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:
Transcript
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.
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.
The Environmental Protection Agency says a genetically altered corn intended only for animals is in human food less often than first thought. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Canadian researchers have developed a genetically altered
salmon. Dubbed "Frankenfish" by the public, the designer salmon grow
about eight times faster – and as much as 37 times larger – than normal
salmon. While fish farmers are hoping to bring their latest catch to
a dinner table near you, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator
Suzanne Elston finds the whole thing rather unappetizing:
When was the last time you got a bouquet of flowers that had a
fragrant smell? While there’s no shortage of beautiful looking flowers
for
sale, many have little if any scent anymore. As the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports it’s a problem one scientist has
gotten a whiff of:
Transcript
When was the last time you got a bouquet of flowers that had a fragrant smell? While there’s no shortage of beautiful looking flowers for sale, many have little, if any, scent anymore. Ast he Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports, it’s a problem one scientist has gotten a whiff of:
Flowers have lost their smell as flower growers have bred them to be big and brightly colored. Eran Pichersky is a biologist at the University of Michigan. He studies the smell of flowers. Pichersky is focusing his genetics research on whether it’s possible to bioengineer a flower’s scent.
“We actually have some collaboration with biotech companies who are trying to use some of the genes and enzymes we’ve isolated to put them back into plants so that the plant makes more scent, or even new scent that they didn’t make before.”
But it’s not florists who are interested in this work, it’s farmers. Pichersky’s research means it might be possible to alter the smell of flowers in ways that entice bees to visit crops more often, or even attract other insects to do the pollination work. That increase in pollination could mean an increase in crop yields.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.
This month the number of people on Earth reaches six-billion. Food
experts say feeding the world’s population will put more pressures on
the environment unless existing farms can increase production. … but
experts argue about the best way to do that. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:
crop management, yield, yields, technology, biological research, food,
food production, pollination, climate, natural capital, population,
population growth, world growth, genetics, genetically
In a recent issue of the journal, Nature, Cornell researchers released a
report claiming that pollen from a genetically engineered, or BT, corn
has a deadly effect on the monarch butterfly. But industry
representatives criticized the results, saying the lab-work didn’t
duplicate a real-life scenario. So now, Cornell scientists are heading
into the field for more research. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
David Hammond has more:
A Sea Grant researcher in Ohio has genetically engineered a
single-celled algae to work as a pollution solution. The algae binds
with heavy metals in lakes and then is harvested. The metals are removed
with the algae. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Aileen LeBlanc has
the story:
It’s nothing new to get predators to get rid of pests. The colorfuland cute ladybug, for example, loves to devour aphids, mites andmealybugs and is used by many people instead of pesticides. But workingwith these flying predators presents some problems. Now, one researchermay have a solution. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelsonreports:
A new study indicates weeds that cross with genetically altered crops can cause problems, like tough to kill weeds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more: