it and always read the boxes," said Marco Feline, 32, an artist in jeans, getting onto his bike (with no helmet). "It scares me because we don't know what the long-term effects will be - on people or the environment."
The majority of corn and soy in the United States is now grown from genetically modified seeds, altered to increase their resistance to pests or reduce their need for water, for example. In the past decade, Americans have happily - if unknowingly - gobbled down hundreds of millions of servings of genetically modified foods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says there have been no adverse effects, and there is no specific labeling.
But here in Europe - where food is high culture, if not a religion - farmers, consumers, chefs and environmental groups have joined voices to loudly and stubbornly oppose bioengineered foods, effectively blocking their arrival at the farms and on the tables of the continent. And that, in turn, has created a huge ripple effect on trade and politics from North America to Africa.
The United States, Canada and Argentina have filed a complaint that is pending before the World Trade Organization contending that European laws and procedures that discriminate against genetically modified products are irrational and unscientific, and so constitute an unfair trade barrier.
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By Natuza Nery and Reese Ewing
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil's Senate has passed a long-delayed biosafety bill that will regulate the planting and selling of genetically modified (GMO) crops like soy, corn and cotton, as well as human stem-cell research.
The basic text of the bill with some amendments will return to the lower house, which voted through an earlier draft in February, for clearance before being signed into law by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A backlog in legislation in the lower house, however, is likely to delay the bill's approval until late October or after, well into the current soybean planting season that began in mid-September.
Many farmers in southern Brazil refuse to wait for GMO crops to be legalised.
"Ninety percent of the soy crop our state produces is genetically modified and the producers are going to plant it with or without the legislation," Rui Polidoro Pinto, president of Rio Grande do Sul's State Cooperative Federation (Fecoagro), told Reuters.
Rio Grande do Sul is Brazil's number three soybean producer and is home to most of Brazil's black market GMO soy planting.
The local unit of biotech seed pioneer Monsanto Co. said it hoped the bill would end a six-year legal battle with environment and consumer watchdogs in Brazil and give producers freedom to choose between conventional and biotech crops.
"Millions of farmers have opted to use biotechnology in various countries over the past 10 years due to the benefits this technology has shown, like reduced costs and chemicals," Monsanto's communications director Lucio Mocsanyi said.
Brazil is one of the last major agricultural exporters to prohibit the commercial use of GMO crops, although its soybean producers have ignored the ban for over half a decade and planted illegal black market GMO soy.
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Move should provide researchers new tool to reduce animal disease
WASHINGTON - For the first time, scientists have created a genetic map of a cow, providing researchers a new tool to reduce animal disease and improve the nutrition of beef and dairy products, the Agriculture Department announced Wednesday.
The announcement was a major development in the $53 million international project to sequence the genome of different breeds of cattle.
“Sequencing the bovine genome is a major accomplishment ... in human and agricultural research,” Agriculture Undersecretary Joseph Jen said in a statement.
The program, launched last December, was aimed at documenting each of the 3 billion “letters” — or base pairs — of the cattle DNA code, about the same number as found in humans and other mammals.
The initial draft involved genes of the Hereford breed. Gene sequencing of a half dozen other breeds will follow, the department said.
Jen said that the first draft sequence has been put into a free public database, making it accessible to biomedical and agricultural scientists around the world.
“The bovine genome sequence will serve as a tool for agricultural researchers striving to improve health and disease management of cattle and enhance the nutritional value of beef and dairy products,” the USDA statement said.
Scientists believe that by identifying and better understanding the function of genes in cattle, researchers will be able to track the genetic makeup of the animals and breed cattle that are more disease resistant while using fewer antibiotics. That will increase the safety of the food supply, said the department.
The gene tracking also will help cattle breeders discover traits that will allow for better meat and milk products, the USDA said.
The research was carried out by a team at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing Center in Houston, Texas.
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Thijs Kuiken,* Guus Rimmelzwaan, Debby van Riel, Geert van Amerongen, Marianne Baars, Ron Fouchier, Albert Osterhaus
During the 2003 to 2004 outbreak of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus in Asia, there were anecdotal reports of fatal infection in domestic cats, although this species is considered resistant to influenza. We experimentally inoculated cats with H5N1 virus intratracheally and by feeding them virus-infected chickens. The cats excreted virus, developed severe diffuse alveolar damage, and transmitted virus to sentinel cats. These results show that domestic cats are at risk of disease or death from H5N1 virus, can be infected by horizontal transmission, and may play a role in the epidemiology of this virus.
The relationship between avian influenza A virus and its hosts has changed markedly in recent years, with important consequences for human health (1). The most recent example is the 2003 to 2004 avian influenza A (H5N1) virus outbreak in Asia, which not only caused vast mortality in poultry, but also resulted in 39 officially reported cases of direct bird-to-human transmission, of which 28 were fatal (2). During this outbreak, there were also anecdotal reports of fatal H5N1 virus infection in domestic cats and zoo felids after they had fed on virus-infected chickens (3). This is unusual, because domestic cats are generally considered to be resistant to disease from influenza A virus infection
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Matthew Herper
NEW YORK - For the second year in a row, the U.S. may face a profound shortage of flu vaccine. As a result of manufacturing problems, the biotech company that makes half of the flu shots needed in the U.S. said it could not deliver any vaccine at all.
Chiron , one of only two drugmakers that supply America with flu shots, said British regulators suspended its license for the Liverpool, England, facility where it makes all of its flu shots. As a result, the U.S. may only have half the vaccine it needs--too much for Aventis Pasteur, the only other maker of flu vaccine, to make up for on short notice.
On Sept. 28, Howard Pien, chief executive of the Emeryville, Calif.-based company, had testified before Congress, reiterating the company's expectation that it could provide between 46 million and 48 million doses of its influenza vaccine.
"If we do indeed have a short supply of influenza vaccines, I think it's going to have a significant impact on the public health," says Sara Cosgrove, director of the antibiotic management program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"This is a huge issue," says Geoffrey Porges, a biotechnology analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "It's going to be discussed in Congress; it's going to be discussed at the highest levels in the [Centers for Disease Control]. There's a real likelihood that we will see some fundamental changes in the vaccine market and in vaccine oversight."
The shortage comes at a time when the number of people the CDC recommends should get the vaccine has actually risen. Infants and their siblings, parents and caregivers are now also supposed to get the vaccine in addition to traditional high-risk groups. To make matters worse, the bird flu, an especially deadly strain, has recently been transmitted for the first time from person to person in Thailand. And regular flu can be bad enough. Says Cosgrove: "People forget how dangerous regular old influenza can be."
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Kona Bay Marine Resources Inc., a Hawaii-based marine biotechnology company, has gotten a license to export shrimp brood stock to Thailand, the largest shrimp producer in the world.
It is one of only three licenses in the world that Thailand has granted, Kona Bay Marine said Monday. To meet the demand, the company has increased its capacity 50 percent and plans to double that next year.
"This is validation that Hawaii now has the first global agricultural brand since Kona coffee," said CEO Brian Goldstein. "It validates our strategy to become the leading shrimp brood stock exporter in the world."
Kona Bay Marine Resources was founded to commercialize biotechnology developed at the University of Hawaii that provided disease-free and disease-resistant white shrimp. Since then it has developed a proprietary polyculture biotech that allows two different species to exist in one system. It's based on symbiosis — any bivalve (oysters, clams) continuously cleans the shrimp water, producing stronger, hardier shrimp brood stock. The system also is dependent on the pristine, disease-free deep ocean water from offshore pipelines at its facility at the Natural Energy Laboratory at Keahole Point on the Big Island, as well as the solar irradiance in Hawaii.
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In a strange turn of events - reflecting a deepening crisis in the Third World over whether to accept or not the planting of genetically modified (GM) crops - Thailand's cabinet rejected on August 31 a decision, taken by a panel headed by its prime minister, to lift three-year ban on GM crops.
It is for the first time that a government in a developing country was so sharply divided on the use of this controversial technology marketed by powerful transnational corporations but largely considered harmful to human health.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's committee had only a week earlier decided to allow open-field trials of GM crops alongside non-GM plants and the next day Thaksin had used part of his weekly radio address to laud Thailand as a country technologically capable of developing GM organisms, saying, "If we don't start now, we will miss this scientific train and lose out in the world."
Following Thaksin's decision, anti-GMO activists, including Greenpeace, came out on the streets chanting slogans to seek reversal of the government's decision which they feared would hit hard the country's organic food export industry.
Meanwhile, to head off the divide, the Thai government decided to set up a committee to hear arguments for and against GM crops from state agencies and university professors and then decide about the future of biotechnology in Thailand.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been accused by critics of bowing to pressure from US corporate giants like Monsanto, which are pushing the country to test GM corn strains, to reverse a ban on its trials.
The United States is the world's biggest GMO producer but has struggled, without much success, to persuade other nations to accept the products. Europe has been its bitter critic and opponent and largely responsible for restricting this technology to Americas.
This relatively new technology has become a central means by which multinational corporations are expanding their control over the food supply, personal health, and environmental security of the people throughout the world.
The claims that biotechnology is poised to "feed the world, cure diseases and reduce sufferings" are the false hopes that the developers of this technology sell to the developing world. But it's not Thailand alone which is facing stiff opposition to any plan of introducing genetic engineering in agriculture. Even some states in the United States, the home of this technology, are turning against it.
Mendocino county in California state became America's first to ban the raising and keeping of genetically engineered crops or animals. And in March, the state of Vermont, in a historic decision, voted overwhelmingly to support a bill to hold biotech corporations liable for contamination of conventional or organic crops by genetically engineered plant materials.
This bill is the first of its kind in the world that aims to protect a farmer from being sued by the seed companies if his crops are contaminated with GMO material.
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