(Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.)
[W]ell, didn’t Vermont feel good about itself when this month began.
Despite a court challenge, Act 120 went into effect July 1, and Gov. Peter Shumlin led the celebration of Vermont’s becoming the first state to require the labeling of food made from genetically modified organisms.
“Giving consumers the right to know what is in their food” is “simply the right thing to do,” said the governor, a sentiment echoed by several legislators and the state’s environmental community.
And why not? In this case the leaders are speaking for the people. In Vermont and elsewhere, polling shows, a large majority of people want that information. In a democracy, the wishes of a large majority may be disputed but not dismissed.
Besides, putting those little labels on the jars, boxes and bottles is a minimal expense and inconvenience, hardly worth getting into a tizzy about even if it turns out that eating food produced with GMO ingredients does one no harm.
Which is entirely possible. In that context, however good they felt about themselves, it might have behooved at least a few of Vermont’s pro-labeling cheerleaders to note that just a few days before the law took effect, 109 Nobel laureates had issued a letter stating that “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from (the) consumption” of GMO-produced food.
Like all other political screeds (exactly what this letter was), this one may have overstated its case. First of all, perhaps half of these laureates are experts in fields unrelated to the subject at hand. Twenty-three of them are physicists. Seven others are economists. One of them won the prize for literature. A great honor, the Nobel Prize for literature, but who would seek scientific judgment from Ernest Hemingway or T.S. Eliot? They won it, too.
But 38 of the signers were laureates in medicine and 31 others are chemists, some of them perhaps conversant with the biochemistry dealing with food safety. Say it’s only 50 Nobel laureates with relevant expertise. That ain’t chopped liver, and one might expect Vermont’s labeling advocates to take notice.
Especially because refuting the case made by the laureates isn’t that difficult. The credentials of the signers are intellectually impressive; the letter — intemperate in tone and simplistic in content — is not. In support of its contention that GMO production is “better for the environment,” the letter provides a link to a study by two British researchers.
That study acknowledges that “funding towards the researching of this paper was provided by Monsanto,” the company whose glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide is widely used on GMO crops. Credentialed scientists can be politically brain dead.
Still, the fact remains that there is zero evidence that either man or beast has gotten sick from eating GMO-produced food. Or as the American Medical Association put it in a report from its Council on Science and Public Health, “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.”
Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union in Yonkers, New York, and an opponent of GMOs, acknowledged that no one need worry that “eating engineered food is going to cause you to drop over and die within the next couple of days.”
But he said that neither was there conclusive evidence that GMOs could not lead to health problems. Unlike in studies proving the dangers of smoking, he noted, researchers cannot use the “appropriate epidemiology you have to have to isolate who’s exposed” from the rest of the population.
That’s true. But nobody had to wait for epidemiology to know that smoking could be unhealthy. Heavy smokers developed a chronic hacking cough. They suffered shortness of breath. No comparable symptoms have afflicted consumers of food that has gone through the genetic modification process, which is pretty much everybody.
Hansen said allergies have become more common since the introduction of GMOs and that some research suggested the presence of “some allergenic properties” in the GMO process. Will Allen, the owner of Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford and author of “The War on Bugs,” also pointed to a correlation between consumption of GMO foods and the rise of obesity.
But the rise of obesity also correlates with the rise of couch-potatoism and increased guzzling of sugared soda and gobbling of fast-food French fries and processed desserts.
Because there is no evidence of GMO-caused disease, GMO advocates have taken to taunting opponents, almost all of whom (including Shumlin and Vermont environmentalists) accept the scientific consensus on global warming. Why won’t they accept the scientific consensus on GMOs?
But that consensus is not nearly as strong or as widely accepted. There may be scant evidence that the genetic modification process itself is harmful, but many scientists have found potential dangers in some of the material involved, especially glyphosate. Last year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that the herbicide could cause cancer in humans. A United Nations committee of food and health experts later rejected that finding, but the European Union may still ban glyphosate, and France has said it will ban it even if its neighbors do not.
“Regardless of debates around whether it causes cancer or not, the studies we have show it’s an endocrine disruptor,” Health Minister Marisol Touraine said.
That’s a decision based on the findings of mainstream French scientists. No comparable body of scientists rejects the global warming consensus.
Like so many political debates, this one may be as much tribal and psychological as scientific and rational. For more than a century, American agriculture (like just about everything else) has become less individualistic, more consolidated, standardized and corporate. Genetic engineering is the latest if not the last step in this transformation. Farmers who agree to use seeds engineered to tolerate glyphosate (which kills weeds and all other plants it touches) must buy only those seeds, every year, from Monsanto. Is that farmer an independent operative, or a de facto employee of the company? Many people find this apparent loss of autonomy distasteful.
Others do not. They approve of a more corporate system, finding it more efficient, even though in this case it might not be. The evidence that GMOs increase crop yields is not much more convincing than the evidence that they make people sick.
Vermont’s moment of glory did not last long. Over the protests of state officials, Congress, without bothering to submit the proposal to a committee in either house, overrode Vermont’s law with one calling for nationwide labeling.
Well, sort of labeling. Under the new law, food producers may affix to their packaging merely a scannable or smartphone-readable quick response code (similar to a barcode) that links to information about whether GMO ingredients are in the product. Most members of Congress (the three Vermonters dissented) seem to think that everyone has a smartphone, the devices work in all stores, and all shoppers will have the time and ability to go through that process.
In this case, comparing the state and its lawmakers with the folks down in D.C., Vermont might be justified in feeling good about itself.
