People have been eating genetically modified vegetables and grains for several years. Now a genetically altered salmon might be headed for the market. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports that a few hundred seafood retailers are planning to boycott the new fish:
Transcript
People have been eating genetically-modified vegetables and grains for several years. Now, a
genetically-altered salmon might be headed for the market. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Rebecca Williams reports that a few hundred seafood retailers are planning to boycott the new
fish:
The genetically-altered salmon grow twice as fast as other farm-raised salmon. The Food and
Drug Administration is deciding if it will approve the fish for human consumption.
If it gets to market, it might be tough to find buyers. That’s because of a boycott organized by
environmental groups.
Julie Francis is a restaurant owner in Cincinnati. She’s joining more than 340 chefs, seafood
distributors and grocers in the boycott. Francis is concerned that not enough is known about the
effect on humans and wild salmon.
“I really, being a chef owner, come from the background of, you know, ‘I want the best fish, I
want the best vegetables,’ and I just, it’s just, in my personality, to be concerned about things like
chemicals, and additives, and different things that we just don’t know, I don’t know that much
about.”
The seafood retailers plan to boycott genetically-altered fish until they feel it’s safe to eat. They
also want the FDA to insure that wild fish stocks won’t be harmed.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.
A new study claims the U.S. government is losing billions of dollars by allowing farmers to grow genetically modified crops. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
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A new study claims the U.S. Government is losing billions of dollars by allowing farmers to grow
genetically-modified crops. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
The study from the British Soil Association reports the U.S. has increased farm subsidies by 12
billion dollars over the past three years to make up for lower exports. Many European countries
will not allow the import of genetically-modified food. They say it hasn’t been proven to be safe
for human consumption. But U.S. farmers refute the report.
Leon Corzine is a Central Illinois corn and soybean farmer. He says a report criticizing the economics of genetically-modified
crops is nothing more than propaganda.
“If bio-tech crops – just like any other item – if it is not economically viable, they don’t last and
we don’t use them. That’s how I operate on my farm.”
Corzine says there are so many variables in the agriculture industry that it’s impossible to blame
one thing for higher subsidies. He also says while some European countries are turning away
U.S. grain, other countries are increasing their import levels.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
The USDA has released its labeling requirements for organic foods. Consumers will have to look at the labels carefully to see just how much of the food is actually organic. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
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The USDA has released its labeling requirements for organic foods. Consumers will have to look at the labels carefully to see just how much of the food is actually organic. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Under the USDA’s National Organic Standards, you won’t be able to just look for the USDA Organic seal. The government agency is allowing four different levels of organic. Only the top two levels can actually use the USDA’s seal. There’s 100-percent organic. And then a product can claim to be “Organic” , but only be 95-percent organic… and still get the USDA Organic seal. Other products can claim “Made with Organic Ingredients” or claim “Some organic ingredients” and show the percentage on the back. Based on marketing history, you can imagine how the label on the front will be able to take advantage of that word “organic” in the “some organic ingredients” statement. Still a saavy consumer will be able to tell just how organic the product is by looking closely at the label. Products with the new labels will soon be on the grocery shelves.
Milk production is big business in the upper Midwest. Now, the president of a biotech company in Wisconsin is milking a herd of cloned cows that he says could give the Great Lakes dairy industry a boost, but there are still questions about the health of cloned cows, and whether the milk they produce is safe for human consumption. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Gil Halsted has the story:
Transcript
Milk production is big business in the upper Midwest. Now the president of a biotech company in Wisconsin is milking a herd of cloned cows that he says could give the Great Lakes dairy industry a boost. But there are still questions about the health of cloned cows and whether the milk they produce is safe for human consumption. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Gil Halsted reports:
(Sound of milk splashing into a sink)
Just outside the milking parlor at the Infigen Dairy a steady stream of milk is flowing from a pipe into a sink. It gurgles down the drain into another pipe that leads to a holding tank. Infigen president Michael Bishop says the milk is perfectly safe and nutritious but when the day’s milking is done he’ll get rid of it.
“Right now that milk is worth 15, 16 dollars a hundredweight and we’re dumpin’ it.”
The milk Bishop is dumping comes from 23 cloned cows. He produced them by removing the genetic material from an unfertilized cow egg and then inserting the DNA from the ear of a cow he wanted to reproduce. The result is a herd of cows that looks uncannily identical. There are no regulations requiring Bishop to dump the milk from his herd. But the FDA has asked all owners of cloned livestock to keep food products from their animals off the market until the agency decides whether or not to regulate them. The FDA is waiting for a National Academy of Sciences report on animal cloning due out later this spring before it makes a decision.
FDA spokesperson Stephen Sundlof says even if the report includes no red flags on food products from clones, the agency may require tests on the milk from cloned cows before it goes on the market.
“That would be to look compositionally at milk from cloned animals and compare that to milk from non-cloned animals to see if there was any substantial differences. But other than that we would likely find that those products were in fact identical to normal milk produced by uncloned animals.”
Michael Bishop is confident the milk his cloned cows are producing is perfectly safe for human consumption. In fact he says he’s already run the kind of test Sundlof is talking about comparing the milk of his cloned cows with the milk from cows at a neighboring dairy.
“Nothing new in the cloned cows… but there were variants in the bulk tank of a neighbor dairy, so it really turns out that the food product is more predictable. It’s gonna be the same in a cloned animal.”
But critics of cloning food say there are still lots of unanswered questions. Infigen isn’t the only company cloning dairy cows and several consumer groups are lobbying the FDA to put some strong regulations in place before milk from any of the diaries using the procedure is allowed on supermarket shelves. Joseph Mendelsen is with the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. He says there are a number of potential health problems for cloned cows. For instance they may be more susceptible to mastitis, and may require more use of antibiotics.
“Are there possibly subtle genetic differences that may affect the nutritional quality of the milk? I don’t think those issues have been looked at and they’re certainly not gonna be looked at with the scrutiny I think that consumers expect if we don’t have a mandatory regulatory system looking at cloned animals and the products derived from them.”
Infigen’s Michael Bishop agrees that regulations to insure the quality of the milk may be necessary, and he’s in favor of labeling the milk from cloned cows so consumers can make an informed choice.
“Americans are used to having choices and I believe they should have this choice. Let’s let science prove one way or the other if there’s a difference and then let’s let the marketplace decide if that product is going to be acceptable.”
Critics of cloning all say labeling should be required for food from cloned animals. But they’re even more concerned about the affect clones will have on genetic diversity. John Peck is the executive director of the Wisconsin-based Family Farm Defenders. He says an increase in the number of cows with identical genes will reduce the range of genetic diversity. And that means, he says, that herds of cloned cattle will be even more likely to face problems from disease and viruses.
“If you’re basically engineering in this uniformity, you’re also engineering susceptibility to catastrophic events, which we’ve seen that with other crops that are genetically engineered or hybrids that are vulnerable to one form of blight or rust or something that comes in from afar. The big question then is, who’s gonna pay for that? You know are the consumers gonna foot the bill when a factory farm of two thousand dairy cows all gets wiped out by one virus?”
But Michael Bishop says his cloned cows will not be any more at risk for disease than the original healthy cows they were cloned from. He predicts that once cloning catches on, farmers running large commercial dairies will begin adding clones to their herds to increase their efficiency.
“Because they’ll actually be able to create a more uniform consistent product from cow to cow to cow, and be able to predict how much hay, how much feed, and exactly what the outcome’s gonna be. Is it gonna be thirty thousand, thirty one thousand, thirty two thousand pounds of milk from the inputs they put in.”
Just
how quickly large dairies turn to cloning for economic advantage though depends a lot on whether the FDA decides to impose restrictions on the milk the cloned cows produce.
For Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Gil Halsted.
Those worried about food safety say it’s time for a uniform animal identification system – one that could rapidly isolate animals suspected of carrying contagious diseases. Wisconsin agriculture officials have taken the lead on this type of preventative action but will need the help of all the Great Lakes states to make it work. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Jo Wagner has more:
Transcript
Those worried about food safety say it’s time for a uniform animal identification system, one that could rapidly isolate animals suspected of carrying contagious diseases. Wisconsin AG officials have taken the lead on this type of preventive action but will need the help of all the Great Lakes States to make it work. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Jo Wagner has more.
There’s growing consensus among agricultural officials that some type of universal animal identifier is needed to trace animals from birth to the marketplace. Especially in light of recent occurrences of “mad cow” and “foot and mouth” diseases in live animals overseas and the nasty form of e coli in meat products here. Wisconsin secretary of agriculture, Jim Harsdorf says the ID system started in Europe. Now it’s moved to Canada, where it’s mandatory, and Harsdorf says Holland has a central database containing information on all the nation’s animals.
“It’s housed in one location and the producers within 48 hours have an animal ID’d after it’s born and that animal ID stays with it for life.”
Federal officials in the United States have been slow to implement such a system though, so Harsdorf says state officials are working to come up with one. It might be tied to different identification networks that farmers already use to keep production and reproduction records, herd health, vaccinations and the location of cattle that are sold, or it could be a totally new system that keeps some or all of those records on one central computer database managed by state, private or non-profit organizations.
Wisconsin state veterinarian Clarence Siroky says public feedback surprised them. State officials were expecting farmers to want only a voluntary system but what they found at public meetings was that producers want a more comprehensive mandatory system nationwide
“We move cattle all over the United States rapidly…we can have one cow at least touch 27 other states within a week…one pig can touch 19 other states within 24 hours.”
For those reasons, Siroky says, all animals will have to be included, not only cows, but sheep, horses and pigs. In England for example, cows are identified, but sheep are not, and he says sheep were implicated in the rapid spread of foot and mouth disease there.
That concerns Ted Johnson. He’s a Wisconsin dairy farmer who likes the idea of a universal identification system because it would quickly pinpoint the location of animals that might have come in contact with a disease.
“If in the event of an outbreak of some highly contagious disease, it could be stopped very quickly and we wouldn’t have to have wholesale slaughtering of cattle.”
Still Johnson says many farmers are concerned about how much the ID would cost, who would maintain the records, and who would have access to them.
“The worst case scenario would be if that information is released and there is some doubt about the information or if the information is used in an incorrect manner, the perception can be there’s a problem on individual farms.”
State veterinarian Clarence Siroky says that’s why input from farmers, processors, privacy advocates and consumers is important as the technology is developing.
Still to be decided is the type of animal ID that would be used. Siroky says it could be a tag placed on the animal’s ear. However, some animals already have so many different ear tags, he says one ear can look like a Christmas tree. Other possibilities include a computer chip or other type of recyclables monitor placed inside an animal.
Meanwhile, AG secretary Harsdorf says the records included in a computerized type of system could be very beneficial to consumers at the supermarket.
“At some point in time, you’re gonna have the ability to go through a grocery store and see up on a screen when you buy that package where it came from, a picture of the operation — it’s almost mind boggling to see what could happen down the road.”
Still, farmer Ted Johnson worries all the talk right now about the need for animal identification might create a consumer backlash.
“I feel as a producer our food supply is very safe. I don’t want the perception to be that an animal ID program is being instituted because we have a problem.”
But a potential problem without plans to deal with it could create havoc for the agricultural industry, and so far veterinarian Siroky doesn’t know when a system with wide support might be in place. He does say animal health officials are on high alert for the appearance of any contagious diseases. At the same time, he says even if Wisconsin comes up with a proactive plan, unless other states adopt a similar identification method, any tracking system would have limited effectiveness. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mary Jo Wagner.
A corporate merger between two large agri-chemical companies
will create the world’s largest pesticide manufacturer. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… some environmentalists are
concerned the new company’s approach will mean more pesticide use:
Transcript
A corporate merger between two large agri-chemical companies will create the world’s largest
pesticide manufacturer. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports some
environmentalists are concerned the new company’s approach will mean pore pesticide use:
The chemical and agriculture companies Novartis and Astra-Zeneca are in the process of merging
their agriculture divisions. The new company, Syngenta, will go its own way sometime in 2000.
Syngenta will be the world’s largest pesticide producer, and the third largest producer of
genetically modified seeds. Some environmentalists are concerned about the merger. Lori Mott is
with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Well, it’s a potentially dangerous mix because one of the areas where genetically modified
organisms are being developed is to make them pesticide resistant. So, you could have the largest
seller of pesticides also making the seeds that are resistant to the very pesticides that they
sell and the end result would be excessive use of pesticides – as if we don’t already have that –
out in the environment with severe environmental consequences.”
Mott says the new company will likely focus on creating herbicides and design genes to make crops
resistant to them. She says that will encourage farmers to use pesticides even more because they
know it won’t harm their crops. Astra-Zeneca already has a pesticide and pesticide-resistant crop
seed package. Novartis is working on one. Both of those product packages will now be part of the
Syngenta line. Other companies such as Monsanto and DuPont also have genetically modified crops
resistant to their respective pesticides.
A financial analyst says it’s possible the merger might mean less use of certain pesticides. One
of the companies involved in the merger, Novartis, manufactures atrazine. It’s the herbicide most
used on crops in the Midwest. Atrazine has developed negative reputation because drinking water in
some lakes and wells has been contaminated by the herbicide.
Alexander Hittle is an analyst with A.G. Edwards and Sons. Hittle says if Syngenta pushes an
herbicide and genetically-altered crop package, it might mean atrazine is used less.
“Atrazine sales are actually really being in part driven by resistance to genetically modified
crops. Either way, the farmers are going to be using pesticides, herbicides. Is the herbicide
being used in one of these seed combinations more or less benign than an herbicide that would be
used under so-called conventional farming. And, I think that’s the way, in terms of the
environment, the question needs to be posed.”
Because some of the new generation herbicides break down faster, they don’t have the same
reputation for contamination problems atrazine does.
Pesticides aren’t the only thing about the merger worrying environmentalists and others. Until
recently, genetically modified crops were more or less ignored by the American public. But,
because of food safety and environmental concerns, some people are becoming wary of the
bio-engineered plants. Public opinion might shift again in the near future. Hittle says so far,
the traits of the genetically engineered crops have only benefited farmers and the ag-chemical
companies. If consumers see a direct benefit, he thinks they’ll be more accepting.
“Down the road what’s coming are crops that have improved nutritional profiles, so that you’ll
begin to see benefits to consumers and that’s probably where the tide will turn. And, Novartis,
Astra-Zeneca both have pretty strong research capabilities and that should play into those sorts
of products.”
Farmers will be watching for the new products and the whims of the market as public opinion about
genetically modified food evolves. Don Parrish is with the American Farm Bureau. He agrees that
people eventually will accept the new technology.
“But, I guess as consumers see the benefits of what it could mean more lean, tender products, more
nutritious products, you know, I just have a hard time believing that people won’t believe in
good, sound science and won’t ultimately allow that to dictate what is safe for the marketplace.”
The Farm Bureau adds… genetically altered crops will be necessary to feed the world’s growing
population.
Environmentalists say advances in food production should not come at the expense of environmental
damage. The NRDC’s Lori Mott says the Astra-Zeneca and Novartis ag divisions’ merger rushes
headlong into a genetically-altered future that might have serious consequences.
“I think the whole issue of genetically modified organisms is a dicey one. We are changing the
scale of evolution…”
One interesting twist of the Syngenta merger: Novartis will be keeping its baby food line, Gerber
Foods. This past year, Gerber declared it would not allow genetically modified crops into its baby
food – something of a contradiction inside a corporation that has touted the safety of genetically
modified foods. Novartis will keep Gerber, and spin off its genetically modified foods section to
the new company, Syngenta.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Genetically modified foods have gotten the cold shoulder from
consumers in Europe… and now, resistance to engineered food seems to
be growing in Canada. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson reports:
The Food and Drug Administration has recently re-opened the issue of
labeling foods that have been irradiated. As The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Suzanne Elston points out, by focusing the debate on
labeling, were ignoring a much bigger issue:
A recent Wall Street Journal article has again raised the issue of
plastic food wraps used in microwave ovens. Citing a recent study by
Consumer Reports, the Journal cast doubt on the safety of plastics that
can leak chemicals into foods–some of these chemicals can interfere with
our body’s hormones. While scientists differ in their assessment of the
risks, most agree that consumer caution is warranted. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Haven Miller has more:
A consumer’s group wants the E-P-A to ban 40 pesticides that are usedon food children often eat. The Consumers’ Union says there are saferalternatives, but farmers say those alternatives are not available yet.The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
