An incident halfway around the world in which genetically modified peas made laboratory mice sick is proof that Canada needs to apply the precautionary principle when it comes to dealing with biotech crops, says the National Farmers Union.
“This new information fundamentally reinforces the NFU policy, which states that every new genetically modified product has to be thoroughly tested on a case-by-case basis,” said NFU president Stewart Wells.
On Nov. 17, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization issued a News release
news stating it was discontinuing a 10-year research program into a line of insect-resistant peas after it discovered they caused an allergic reaction in mice.
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The GM peas were created by inserting a gene from beans containing a protein that inhibits the activity of alpha-amylase, an enzyme that helps in the digestion of starch. The idea was the protein would cause starvation in weevils, a pest that can reduce pea yields by up to 30 percent.
Field tests showed the GM peas were 99.5 percent resistant to pea weevils, a promising development for Australia’s $100 million pea industry.
But during immune response tests it was discovered laboratory mice exposed to the alpha-amylase inhibitor developed inflammation in the lungs and increased serum antibody levels, likely due to a slight transformation of the protein.
Wells said the peas made mice ill despite repeated assurances from the biotech community that there are no food safety issues surrounding biotechnology.
He said the incident highlights the need to put the brakes on this technology, a message that wasn’t well received when Wells delivered it to the House of Commons agriculture committee years ago.
“I was viciously attacked by members of Parliament from the Conservative party and other promoters of the biotech industry, who said that position was the wrong position,” he said.
The GM pea episode is only the third case that Wilf Keller, research director at the National Research Council of Canada Plant Biotechnology Institute, can think of where an experimental biotech crop has caused such a reaction in laboratory animals.
Any work involving enzyme inhibitors should set off alarm bells because it is widely known they can cause allergic or toxic reactions in animals, said Keller. And that is exactly why CSIRO put the experimental crop through rigorous immune response testing.
“These things can happen and that is why we have good regulatory, science-based systems,” he said.
The same result could have occurred through traditional plant crossing techniques and there is no guarantee the resulting line would have been subject to the same level of scrutiny, said Keller.
Wells said as of 2003, eight years after the commercialization of GM crops, only 10 peer-reviewed papers on the health effects of GM foods had been published in academic journals. He said that is woefully inadequate, especially in light of the fact that half of those papers were independent studies that reported adverse effects from feeding GM foods to lab animals.
But Keller pointed to a different study showing there have been 42 such peer-reviewed feeding papers, only two of which reported any statistically adverse effects. And those were crops at the laboratory stage of development. There has been no link between commercialized GM crops and human illness.
“No matter how you screen the literature or how you sample health clinics, there is no evidence that a genetically modified plant has caused any harm,” he said.
Keller said the PBI will continue its work on GM peas, which amounts to evaluating gene function within the legume. The institute does not plan to field test the crop or commercialize any of the experimental lines.
He pointed out the Australian pea project was from a different era of biotechnology when genes from other species were shuffled around. As the science evolves, the focus is shifting to tweaking genes that already exist within a plant.
Wells said the Australian GM pea experiment should serve as a wake-up call to Canadian policy makers.
“As the evidence mounts, it really points us in the direction this argument about substantial equivalence is just wrong. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”
