World According to Monsanto, pt 4, rBGH and Bt Crops

This installment of the World According To Monsanto documentary (and a big shout out to Robert Wager, who convinced me that I wasn't taking a nearly hard enough line on biotech) starts out talking about rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone.

Understand that this hormone is a mimic of a hormone naturally found in cows' bodies during a certain stage of their development. It's nothing very strange.

Nonetheless, rBGH use in adult milk cows causes painful, continuous udder infections and other health problems. This requires the use of constant, elevated doses of antibiotics, and there still ends up being pus in the resulting milk. The hormone isn't reactive in human bodies; not directly, not until it breaks down, and then it seems to promote reproductive cancers.

It's extremely important to understand that protein and hormone interactions in living bodies are very complex. Introducing a hormone at the wrong developmental stage can prove a disaster. Introducing a normally safe protein or compound at high doses, or to the wrong person, or with the wrong chemical companions, can be a disaster.

This is why controlled, independent safety testing is important when introducing novel compounds to the food system or medical repertoire.

Even though rBGH is ostensibly natural, it isn't normally present in adult cows at these artificial levels, or in food that we've had a chance to try over the long term for safety. This is where the equivalence arguments fall down, because even a cursory understanding of the problems inherent in the safety testing of medicinal and food compounds reveals cases where assumptions of safety were badly misplaced because one compound seemed to be 'just like' some other, normally encountered compound.

Sometimes, problems don't reveal themselves for decades.

With Bt crops, not only are they far more expensive and higher input than traditional crop varieties, but it still requires plenty of pesticides and may cause allergic reactions.

The Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin comes from a bacteria and no amount of garden-variety plant breeding or typical food preparation technique would ever add significant quantities of it to the human diet. Yet Bt crops produce this toxin throughout their tissues, including the edible portions.

Perhaps stories of animals dying after foraging on crop remains, something that rarely happens in the US because of the separation of animal and crop agriculture, are anecdotal and not related. I want a public, independent, well-controlled study to prove it.

Perhaps stories of field workers getting allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton are anecdotal, maybe they were reacting to some crop chemical or other unknown allergen. Prove it. Run proper studies and make the data public.

'It's safe because we said so,' whether the 'we' at this point is the biotech firms or their cowering minions at USDA and the land grant universities, cuts no ice.

There's very little in the history of industrial agriculture that leads me to believe they should get the benefit of the doubt.

Update: For some reason, I can't access comments right now. But a couple notes ...

- The OECD is a private preserve of a few rich countries that have a lot to gain financially from there never being anything harmful discovered about biotech crops.

- Bt spray is applied in low concentrations, washes away with water and degrades in sunlight within 12-24 hours. This is not true of the same chemical protected in plant tissue. Its persistent presence in a GMO cropping system raises the possibility of destroying its usefulness for organic farming by increasing pest resistance and possibly displaying other side effects.

- This is what the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says about biotechnology, in among all of their abject boosterism:

... Caution must be exercised in order to reduce the risks of transferring toxins from one life form to another, of creating new toxins or of transferring allergenic compounds from one species to another, which could result in unexpected allergic reactions. Risks to the environment include the possibility of outcrossing, which could lead, for example, to the development of more aggressive weeds or wild relatives with increased resistance to diseases or environmental stresses, upsetting the ecosystem balance. Biodiversity may also be lost, as a result of the displacement of traditional cultivars by a small number of genetically modified cultivars, for example. ...

- As to biotech contamination, in spite of the fact that incredibly little food is monitored for its presence:

... Indeed, contamination of conventional crops by biotech crops has been reported around the world. There were 39 cases of crop contamination in 23 countries in 2007, and more than 200 in 57 countries over the last 10 years, according to biotech critic Greenpeace International.

... Organic dairy farmer Albert Straus, who started testing corn fed to his 300-head dairy herd more than a year ago, and found about one-third had been contaminated, now tests every lot of grain he buys. ...

Good times.