Organic industry’s credibility eroded by misinformation about GE foods

Many consumers—especially those who consider themselves ‘progressive’—have come to embrace the hard-edged beliefs, promoted by factions of the organic industry, that gene-altered crops are less safe, nutritious and sustainable than organic crops and foods.

The chief promoter of anti-biotechnology claims is the Organic Consumers Association led by Ronnie Cummins, with some help from foodies like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. The OCA has campaigned relentlessly against conventional agriculture, but it’s greatest ire is reserved for biotech crops and foods.

The OCA’s home page promotes a litany of anti-science posts—mostly tirades written by Cummins or from well-known anti-biotech advocacy groups, usually with no reputable sources linked. The centerpiece of its current campaign is a guide titled “GMO Myths and Truths.” If only to ridicule them, OCA lists claims made by prominent scientists and endorsed by every major science organization of note in the world, including in Europe where politicians, but not scientists, have promoted bans and restrictions. According to OCA, these miscreants falsely believe genetically modified crops:

  • Are safe to eat and can be more nutritious than naturally bred crops
  • Are strictly regulated for safety
  • Increase crop yields
  • Reduce pesticide use
  • Benefit farmers and make their lives easier
  • Bring economic benefits
  • Benefit the environment
  • Can help solve problems caused by climate change
  • Reduce energy use
  • Will help feed the world.

 

According to every leading national and international science body, those statements are accurate, although the specifics of each claim are complicated and worthy of nuanced discussion. But one won’t find that kind of serious dialogue at the OCA site. Rather, it promotes blind anti-biotech advocacy and non-education, making the sweeping and false statement that “a large and growing body of scientific and other authoritative evidence shows that these claims are not true.”

The OCA’s “authoritative evidence” is contained in “GMO Myths and Truths,” written by anti-biotech Earth Open Source, a British NGO that bills itself as committed to “collaborative approaches for sustainable foods.” Like OCA, it is a campaigning organization that has no scientists of any note on staff and no track record of serious science analysis or journalism.

From a science perspective OCA and its associated groups are a mess of a resource for anyone interested in a discussion of the data on the environmental and health impacts of biotech crops and food—let alone an honest appraisal of the benefits and limitations of organic agriculture. Unfortunately for public discourse, the OCA’s misinformation campaigns have become templates for other organic and foodie groups, obscure and mainstream.

Organic anti-biotech campaigners

Just last week, for example, the popular website Eating Local and Organic published a bizarre post purportedly addressing the question “What is GMO?”  Its sole example: gene-altered tomatoes. It claims that the tomato was modified by process that causes tumors in rodents, killing them, implying that humans faced the same fate. “The foreign DNA ends up inside the good bacteria in our gut that’s responsible for digestion,” the unnamed writer for the site writes. “Have you wondered why so many people are needing pro-biotics these days? What about all of those Activia commercials to ‘make you regular?’”

This is fear mongering at its baldest; Health problems including the threat of gastronomic suicide must ultimately be caused by conventional agricultural products containing GMOs!

In this case, the anti-biotech argument focuses on a product that is not even in available—the Flavr Savr tomato. The source for this outrageous claims is a “documentary” called “The Future of Food” produced by an anti-biotech front group founded and funded by Cummins’ OCA. Like almost all anti-biotech claims by radical NGOs, it has a speck of truth embedded in exaggerations and flat out misstatements. In 1994, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first commercially grown genetically altered food for human consumption, a tomato called the Flavr Savr, which was altered to slow the ripening process, preventing it from softening, while still allowing it to retain its natural color, flavor and nutritional value. The tomato was evaluated extensively by independent and industry scientists, as well as by the Food and Drug Administration, and found healthful and environmentally benign.

To get those characteristics into the tomato and into transgenic crops, geneticists use what’s called a “promoter”, which is a nucleotide sequence that acts like a motor driving production of a genes’ message. The article on the organic site—and similar claims on hundreds of other foodie and anti-biotech web pages—makes the alarmist claim that something weird and dangerous must be going on because the promoter is carried by a virus and in this instance because it commonly infects cauliflowers (known as the cauliflower mosaic virus or CaMV).

In fact, viral vectors are key to bioengineering; they have been rendered noninfectious, are just transporters and are utterly harmless. The FDA extensively evaluated the Flavr Savr tomato, concluding that it “is as safe as tomatoes bred by conventional means” and that the process used to make it is “safe for use as a processing aid in the development of new varieties of tomato, rapeseed oil and cotton intended for food use.”

Despite the new tomato’s obvious benefits activists campaigned against it, calling it a “mutant veggie.” It never caught on and was eventually discontinued. A safe and nutritious food was removed from the market by a disinformation campaign. Even today, palpably false accusations about the tomato’s safety are re-circulated by Cummins and by other anti-biotech campaigners, such as Jeffrey Smith, who falsely claim that the Flavr Savr tomato or its ingredients killed rats in lab tests. (In fact, in lab tests, some rats fed an exclusive diet of tomatoes did show esophageal lesions, which speaks to the acidity of tomatoes; there was certainly no evidence of toxicity as Cummins and Smith have implied).

A sad twist in the fevered efforts of anti-biotech advocates is the degrading of the integrity and credibility of more mainstream organic groups. Although the leaders of the Organic Trade Association sometimes distance themselves from Cummins’ anti-science guerilla tactics, they now swim in the same cesspool of pseudoscience. The OTA no longer publicly rebukes his outrageous statements, and in fact they end up circulating many of his insinuations or outright falsehoods.

The OTA’s primary vector is its regular “consumer survey” that trumpets the anti-biotech beliefs of its green washed supporters. It’s latest tracking poll, released in March, indicated “32 percent of parents who learned about GMOs in the news are significantly more likely to increase their organic purchases.” Those numbers have risen in recent years—not because of any new data suggesting biotech crops are harmful. Rather, it’s the result of scare campaigns, which the OTA, like its less reputable cousin OCA, encourages.

“Results from the latest consumer survey conducted for the Organic Trade Association (OTA) reveal that as U.S. families are becoming increasingly aware of the presence of unlabeled genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in foods in the marketplace, they turn to organic as the food labeled by law to not have been made with genetically engineered ingredients,” the OTA boasts in its press release. That news release drove hundreds of news articles and thousands of posts that ricocheted through the Internet echo chamber.

Organic crops no more nutritious and less sustainable

The organic industry has been growing in part by promoting the false claim that organic products are more nutritious than conventional varieties. According to its latest survey, “Families continue to cite their desire for healthful options, especially for their children, in choosing organic foods,” the survey notes. That’s green washing; study after study, going back to the 1960s, has found that organic foods are neither safer nor more nutritious alternatives to conventionally grown crops. The most recent, considered definitive—and in line with all major past studies—examined 237 scientific reports over the past 50 years evaluating the nutrient content of organic and conventional foods. Researchers at Stanford University concluded that organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs are comparable in their nutrient content.

Organic supporters also ignore the sustainability contradictions at the heart of their passion. Although organic farming may be environmentally benign when producing small quantities of crops for regional markets, they are environmentally precarious on a large scale. In 2008, as part of its Census of Agriculture, the USDA conducted the Organic Production Survey, the largest every study of organic farming yields. As Ramez Naam has written in his recent book on sustainability, The Infinite Resource, it takes one and a half times to two times as much land in the U.S. to grow food organically than it does to grow food via conventional methods. That, in turn, puts more pressure on farmers around the world to grow more. In the developing world, that often means slashing and burning forest into farmland, a process that emits a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and harms both the water cycle and species that live in forests.”

In other words, although organic farming might require the use of fewer pesticides (genetically modified crops also use far less pesticides, of course), its broader impact could be environmentally disastrous: it would require more acres cut out from virgin woodlands and an estimated 5 to 6 billion additional head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland—and there are only about 1.3 billion cattle in the world today.

“Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far,” Naam summarizes. “And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far more greenhouse gasses, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today.

Organic activists led by the OCA, OTA and foodies may believe they are on the side of the angels, but their campaigns are often ignorant of science, selfishly focused on the desires of the affluent and ultimately destructive. Their policies also drive up costs to many consumers who cannot afford the price premiums charged by the organic industry for what is largely, in scientific terms, a ‘feel good’ purchase. Even worse, their efforts if emulated in the developing world could seriously damage world food security, resulting in an increase in malnutrition and even premature deaths.

The organic industry has a direct commercial interest in sowing confusion and doubt about genetically engineered crops and food ingredients derived from them.  Anything that creates doubt or concern about foods that may have genetically modified ingredients in them, or are labeled “May Contain Genetically Engineered Ingredients” is doing the organic industry’s marketing work for it and driving confused consumers to higher-priced products.

Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.

24 thoughts on “Organic industry’s credibility eroded by misinformation about GE foods”

  1. “The organic industry has a direct commercial interest in sowing
    confusion and doubt about genetically engineered crops and food
    ingredients derived from them.”

    Absolutely! And the more scientifically ignorant – or merely unfamiliar with reasoned thinking – a listener/reader is, the more likely the pseudoscience messages will strike a chord of “success”, for the anti-GMO groups. But in a wide view and long range evaluation, success, in the sense of greater individual lifetime Happiness, will not come via government regulations that ban individual choices as to what a person can grow and/or sell/serve/eat.

    Reply
  2. I think Anastasia Bodnar summed it up perfectly over at Biofortified when she likened their nonsense to “whack-a-mole.”

    Reply
  3. Interesting…..no mention of studies that show more pesticides are used on GM crops (since those are altered to withstand greater amounts of pesticides). Nor is there any mention of increased farmer suicides in India as they can’t afford to buy GMO seeds every year, a policy which corporations like Monsanto stricly enforce. I could go on, but the point is this article is as biased towards GMOs as it claims OCA is prejudiced against..

    Reply
  4. A move to Organic Only foods would kill about 2 Billion people in the world. 90% of those deaths would be the poor in all countries, including the US. Some socialist people have an agenda that is scary. There is no way to feed the world without GMO foods, pesticides, and fertilizers. Anyone who supports eliminating modern farming is clearly trying to kill a couple billion people.

    Reply
  5. As I once read in a discussion about GMOs, those who are against it are the ones who think that they are much better off going organic, but in reality, they are the most gullible to believe all the stuff promoted by the OCA and OTA. When the OCA start publishing stuff on the social media such as the “RoundUp causes every single disease under the sun,” it erodes their credibility even more when it can be debunked every single time.

    Reply
  6. It’s foolish for anyone to think that there will be an Unlimited supply of roundup herbicide for the next 10,000 years to spray on GMO crops! GMO farmers use synthetic fertilizers, chemical based pesticides & herbicides that are non-renewable and come limited resources! Organic fammers use more renewable resources & use fewer outside inputs in their operations!

    Reply
    • you just used the word ‘synthetic’ to claim that roundup can’t be around in the far future. please look up what ‘synthesizing’ a chemical means…

      Reply
  7. These are very interesting findings that can change how the world thinks about organic food. There are millions of people in the world who are opting for organic foods because they are healthy. Imagine the frustration that will pass if they knew that organic foods aren’t everything that it is claimed to be. They already have spent a lot just for food. – http://www.modestomilling.com/

    Reply
  8. I believe the supporting evidence provided here is convincing enough to prove that the organic industry is misinforming society about gene-altering foods.

    Reply
  9. The reason I oppose GMO food has nothing to w/ scientific evidence, but has everything to do w/ common sense. There is only one entity w/ anything to gain from GMO food, and those are the corporations that own the patented, modified seeds. If GMOs were accepted by the marketplace, they could tout such things as “tomatoes that would never rot” which would give their products a huge advantage over unmodified foods.

    The problem is that what they are playing w/ is our food supply – and that almost w/o exception, doing things like this have unexpected consequences. One of the best examples is the modified vegetable oil known as partially hydrogenated oil, or more commonly known as “trans fat”. Partially hydrogenated oil is created by a manufacturing process which takes vegetable oil and exposes it to hydrogen which then changes the molecule, making it one of the most unhealthy and dangerous things you can put in your body – it’s truly amazing how effective it is at clogging arteries. However, it is STILL in our food supply, and nobody was even aware of how harmful this stuff was until around 10 years ago. So it was around for approximately 40 years, causing millions upon millions of heart attacks, strokes, hypertension and who know how many other cardio-vascular related health problems before anyone was even aware of the harm it was causing.

    So the lesson? You don’t mess w/ food, there are too many variables and far too many things that can go wrong when introducing unnatural things into the food supply. It can have the potential for causing all kinds of health problems, and as well as all kinds of environmental problems that are too difficult to test for until it’s too late.

    Why would we allow corporations to risk human health and environmental destruction so they can make higher profits?

    Reply
    • You are an idiot. GMOs are not produced solely to pad the pockets of corporations. They are created to increase efficiency and yield, because who wouldn’t want a better crop for the same amount of work. Foods that are genetically modified have been bred specifically to get the most desirable traits. This is in a way a manipulated evolutionary process, where instead of natural selection, we are artificially selecting for the traits (yield, size, durability) we desire. Think of it in terms of horse breeding where people pay large sums of money for sperm from racing greats, and they are constantly trying to improve the genetic advantage of the animals. The only difference with GMOs is that they’re cross breeding plants.

      Reply
      • Angie, they aren’t cross breeding plants, that’s not what GMOs are.. GMOs are created when a laboratory genetically modifies the structure of an organism for some commercial purpose, for example to resist a patented pesticide. It is a far cry from simply cross breeding plants which I would still consider a natural process.. Have you heard that bee populations have been in steep decline over the last 10 yrs? The already PROVEN cause of this is a GMO corn and other GMO crops that use a pesticide called neonicotinoids – here’s a link, http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/bayer-pesticide-bees-studies

        Why hasn’t the EPA banned it already, because the EPA struggles to get things done when opposed by giant extremely wealthy industries, for all the obvious reasons.

        If you’re going to spout off, and in effect take the side of corporatations that are destroying the envinroment, at least have some idea of what you’re talking about.

        Reply
        • no you’re wrong cross breeding is in fact genetically modifying something …you’ve changed the offsprings genetic code by cross breeding it with another plant ….-_-

          Reply
    • So the hundreds of thousands of poor people in the world that are barely getting by wont benefit from more cheaper food? Things like golden rice are only going to pad the pockets of the wealthy and WONT help reduce blindness due to vitamin A deficiency in children in poor nations? How enlightening! Let’s go back to cutting down tonnes of land to convert to farmland, destroy habitat and put a greater strain on the planet so we can feed the well off expensive organic food. /sarcasm.

      Reply
      • First let’s talk about why organic food is expensive. It’s expensive because it’s in great demand by people like me, and because there is so little of it actually grown. If we decided to pass a law that banned all pesticides(including GMOs) and all agriculture was organic, you would see prices plummet. Also w/ organic food, farmers don’t have the enormous expense of buying chemicals that destroy farmland, pollute our water, and cause diseases such as cancer.
        Second, it is highly disputed that pesticide/GMO use actually creates greater crop yields in the long run. When first applied, yes they kill all pests so the yield is greater. But pests are of course resilient, they adapt to the chemicals creating a vicious cycle of dependence as the farmer is forced to buy more and more chemicals every year (that end up on your food) as the pests gain immunity to them.
        So your “industry approved” argument that pesticide use and GMOs exist to feed the world is complete nonsense. But of course that is the industry’s favorite argument. And your claim that organic farming puts a greater strain on the planet is the worst sort of willfully ignorant bullsh*t – that statement makes you either an idiot or a liar.
        Finally my main argument is very simple.. Even if GMOs were beneficial to feeding the people you say you are concerned about, they are not worth the enormous risks. If you want to educate yourself on the risks involved w/ using GMOs, check out the documentary ‘GMO OMG’.

        Reply
        • I see you’re mistaken about the cause for the higher prices of organic foods. The cost is higher because they have to use more organically approved pesticides (Yes, organics do use pesticides. Saying they don’t is the favourite lie of the organic movement). Organic crops require much more land to produce the same amount as even conventional crops, let alone GMOs. In order to produce enough organic food to see a price drop you would have to destroy so much habitat, and the resulting CO2 emissions, that you would cause more harm to the environment than anything conventional crops could do. Organic is not “nature friendly”.

          Now, let’s take the example of BT corn. This is a breed of corn that produces it’s own pesticide, one found in nature in other plants already. This eliminates the cost of buying insecticides. What does organic do? Oh right, spray crops with harmful “natural” and “organic” pesticides.

          Pest resilience occurs in all forms of pest control, not just in conventional pesticide use but also in organic pesticides. That is why they have to use so much more, to overcome the pests resistance. Anyone who tells you that using one pesticide all the time, to not employ good farming practices like pesticide rotation, is promoting harmful farming practices. This is true of organic, conventional, and gmo crops. We have the same issue with overuse of antibiotics causing antibiotic resistant bacterium. No sensible GMO advocate is going to say that using only one pesticide to the exclusion of all others is a good idea, the only place I hear it is from the pro organic crowd building up a non-existent argument to tear down.

          GMO is a technology with the potential to feed the world, there is simply no denying that. Being able to grow more food with less land, less fertiliser, less water and less pesticides is a feat only possible with GMOs on a reasonable time scale.

          On the topic of fertiliser, what do organics use? Manure right? How will we meet the increased demand for manure that an all organic industry will require? More cows! But cows need a lot of land to grow, which means clearing yet more wild habitat, and more CO2 emissions. And the cows themselves? Apart from crashing the beef market (a statement which is conjecture on my part, I have no evidence to back that up) the large numbers of cows will produce tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas MORE potent than CO2.

          GMO crops go through more testing, and more rigorous testing, than any other crop type. They are tested for environmental impact as well as weather or not the introduced gene is in the right place and doing its job. The idea that scientists in a lab shoot up a seed with foreign DNA and then release it with barely any testing is ludicrous.

          Notice how I put forth arguments to counter yours and did not resort to name calling? Yea, if you could not resort to that it would be less embarrassing for you.

          Reply
  10. Habitat loss??? It wouldn’t be a loss of habitat because we’d be converting commercial farmland to organic farmland. The industry touted claim that commercial farming produces more food is a LIE, the data simply does not support those claims made by the chemical industry over the long run… So your CO2 argument doesn’t work.

    I never said organic farming is perfect, it’s not. Organic standards do allow the use of non-synthetic pesticides, and there are organic standards that need to be improved. Obviously there is too big a difference right now between an excellent organic farm(which relies on organic farming methods and many times NO pesticide) and a bad organic farm that does the bare min to get the organic certification.

    However, organic farming represents a very great step forward in sustainable farming: there’s very little soil erosion, the waterways are not polluted w/ synthetic pesticides that do NOT break down in the environment(thus causing things like animals and bird eggs, and eventually people to get contaminated w/ the poison), farm workers don’t get sick like they do on conventional farm just to name a few..

    However, all of this aside, my MAIN problem currently w/ the conventional farming industry is the introduction of the GMO. To me this is the most dangerous environmental experiment of all time. Anyone that knows anything about science knows that when you change something like a natural organism, the possibility that it will cause some unexpected/unintended results is not only likely, but it’s all but guaranteed!! Modifying the genetic traits of a plant is nothing like programming a computer, it’s not mathematical, there are variables that we only will ever find out about through TRIAL and ERROR. And herein lies the problem. Our food supply is not something any person or company, no matter how much money they have, should be playing around with. The risk will ALWAYS outweigh whatever benefit you are seeking. And remember the main “benefit” being sought by a company like Monsanto is not to save the world, if anything it’s to dominate major food sources by owning the “copyrights” of seeds. Not very nice in my opinion.

    To make the claim that organic farming is not an improvement over conventional farming is not supported by the facts, and not even supported by common sense. To try to make the claim that conventional farming is “better for the environment” is, again, either a claim by someone who is not being very truthful or at best someone that is getting his information from disingenuous sources. Any chance you work for Monsanto?

    Reply
    • Mistaken about habitat loss?

      http://www.scribd.com/doc/47829728/A-Detailed-Analysis-of-US-Organic-Crops

      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1100182X

      two large meta-analasys show that, on average, organic farming produces less food per acre than conventional farming. That’s not even touching on the increase in land we’ll need to raise cows to produce the manuer required! Cows take up a lot of land and water for very little food. We need less beef, not more! So yes, the yield gap is not a lie, and my CO2 argument remains valid. It’s nice to have data backing up your claims.

      And you don’t seem to understand how great GMOs are compared to other forms of genetic manipulation. DNA -is- like a code. 4 letters combined to create instructions to produce specific amino acids and proteins. After some DNA is inserted the resulting plant is heavily tested to ensure that only the desired effects are obtained. The last thing GM scientists want is an unintended result getting out into the food supply. There isn’t any mysterious difference between a plant acquiring this trait naturally through thousands of years of evolution, cross breeding, chemical mutagenesis or radiation induced mutagenesis. All of which, by the way, are USDA organically aproved. However, all of these methods have far lower testing standards than GMOs, and it carries a lot less risk of unintended consiquences. The risks are minimal, less even than other methods of modifying our crops that you seem to have no problem with.

      Humans have been playing around with thier food supply for years, it’s how we got the corn we love, brocoli and colliflour. It’s how we have seedless grapes, seedless watermellons, bananas! Do I believe control of sutch should be in the hands of one group of people? Hell no! But Genetic Engineering is a technology, not a product, and monsanto is not the only one that can produce engineered crops. Do not conflate GMOs with Monsanto, one is a technology, the other a company. GM crops have the potential to help save the world, that cannot be denied, and no cries of “MONSATAN” will change that fact.

      Organic farming is, by definition, a BACKWARDS step, rejecting many of the advancements in technology we have made. Advancements whos benefit IS backed up by data and facts and IS supported by common sense. Conventional farming has issues, but sliding back into organic farming is not the solution, but will only provide more problems.

      And lastly, I address your “shill gambit”. I’ll have you know I only recently graduated from university with a physics degree. I am struggling to find work, and have never even met a Monsanto representative, let alone work for them. The fact that you have to resort to that accusation infuriates me, as if the only way someone would love modern technology is by working for some vilified company. I have done my research, looked at the studies written by people who know and have done the science and have come to this conclusion on my own. At least I have the data to back up my claims.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

glp menu logo outlined

Newsletter Subscription

* indicates required
Email Lists
glp menu logo outlined

Get news on human & agricultural genetics and biotechnology delivered to your inbox.