Robert Kremer, a U.S. government microbiologist who studies midwestern farm soil, has spent two decades analyzing the rich dirt that yields billions of bushels of food each year.
Kremer’s lab is housed at the University of Missouri and is in the shadow of Monsanto Auditorium, named after the $11.8 billion-a-year agricultural giant that has accumulated vast wealth and power creating chemicals and genetically modified seeds for farmers worldwide.
However, recent findings by Kremer and other agricultural scientists are raising fresh concerns about Monsanto’s products and the Washington agencies that oversee them.
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This body of research shows that the same seeds and chemicals spread across millions of acres of U.S. farmland could be creating unforeseen problems in plants and soil.
Kremer, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, is among a group of scientists who are discovering potential problems with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and the most widely used weed killer in the world.
“This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem,” said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research.
Concerns include worries about how nontraditional genetic traits in crops could affect human and animal health and the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds.
Biotech crop supporters say there is a wealth of evidence that the crops on the market are safe, but critics argue that after only 14 years of commercialized GMOs, it is still unclear whether or not the technology has long-term adverse effects.
Whatever the point of view on the crops themselves, many people on both sides of the debate say that the current U.S. regulatory apparatus is ill-equipped to adequately address the concerns.
Indeed, many experts say the U.S. government does more to promote global acceptance of biotech crops than to protect the public from possible harmful consequences.
“We don’t have a robust enough regulatory system to be able to give us a definitive answer about whether these crops are safe or not,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, who served on a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) biotech advisory subcommittee from 2002-05 and is now a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental group.
“We simply aren’t doing the kinds of tests we need to do to have confidence in the safety of these crops.”
The World Health Organization has not taken a stand on biotech crops, simply stating that “individual GM foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.”
And while many scientists cite research that they say shows health and environmental risks tied to GMOs, many others say research proves the crops are no different than conventional types.
With a growing world population and a need to increase food production in poor nations, confidence in the regulatory system in the leading biotech crop country is considered critical.
“One of the things that we think is important to do is to have regular reviews and updates of our strategies for regulating products of biotechnology,” said Roger Beachy, a biotech crop supporter who became director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture last year.
“We want to look carefully to see that they are logical and science-based but still maintain the confidence of the consumer to ensure that the projects that are developed and released have the highest level of oversight.”
So far, that confidence has been lacking. Courts have cited regulators for failing to do their jobs properly, and advisers and auditors have sought sweeping changes.
Even Wall Street has taken note. In January, shares in Monsanto fell more than three percent amid a rush of hedging activity during a morning trading session after a report by European scientists in the International Journal of Biological Sciences found signs of toxicity in the livers and kidneys of rats fed the company’s biotech corn.
Monsanto has said the European study had “unsubstantiated conclusions” and that it is confident its products are well tested and safe.
Farmers around the world seem to be embracing biotech crops that have been modified to resist bugs and tolerate weed-killing treatments while yielding more.
A common complaint is that the U.S. government conducts no independent testing of these biotech crops before they are approved and does little to track their consequences afterward.
The developers of these crop technologies, including Monsanto and its chief rival DuPont, tightly curtail independent scientists from conducting their own studies. Because the companies patent their genetic alterations, outsiders are barred from testing the biotech seeds without company approvals.
Unlike France, Japan and Germany, the U.S. has never passed a law regulating GM crop technologies. Rather, the government has tried to incorporate regulation into laws that existed before biotech crops were developed.
The result is a system that treats a GM fish as a drug that is subject to FDA oversight, while a herbicide-tolerant corn seed is treated as a potential pest that needs to be regulated by the USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service before it can be sold to farmers.
The process is costly and time-consuming for biotech crop developers, which might need to go through three regulators before it can commercialize a new product.
Nina Fedoroff, a special adviser on science and technology to the U.S. State Department, which promotes GMO adoption overseas, said she is confident biotech crops are safe and beneficial for agriculture and food production.
However, she admits an improved regulatory framework could help boost confidence in the products.
“We preach to the world about science-based regulations but really our regulations on crop biotechnology are not yet science-based,” Fedoroff said.
“They are way, way out of date. In many countries, scientists are much better represented at the government ranks than they are here.”
U.S. agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, which is the country’s top corn producing state, also said he recognizes change is needed.
The USDA is developing new rules for regulating GM crops, but the process has dragged on for more than six years amid heavy lobbying from corporate interests and consumer and environmental groups.
“There is no question that our rules and regulations have to be modernized,” Vilsack said.
“The more information you find out, the more you have to look at your regulations to make sure they are doing what they have to do. There are some issues we are still grappling with.”
But 14 years after commercialization of the world’s first biotech crop, the trio of U.S. regulatory agencies charged with overseeing biotech crops – the USDA, the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – are under attack on several fronts.
The USDA is most directly in the line of fire after a string of federal court decisions found its officials acted illegally or carelessly in approving biotech crops.
In one recent case, a federal court banned the sale of a herbicide-tolerant alfalfa engineered by Monsanto until the government more thoroughly evaluates its safety.
U.S. District Court judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California ruled that the USDA violated federal law in allowing unrestricted commercial planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa without a solid review.
Breyer ordered the USDA to prepare an environmental impact statement that explores potential negative consequences that critics say could include contamination of non-GM alfalfa fields.
The spread of herbicide-tolerant weeds is also a mounting problem that has been reported across the U.S. in many key farming areas.
Monsanto has appealed the ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case April 27, marking the first time the high court has taken up biotech crop concerns.
Meanwhile, the USDA recently completed its environmental impact statement and took public comments on the report through early March. The department has yet to issue a final report.
In a similar case, a federal court found that sugar beets altered to be Roundup Ready were approved without adequate USDA evaluation.
U.S. District Court judge Jeffrey White said the government’s decision to deregulate Roundup Ready sugar beets “may significantly affect the environment,” and he encouraged growers to “take all efforts, going forward, to use conventional seed.”
White declined to immediately ban all GM sugar beet plantings but said he would consider a permanent injunction at a July 9 hearing.
Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which filed the sugar beet lawsuit, said the court actions should be a wake-up call for the U.S. government.
“They will not be allowed to ignore the biological pollution and economic impacts of gene-altered crops,” he said.
“The courts have made it clear that USDA’s job is to protect America’s farmers and consumers, not the interests of Monsanto.”
The USDA, EPA and FDA say they work hard to ensure that crops produced through genetic modification for commercial use are properly tested and studied to make sure they pose no significant risk to consumers or the environment.
However, a November 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, cited several problems.
Among the shortcomings mentioned in the report is a lack of a co-ordinated program to determine whether the “spread of genetic traits is causing undesirable effects on the environment, non-GE segments of agriculture, or food safety.”
The GAO recommended the FDA publicize the results of food safety assessments of GM crops and advised the three agencies to develop a risk-based strategy to monitor the use of GM crops.
However, more than a year later, most of the recommendations re-main unimplemented, according to Lisa Shames, director of the natural resources and environment arm of the GAO.
“We can only influence agencies to take action. We can’t compel them to,” she said.
