Genetically Modified Food, Anyone?

Book review of Eat Your Genes: How Genetically Modified Food is Entering Our Diet By Stephen Nottingham

Published in the UK by Zed Books and in the Philippines by IBON Books

2003, 186 pages

Eat Your Genes: How Genetically Modified Food is Entering Our Diet is not easy reading for those who do not have a background in the natural sciences. The book however is a must-read for health activists, environmentalists and others who are concerned with health and the food they and their loved ones eat.

BY ALEXANDER MARTIN REMOLLINO
Bulatlat

Think you have a healthy diet? One needs to read the book to find out.

“By 1997, people in many industrialized countries had eaten food produced using genetic engineering,” biologist Stephen Nottingham says in his book Eat Your Genes: How Genetically Modified Food is Entering Our Diet. The same is increasingly becoming true in the Third World, he adds.

In the book, Nottingham, who briefly worked as a foreign research associate at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, starts with a brief history of genetic improvement in agriculture, tracing the practice to Austrian monk and pioneer geneticist Gregor Mendel who formulated the scientific laws of inheritance after a series of experiments in 1866.

He then describes the technology behind genetic engineering, as well as the various forms of the practice: the engineering of the Bovine Growth Hormone from cattle into bacteria “to produce commercial quantities of this hormone” and its injection in this form into cows to increase milk yields (milk pharming); the modification of crops to make them resistant to herbicides and insecticides; and the development of transgenic crops with disease resistance.

Nottingham’s book carries particular relevance for Filipinos.

Philippine agricultural agencies under the Ferdinand Marcos administration (1965-1986) are known to have experimented with transgenic rice under the auspices of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), as Nottingham himself notes. The experiment has been criticized by peasant groups like the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP or Philippine Peasant Movement) as costly for farmers, the hybrid rice varieties being dependent on expensive imported fertilizers and pesticides.

The Philippines has also been an importer of pharmed milk from First World countries like the U.S. for more than 20 years, and a laboratory for modified crops like Monsanto’s Bt corn since the late 1990s.

Genetic engineering

Nottingham devotes a chapter each to the various forms of food genetic engineering. He describes the practices in extensive detail, in some cases complete with blow-by-blow “accounts” of the particular processes.

In the first few chapters, one may get the impression that the book is nothing but a manual on food and genetic engineering. But the reader would realize the political significance of the book in the later chapters.

The author talks about the ecological and health risks of genetic engineering in food, particularly the spread of transgenes to other crops (and their subsequent contamination by these), as well as the carcinogenic and allergenic potentials of certain genetically-engineered food varieties like pharmed milk and Bt corn.

In one chapter, Nottingham tackles the ethical dimensions of genetic engineering. He does this by taking into consideration the stand of animal rights advocates and the moral dimensions of the patenting of life, the latter being an argument against having intellectual property rights on seeds and other life forms.

“Transgenic crops...have been developed amidst promises that they will help the Third World feed itself,” Nottingham points out, “although this claim seems to ignore the complex social and political factors that contribute to hunger.” This argument is presented in the context of the massive hunger in the Third World.

According to Nottingham, “World food production has been rising by around (one) percent per annum over recent decades, but the number of people with insufficient food is also growing. Hunger is the result not of insufficient food being grown, but of people being excluded from access to that food.”

The author relates hunger to poverty as he explains, “The conditions under which widespread poverty in the Third World became established were created during the colonial era. These conditions have been maintained in the post-colonial era by Third World debt, by free trade agreements, by industrial agriculture, which has concentrated on the growing of monocultures of export crops, and by a number of other factors.”

Nottingham knows whereof he speaks, having worked in the belly of the beast. His analyses cannot be dismissed as rants of a left-leaning individual, as what proselytizers of globalization and genetic engineering are wont to do when confronted with views like his.

Eat Your Genes: How Genetically Modified Food is Entering Our Diet is not easy reading due to the author’s extensive use of jargon. Nevertheless, the book is a must-read for those who are concerned with health and the food they and their loved ones eat. Bulatlat

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