The Institute for Responsible Technology, an organization
opposed to crop biotechnology, has published a list
of reasons to avoid GMOs—that is, genetically modified food. It’s a
mish-mash of misinformation and disinformation. All of the
institute’s assertions are unfounded, but here are the five most
dubious claims on the list.

1. GMOs Are Unhealthy

Every independent scientific body that has ever evaluated the
safety of biotech crops has found them to be safe for humans to
eat.

A 2004 report from
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that “no adverse
health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been
documented in the human population.” In 2003 the International
Council for Science, representing 111 national academies of science
and 29 scientific unions,
found “no evidence of any ill effects from the consumption of
foods containing genetically modified ingredients.” The World
Health Organization
flatly states, “No effects on human health have been shown as a
result of the consumption of such foods by the general population
in the countries where they have been approved.”

In 2010, a European Commission review
of 50 studies on the safety of biotech crops found “no scientific
evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or
for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.”
At its annual meeting in June, the American Medical Association
endorsed a report on the
labeling of bioengineered foods from its Council on Science and
Public Health. The report concluded that “Bioengineered foods have
been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overt
consequences on human health have been reported and/or
substantiated in the peer-reviewed literature.”

Unfortunately there is no shortage of fringe scientists to gin
up bogus studies suggesting that biotech crops are not safe. My
personal favorite in this genre is Russian researcher Irina
Ermakova’s claim, unpublished in any peer-reviewed scientific
journal, that eating biotech soybeans turned mouse testicles
blue.

One
widely publicized specious study (also
cited by the IRT) was done by the French researcher Gilles-Eric
Seralini and his colleagues. They reported that
rats fed pesticide resistant corn died of mammary tumors and liver
diseases. Seralini is the president of the scientific council
of the
Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic
Engineering, which describes itself as an “independent
non-profit organization of scientific counter-expertise to study
GMOs, pesticides and impacts of pollutants on health and
environment, and to develop non polluting alternatives.” The
Committee clearly knows in advance what its researchers will find
with regard to the health risks of biotech crops. But when truly
independent groups, such as the
European Society of Toxicologic Pathology and the
French Society of Toxicologic Pathology, reviewed Seralini’s
study, they found it essentially to be meretricious
rubbish. Six French academies of science issued a
statement declaring that the journal should
never have published such a low-quality study and excoriating
Seralini for orchestrating a media campaign in advance of
publication. The European
Food Safety Agency’s review of the Seralini study “found [it]
to be inadequately designed, analysed and reported.”

Sadly, such junk science has real-world consequences, since
Seralini’s article was apparently cited when
Kenya made the decision to ban the importation of foods made
with biotech crops.

2. GMOs Increase Herbicide Use

First, so what? This claim is simply an attempt to mislead
people into thinking that more herbicide use must somehow be more
dangerous. As a U.S. Department of Agriculture report has noted,
planting herbicide resistant biotech crops enables farmers to
substitute the more
environmentally benign herbicide glyphosate (commercially sold
as Round Up) for “other synthetic herbicides that
are at least 3 times as toxic and that persist in the environment
nearly twice as long as glyphosate.” Glyphosate has very low
toxicity, breaks down quickly
in the environment, and enables farmers to practice conservation
tillage, which reduces topsoil erosion by up to 90 percent. So the
net environmental effect is still positive.

Second, it must be admitted that there are few
honest brokers when it comes to this issue. Most of the research on
biotech crops and herbicides is underwritten by either activist
groups or industry. I have drawn my own conclusions, but I provide
a fairly comprehensive review of the various studies on this
question below.

When it comes to biotech crops and pesticide use data, the go-to
guy for anti-biotech activists is Charles Benbrook. After a long
career with various anti-biotech groups, Benbrook now serves as a
research professor in the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and
Natural Resources at Washington State University. He has a long
history of publishing studies allegedly showing that the adoption
of biotech crops boosts the use of pesticides. Four years after
commercial biotech crops were first planted in the United States,
for example, he concluded
in 2001 that herbicide use had “modestly increased.” Benbrook’s
article contradicted research published the year before by
scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who had found
that biotech crops had reduced pesticide
applications.

In a 2004
report funded by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Benbrook
asserted that “GE [genetically engineered] corn, soybeans, and
cotton have led to a 122 million pound increase in pesticide use
since 1996.” In contrast, a 2005 study
in Pest Management Science, by a researcher associated
with the pesticide lobby group CropLife, reported that planting
biotech crops had “reduced herbicide use by 37.5million lbs.” A

2007 study done for the self-described non-advocacy think tank
National Center for Food and
Agricultural Policy, founded in 1984 by the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, reported that planting biotech crops in the U.S. had
reduced in 2005 herbicide use by 64 million pounds and insecticide
applications by about 4 million pounds. Another 2007 study, by a
team of international academic researchers led by Gijs Kleter from
the Institute of Food Safety at Wageningen University in the
Netherlands, concluded that in the U.S., crops genetically improved
to resist herbicides used
25 to 30 percent less herbicides than conventional crops did.
In 2009, Benbrook issued a
report for the anti-GMO Organic Center claiming that “GE crops
have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of
herbicide use in the U.S. over the first 13 years of commercial use
of GE crops.”

Benbrook’s latest study, issued last
year, found that the adoption of pest-resistant crops had reduced
the application of insecticides by 123 million pounds since 1996
but increased the application of herbicides by 527 million pounds,
an overall increase of about 404 million pounds of pesticides. The
media—including Mother Jones’ ever-credulous
anti-biotech advocate Tom Philpott— reported these results

unskeptically.

Benbrook largely got his 2012 results by making some strategic
extrapolations of herbicide use trends to make up for missing data
from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, the USDA does not
provide herbicide use data for corn in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008,
2009, or 2011, for soybeans in any year after 2006, and for cotton
in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011. (The USDA’s National
Agricultural Statistics Service is expected to issue a report
updating national herbicide and insecticide usage later this
year.)

As the University of Wyoming weed biologist Andrew Kniss

points out, in order to get an increasing herbicide trend,
Benbrook’s extrapolations turned a negative herbicide use trend for
corn positive. He did the same thing to a neutral use trend for
soybeans. Meanwhile, a
2012 study by Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot at the PG
Economics consultancy found planting modern biotech crop varieties
had globally cut pesticide spraying by 997 million pounds from 1996
to 2010, an overall reduction of 9.1 percent. Brookes and Barfoot
calculated the amount of pesticide used by multiplying the acreage
planted for each variety by the average amounts applied per
acre.

3. Genetic Engineering Creates Dangerous Side
Effects

The Institute for Responsible Technology’s list simply
fearmongers on this one, claiming, “By mixing genes from totally
unrelated species, genetic engineering unleashes a host of
unpredictable side effects.” Not really.

All types of plant breeding—conventional,
mutagenic, and biotech—can, on rare occasions, produce crops with
unintended consequences. The 2004 NAS report that I alluded to
above includes a section comparing the unintended consequences of
each approach; it concludes that biotech is “not inherently
hazardous.” Conventional breeding transfers thousands of unknown
genes with unknown functions along with desired genes, and mutation
breeding induces thousands of random mutations via chemicals or
radiation. In contrast, the NAS report notes, biotech is arguably
“more precise than conventional breeding methods because only known
and precisely characterized genes are transferred.”

The case of mutation breeding is particularly interesting. In
that method, researchers basically blast crop seeds with gamma
radiation or bathe them in harsh chemicals to produce thousands of
uncharacterized mutations, then plant them to see what comes up.
The most interesting new mutants are then crossed with commercial
varieties, which are then released to farmers. The Food and
Agriculture Organization’s Mutant Varieties
Database offers more 3,000 different mutated crop varieties to
farmers. Many of these mutated varieties are planted as organic
crops. Among of the more recent new mutant offerings are two corn
varieties, Kneja
546 and Kneja 627. Whatever
genetic changes wrought in these corn varieties by induced
mutagenesis, they must be far less known to researchers than any
changes made to standard-issue biotech crops, yet these mutants get
practically no regulatory scrutiny or activist censure.

The point here is not that mutation breeding is inherently
dangerous. Given its solid record of 80 years of safety, it’s not.
The point is that the more precise methods of modern gene-splicing
are even safer than that.

The Institute for Responsible Technology warns that producing
biotech crops can produce “new toxins, allergens, carcinogens, and
nutritional deficiencies.” There is no evidence for any of this.
Consider the panic back in 2000 over Starlink corn, in which a
biotech variety approved by the EPA as feed corn got into two
brands of taco shells. Some 28 people claimed that they had
experienced allergic reactions to eating “contaminated” tacos. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested their blood and
found that none
reacted in a way that suggested an allergic response to
Starlink. As far as cancer goes, it is worth noting that even as
Americans have chowed down on billions of biotech meals, the
age-adjusted cancer incidence rate has been
going down. In fact, research shows that biotech corn
engineered to resist insects is much lower
in potent cancer-causing mycotoxins.

4. GMOs Harm the Environment

As exhibit 1 for this claim, the institute recycles the fable
that biotech crops harm monarch butterflies. This particular meme
was jumpstarted in 1999 when a researcher at Cornell University

poisoned monarch butterfly caterpillars in his laboratory by
forcing them to eat milkweed leaves coated with pollen from an
insect resistant corn variety. Of course, the larvae died since the
Bacillus thuringiensis gene inserted into the corn
specifically targets caterpillar pests like rootworms.

Countering misinformation takes a lot of work, but eventually
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a
series of articles evaluating the effects of biotech corn on
monarch butterflies in the wild. The researchers described the
product’s impact on monarch butterfly populations as
“negligible.” A 2011 review of
more than 150 scientific articles found that “commercialized
GM crops have reduced the impacts of agriculture on
biodiversity, through enhanced adoption of conservation
tillage practices, reduction of insecticide use and use of more
environmentally benign herbicides, and increasing yields to
alleviate pressure to convert additional land into agricultural
use.”

Meanwhile, no matter what effects either conventional or GM
crops have on biodiversity in crop fields, they pale
in comparison to the impact that the introduction of modern
herbicides and pesticides 60 years ago had on farmland biology.
Thanks to GMOs, farmers’ fields became dramatically more productive
and comparatively weed- and pest-free.

5. GMOs Do Not Increase Yields, and Work Against Feeding
a Hungry World

As evidence for this assertion, the institute cites the Union of
Concerned Scientists’ 2009 report
Failure to Yield, calling it “the definitive study to
date on GM crops and yield.” But this report is
less than honest when evaluating biotech crop yield
information: biotech crops boost yields chiefly by preventing weeds
from using up sunlight and nutrients and insects destroying
them.

More recently, a 2010 review
article in Nature Biotechnology found that “of 168
results comparing yields of GM and conventional crops, 124 show
positive results for adopters compared to non-adopters, 32 indicate
no difference and 13 are negative.” With regard to feeding the
world, yield increases are greater for poor farmers in developing
countries than for farmers in rich countries. “The average yield
increases for developing countries range from 16 percent for
insect-resistant corn to 30 percent for insect-resistant cotton,”
the Nature Biotechnology article notes, “with an 85
percent yield increase observed in a single study on
herbicide-tolerant corn.”

A 2012
article by two British environmental scientists, reviewing the
past 15 years of published literature on the agronomic and
environmental effects of biotech crops, finds that they increase
yields and produce impacts that are largely “positive in both
developed and developing world contexts.” They add, “The often
claimed negative impacts of GM crops have yet to materialize on
large scales in the field.”

Indeed they have not.