Genetically Modified Foods Improve Quality of Life Globally

08 October 1999

Text: Genetically Modified Foods Improve Quality of Life Globally

(Washington State University Professor Testifies to Congress) (2480)

Nearly every food one can buy in a U.S. supermarket has some sort of genetic modification and these enhancements have made food safer and the environment cleaner, Dr. James Cook, plant pathologist and professor at Washington State University, testified before Congress October 5.

Cook identified longstanding agricultural management practices, including soil tilling, as the cause of most environmental harm stemming from farming. Genetically engineered plants, such as Round-Up Ready soybeans, help improve environmental quality by allowing farmers to incorporate less damaging practices like no-till farming.

Using biotechnology to add specific genes to plants, rather than using traditional cross-breeding, is safer, Cook said, because scientists know they are adding only the desired genes, and not undesirable traits. "Since traditionally bred crops are accepted as the standard of safety, then crops developed by genetic engineering are at least as safe and are probably safer because of the greater precision of the genetic modifications... There is no scientifically-based reason to discriminate against food from genetically modified crops because of either the source of the gene or method used to introduce the gene."

Bioengineered plants have also had a significant impact on pesticide use in the United States, according to Cook. Cotton farmers have decreased their pesticide use by more than 3.5 million liters in the three years since cotton modified for resistance to the bollworm was introduced.

Following is the text of Dr. Cook's testimony before the Basic Research Subcommittee of the House Science Committee:

(begin text)

Testimony of
R. James Cook
Endowed Chair in Wheat Research
Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164

Plant Genome Science: From the Lab to the Field to Market, Part 2

Before the Subcommitee on Basic Research, House Science Committee
U.S. House of Representatives

October 5, 1999

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your invitation to speak at this hearing on Plant Genome Science: From the Lab to the Field to the Market. My name is R. James Cook. I am a plant pathologist at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, where I have spent the past 35 years working to provide the knowledge and technology needed to grow and protect the health of crops in sustainable cropping systems. In addition to my research, I teach Advanced Cropping Systems at Washington State University. I am here today to testify on the use of genetically modified plants for food, agriculture and the environment.

I would like [to make] four points very clear at the outset.

First, genetic modification of plants for food, agriculture, and the environment is nothing new. In the United States, for example, we grow some 200 different crops nearly all of which were imported as alien species over the past 2-3 centuries and then genetically modified by plant breeding to make them more adapted to our farming conditions, resistant to local pests and diseases, and accepted by U.S consumers and our foreign customers. Virtually every kind of food in the super market has been genetically modified by one method or another. Among the thousands of modifications intended to benefit consumers are seedless grapes, double sweet corn, and miniature carrots.

The introduction of a dwarfing gene into wheat by Dr. Orville Vogel at Washington State University shortly after World War II resulted in spectacular increases in grain yield and sparked what the world knows today as the Green Revolution. The ability of plant scientists to add genes by the new tools of biotechnology is but the latest in a long line of techniques developed and used during the past century or more to genetically modify crops to help farmers, the environment, and consumers.

Second, the use of plants as crops to produce food, fiber, and other products has an amazing record of environmental safety. For example, I am not aware of a crop plant having become an invasive weed because of plant breeding. In fact, just the opposite occurs: through plant breeding and selection, wild plants with their tendency to be weeds are made into high-yielding crop plants increasingly more dependent for their survival on human nurturing. There is no evidence after some 20 years of experience with gene splicing to suggest that these trends will somehow reverse towards more wild as we move toward greater use of this new technology.

Third, of the "risks" to the environment and our natural resource base that have been associated with crop plants, virtually all are the consequence of the management practices needed to grow our crops. This includes the soil deterioration, erosion, and demise of earth worm populations because of tillage used to form a seedbed and control weeds; and the effects of pesticides on non-target organisms, to mention what I believe are the most important environmental impacts associated with the growing of crops. Genetic modification of crop plants is the best route to mitigation of these environmental impacts.

My personal research for the past 20 years has been focused [on] how to grow crops with less or no tillage to save our precious topsoil as well as water, fuel and wildlife. I can say from working in this area over these two decades that no herbicide has done more than Monsanto's Roundup to allow farmers to move towards the use of no-till farming. The availability of crops with built-in resistance to Roundup only means that more crops can be grown without the use of tillage.

As another example, the use of the Bt gene to make cotton resistant to the boll worm and several other cotton insects has resulted in an estimated 1 million fewer gallons of insecticide used on cotton in the United States during the 3 years that these cotton varieties have been available. Cotton farmers trying to manage cotton insects can now look forward to something that wheat farmers managing rust diseases have taken for granted for 50 years, which is a pest-resistant variety.

Fourth, between the extensive performance trials and institutional reviews conducted by the developers of genetically modified crops, typically involving years of field testing, and the regulatory framework in place at the federal and state levels to assure safety of new crops or old crops with new traits, it is hard to imagine what more can be done to assure the safety of genetically modified crops to people and the environment. There certainly is no evidence to support the call for a moratorium on the use of crop plants with genes introduced by genetic engineering.

One of the great marvels of life discovered mainly during the current era of genomics research is that different life forms already share a remarkably high percentage of the same genes. Even plants and humans have many genes in common naturally. Every biology student learns early that a given gene produces the same protein no matter where in the hierarchy of life forms it may reside. Different life forms are due not only to their gene makeup, but also how all the genes are arranged and coordinately played out. For this and many other reasons, science names genes according to their function or protein they produce and not according to whether they were found in a fish, chicken, or wheat plant.

Because we know both the genes and their proteins when making transfers by gene-splicing techniques, it also becomes possible to know which proteins are actual or potential toxins before they become part of our food supply. Having this kind of information is much more difficult if not impossible with traditionally bred crops where the genes may be known but the protein products of the genes are only rarely known.

Since traditionally bred crops are accepted as the standard of safety, then crops developed by genetic engineering are at least as safe and are probably safer because of the greater precision of the genetic modifications and knowledge of the protein products and their function. There is no scientifically-based reason to discriminate against food from genetically modified crops because of either the source of the gene or method used to introduce the gene.

We in the international scientific community, whether on the European or the U.S. side of the Atlantic, and whether from a developing or developed country, are surprised at the reactions to biotechnology applied to agriculture since the concerns and claims against it are ignoring science. Several panels of scientists have been convened over the past 15-20 years to examine the safety issues raised by biotechnology, and these have been the foundation for an on-going scientific assessment of the safety of biotechnology. I would like to call your attention to two studies in particular.

One is a report from the National Academy of Sciences, published in 1987. The panel that developed this report concluded, after a thorough review, that "there is no evidence that unique hazards exist either in the use of rDNA techniques or in the transfer of genes between unrelated organisms" and that "the risks associated with the introduction of rDNA-engineered organisms are the same in kind as those associated with the introduction into the environment of unmodified organisms and organisms modified by other genetic techniques."

This report also introduces the very important concept that safety should be assessed based on the product produced by genetic modification and not the process used for genetic modification. The conclusions in this report have been confirmed and reconfirmed from results of thousands of field trials conducted with genetically engineered crops in the United States and elsewhere around the world over the past 10 years. A copy of this report has been attached as part of my written testimony.

The other report was produced by the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD), written by an international committee of American, Canadian, European Community, Japanese, and Australian scientists with me as the Chair, and published in 1993. This report is apparently the first to examine the safety issues specifically raised by crop plants as plants and not because of the management used to grow them. This report lists the safety issues for crop plants with genes introduced by the new tools of biotechnology and concludes that they are the same issues raised for crop plants introduced into cultivation directly from the wild without genetic modification or modified by gene transfer within the limits of natural hybridization. A copy of this report has also been attached as part of my written testimony.

One concern for the environmental safety of herbicide resistant crops is that genes for resistance to herbicides will transfer by outcrossing into weedy relatives of the crop plants and produce super weeds, or they will lead to greater use of herbicides. Gene transfer is a natural process used by populations to gain diversity and hence the resiliency to survive episodes of environmental stress. Gene transfer from canola to weedy mustard is likely without appropriate management, since these plants occur in the same environments and they have a high propensity for outcrossing. But with a crop such as soybeans, there are no weedy relatives growing wild in our soybean areas, and therefore there is no risk of gene transfer by outcrossing.

Herbicide resistance in weeds is a common problem for agriculture, not because of gene transfer, but because of selection for natural resistance. Regarding overuse of herbicides, a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that herbicide use overall has not increased with crops genetically modified for herbicide resistance.

Another concern is that genes for resistance to pests will lead to the emergence of super pests. As with gene transfer, the emergence of biotypes of pests with ability to defeat genes deployed in crops for resistance to them is nature's way of assuring survival of the species. This issue is not new to agriculture. Resistance breeding is an ongoing effort for crops just to stay ahead of the ever-evolving populations of pest species. Wheat stem rust is a classic example: The pathogen responsible for this potentially devastating disease is noted for its ability to continually adapt through mutations or other genetic changes, yet stem rust of wheat has been kept under control in North America through plant breeding since the last major epidemic in 1953.

In spite of the high priority placed by the USDA, land grant universities, and private seed companies on breeding crops for resistance to diseases and insect pests during this century, I would estimate that we have resistant varieties for no more than 25% of fungal diseases, an even smaller percentage of virus and bacterial diseases, and we have the fewest varieties of crops with resistance to insect pests. Like vaccinations, we need a different gene for each pest agent in each crop, so the work itself is slow and tedious. The other difficulty is that genes have not been available within the populations of plants sexually compatible with our crops. The new tools of biotechnology make resistance breeding more efficient and it gives plant breeders access to genes that formerly were not accessible. It also now appears possible through biotechnology to develop crops that are more broadly and permanently resistant to whole families of pests and not just to single biotypes of pests.

Historically, plant breeding has worked simultaneously to improve crops for profitability of producers through lower costs and higher yields, protection of the environment and natural resource base by allowing less tillage and less use of pesticides, and benefits to consumers through more nutritious, safer and convenient foods. However, we are hearing suggestions and seeing signs that biotechnology applied to crops might be accepted if the benefits are to consumers but not if the benefits are only to producers or the environment.

What if our agricultural enterprises are forced for economic reasons to skip over traits that serve farmers and the environment and go directly and exclusively to traits that add value to the consumer if for no other reason than to pay the cost of identity preservation within the transportation and marketing channels? This would be most unfortunate and unnecessary.

Benefits for consumers are in the pipeline, including coffee produced from plants with one or more genes disabled for making caffeine, rice with genes added to make beta-carotene in the grain, and bananas with proteins to immunize children against certain diseases. Benefits are also in the pipeline for farmers and the environment, including crops tolerant of droughts or late-season frosts and crops with resistance to root diseases responsible for poor stands and fertilizer left unused in the soil.

Everyone benefits from higher yields and more efficient production systems since this keeps the price of food low, keeps our industries competitive in world markets, and assures that we can continue sustainable growth in agriculture without depending on more land. Rather than who benefits, consumers need to embrace the gains for producers and producers need to produce the highest quality products for consumers. (end text)

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