We couldn’t live without GMO and we wouldn’t want to

We couldn’t live without GMO and we wouldn’t want to

There are few acronyms around the world that we all know immediately and GMO is one of them. This is likely due to the constant stream of media attention genetically modified organisms attract: some people say they’re harmful, some people think they’ll help us feed an exploding population. Strangely, people’s viewpoints seem cemented and based not on fact but emotion.

While ‘genetically modified’ may sound science-y and scary, humans have been modifying crops for millennia for flavour, size, colour, shape, disease-resistance and a multitude of other reasons. Selective breeding has produced crops that are unrecognisable from their original species and no one bats an eyelid at purchasing orange carrots (originally purple), sweet potatoes (the original GMO crop), sweetcorn (now pest-resistant), and cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale (all of which originate from the same plant, Brassica oleracea or wild cabbage).

Making GM plants is surprisingly easy and the sweet potato is a testament to this. Agrobacterium is a special microbe that works like a virus injecting a chunk of DNA into plant cells which finds its way to the plant’s genome. Agrobacterium wasn’t engineered by scientists in a laboratory conditions; it’s ubiquitous in soils around the world and infects more than 140 plant species. We’ve been ‘eating GMO for 8,000 years without knowing it’, says virologist Jan Kreuze who led the study into the genes in sweet potatoes. Then, there’s selective breeding, an agricultural practice that’s also thousands of years old. Almost every fruit and vegetable eaten today is a product of artificial selection. Wild cabbage was cultivated by isolating specific characteristics: broccoli was developed from plants with suppressed flower development, while kale was derived from plants with larger leaves. We would have neither without a bit of human intervention. Corn has no clear ancestor and it’s believed Mexican farmers took the largest and tastiest kernels from a grass called teosinte to plant, selecting only the attributes they wanted. Today, corn is a staple in diets around the world with an estimated 875 million tons produced in 2012.

Thanks to modern technology, we can now reproduce a thousand years’ worth of selective breeding and agricultural effort with a little science. Foods that have been genetically modified undergo testing for safety, health and nutrient value: ‘Before any GMO can come to market,’ says Dr Wayne Parrott, Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Georgia, ‘it must undergo extensive testing to ensure that the content of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients is not inadvertently altered during the final process.’ Recent reviews have concluded that there is no difference in nutrient quality between organic and non-organic produce, with Dr Bruce Chassy, Professor of Food Microbiology and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois, adding: ‘Some disagree because they believe (not based on science, but rather, personal beliefs) that organic matter derived from living organisms provides a vital life force to crops that cannot be supplied by inorganic chemical fertilisers. This is just not the case… this thinking has transitioned into a belief by some that organic is more nutritious, which has simply not been proven.’

But, as the Modern Farmer says, the idea that our food might be adulterated or cause harm is an easy thing to get worked up about. In a 2013 New York Times poll, almost a quarter of respondents said they believed GMO foods were unsafe to eat or were toxic. GMOs are more thoroughly tested than any product produced in the history of agriculture. Dr Martina Newell-McGloughlin, Director of the University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program, says ‘in all the risk assessments in over 15 years of field research and 30 years of laboratory research, there hasn’t been a single instance where there was a health risk associated with a GMO product.’

Lots of people hear ‘GMO’ and immediately jump to Monsanto—with good reason. Monsanto was one of four groups to introduce genes into plants in 1983, and was among the first to conduct field trials of genetically modified crops in 1987. But Monsanto was practically unheard of until it tried to sell its GMO seeds—created to resist Monsanto’s own herbicide, Round-Up—to Europe. Monsanto reeled from a failed attempt to win consumer approval in the UK as Brits had just suffered a crash course in modern farming following the Mad Cow disease epidemic. Monsanto’s advertising efforts were met with scepticism and seen as insincere and condescending; environmental groups emerged victorious and have maintained the upper hand in public opinion. If consumers were already mistrustful, Monsanto didn’t help itself with its plans to purchase The Terminator, a seed developed to only propagate once. With this, farmers would be unable to save the seeds and replant them the next season, forcing farmers to buy fresh seed every year. The backlash was so severe Monsanto never went ahead with it, but the damage was done and lives on in anti-GMO rhetoric. And yet, while The Terminator seed may not be a Monsanto product, the company views its patented GM seeds as proprietary technology: its terms of service agreement stipulates the seeds cannot be saved or replanted. From tangible to intangible but the premise remains and the company has sued farmers who have violated these terms.

So, the public perception of GMO is irrevocably tainted by the actions of the company known as the ‘world’s most evil corporation’—we have a bad guy. Forget all the research and evidence showing the safety and ubiquity of genetically modified crops, there’s a level of distrust and vilification to contend with. GMO = Monsanto = bad has entered the worldview of many people.

The average person has little opportunity to verify whether most of these things are true or not; so what they believe is entrenched in a matrix of their overall worldview. If you are convinced that natural is good and artificial is bad—and that companies are trying to cover this up—it’s easy to develop all sorts of mistrustful ideas about science. While there’s a wealth of information out there to challenge beliefs, there’s also plenty to back you up. You can cherry pick whatever supports your hypothesis. It’s confirmation bias. According to the Washington Post, the Russian propaganda apparatus was designed not to convince people that any one thing is true, but to put so much conflicting information into the world that nobody can tell what is true.

We react to attacks on our beliefs the same way we respond to physical attacks—our beliefs form our worldview, which forms a part of our identity. When someone says we’re wrong about something and has evidence to prove it, the logical response is to hear them out and add that evidence to the factors shaping our worldview—but instincts aren’t logical and it’s hard not to dig in to your original beliefs. This same phenomenon explains how people can get caught up in cults—they get so entrenched that it becomes part of their identity and they fear discovering it was all false. If a person denouncing GMO has already decided they won’t accept the evidence because they don’t trust the authorities providing it—mainstream science, corporations, Big Science, governments—they can remain stubborn and access multiple other sources of information they do trust.

Distrusting big corporations is valid—how many times have we seen money lead to power, corruption and manipulation? That doesn’t mean we can’t trust good science. Good science is a study that can be repeated with the same results (it’s commonly said it’s not science if you don’t do it twice) and it’s science with research integrity. Don’t believe the science ‘hasn’t been done’. A meta-study of more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies found no evidence that GMO crops produce adverse effects in humans or livestock.

The GMO backlash is fuelled by emotion and scepticism but as almost all anti-GM studies to date have been discredited, retracted or debunked by the scientific community for using misleading, unscientific methods, we can rest easy. GM foods are indistinguishable from non-GM produce and the majority of the foods we eat were modified long ago anyway. The politics of GMOs are still in their infancy and the latent (media-derived) mistrust in the scientific community combined with a few bad seeds in the business world have birthed the anti-GMO movement.

But even with the vitriol and bad reputation companies like Monsanto have given genetically modified crops, the fact remains: we couldn’t live without GMO and we wouldn’t want to.