Once again I admire the Swiss!

As a South Islander, I wish we would live up to the name that tourists often give us “The Switzerland of the South Pacific” … in much more than just scenery.

Instead of that our “free market” “international corporate” thinking, our watching of cheap TV programmes, and the fact that they speak English, lead us further into the American influence (no matter how inappropriate)!

GE and Switzerland

While the rest of the world wrestles with a biotech industry determined to own and contaminate the world’s food and fields, tiny Switzerland in its quiet, efficient and pragmatic way is eliminating GE from its fields, its food and its society.

11% of Swiss farmers are now organic. Supermarkets such as Coop carry as extensive a range of organic foods as you will find anywhere. They even have begun to carry organic food produced regionally - and labeled as such. A Coop fund is supporting organic research projects and the second largest Swiss retailer now also is launching SlowFood products.

While domestically labeled animal products have been produced with GE free feed for a while, more recently, Coop and the biggest retailer Migros have agreed to undertake the process of ensuring that all imported meat is raised on GE free feed, too. Smaller supermarket chains Denner and Spar have now done the same.

And one of the most conservative societies in Europe put this issue to its people in a referendum in November 2005 and overwhelmingly the public supported a 5 year ban on the growing of GE crops. The referendum vote was unprecedented in Swiss history. It is the first time ever that a referendum has passed in every canton, and it is only one of 14 referenda ever to be approved by the Swiss people.

No one would accuse the Swiss of being anti-technology. No one would accuse the Swiss of acting rashly. No one would accuse the Swiss of taking steps without ensuring that they will benefit.

At the same time, however, almost no one is recognizing how significant these steps have been.

As we all face the latest contamination - this time of rice, the world’s most important staple food, it is perhaps time to remember that we don’t need to find solutions to the problems of GE we only need to implement those that have already been found.

A must see movie about this is “The Future of Food”
Link here: http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

Also our NZ scientist Dr Bob Anderson (of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Genetics) has just released a new book on this topic called “The Final Pollution. How Industry manipultates Science and gambles with your food and future.”

You can order it from his website here:
http://roberta-psrg.tripod.com/index.html

When so much of todays research science is being funded by companies, the bottom line is that we cannot afford to entrust the future of our food to corporate interests who’s dominant agenda is to make profits for their shareholders by controlling the food chain.

As for release of GMOs you have a point I already concede - care is needed. I just disagree that we have to wait ’several generations of the ingesting organism’, ie 50 years or so. That’s insanely conservative out of all proportion to the risk. Medical science would still be in the ancient world if we took this approach, as would agriculture. I keep remembering a survival manual I read as a child, which advised if you are lost in the bush and starving to:

1. See what animals eat
2. Try a bit and see if it tastes of almonds, if so, spit it out
3. Swallow a bit and wait a while
4. Try a larger portion the next day if all seems well

which is pretty much how prehistoric man would have done most of his supermarket shopping. That’s testing in the state of nature, and I think we already do a far better job than that now.

Kiore, I know nothing about this pig epidemic, but I do know that millions of men were living in extremely squalid conditions in trenches, and moving at great uncontrolled speed all around the planet thereafter. But nowhere have I read that the flu was man-made. Perhaps it could be man-cured, though. Pigs live in squalid conditions too, often by choice, but I would think if it came from them it’s more a function of their unprecedented population size, on account of their tasty flesh.

I can’t buy any of this ‘natural is best’ argument. Natural is often really dangerous, as is man-made. The real difference is that man-made can adapt far quicker to new information. That is our strength as a species, and we should use it.

The issue with a GM grain or a GM animal are the known and knowable side effects. We can accept that the targeted characteristic is achieved, or the organism isn’t viable. If the GM is simply something to permit weedkiller to be liberally sprayed everywhere it isn’t worth discussing here either. Chemical warfare is not accepted by the international community any more than Biological warfare. So the GM grain or animal has to be more productive, hardier or more resistant to disease for it to even be considered.

I am going through this to establish boundaries. We needn’t argue about things that we all agree are not useful, and I think the above limits are reasonable observations.

The question becomes whether GM of animals, plants or people is “just wrong” in some moral sense, “too dangerous” over time, or just fine lets do it. My contention is that the danger is what is unknown… that we could create a problem species, weeds and pests, or a gene that migrates… (they do move about some) and to what purpose really? We already have enough food here.

GE science is way different from GM organism releases. I don’t oppose the science, but I worry hard about the release of a GMO. So your argument about curing disease and other potential advantages is accepted, but not relevant to a GMO release.

Incidentally, I have some asthma and found that regular ingestion of chromium supplements reduces the need for the steroids. Damned if I know why. Cats still make my eyes itch and my sneezes still set off nearby car alarms but the really nasty wheeze seems to subside. Takes about a month to see the effect. YMMV.

Kate - I have to take Ben’s side. GE can help individuals if it is taken to its logical conclusion… those genes that make me susceptible to allergy may make me more stable in other respects though, and while mods need to be made with some assurance that the cure won’t be worse than the disease, they also could stabilize favorable traits that are otherwise linked too closely with a disease process. In other words, it CAN be good. Like most things, not good if done for profit.

Personally I think we were all taken over by a prior GM that made Tim-Tams addictive to the bulk of the population, but that’s another rant.

respectfully
BJ

Your question back at you. If you had the choice, which illness would you like to not have any GE science working towards alleviating? asthma, food allergy, chemical allergy, diabetes (increased sensitivity to carbohydrate content of food), chronic heart disease, obesity, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, or one of the rarer genetically-linked diseases which I won’t go into.

I’m personally an eczema and asthma sufferer, and changing to expensive organic food didn’t do shit for it. But taking steroids helps enormously. Science over mumbo jumbo any day.

I don’t think that keeping it in the lab is the only choice. How about opting in? Why do you get the right to say I can’t eat something, drink something, smoke something, try a cure for something? You could be dealing generations, which is billions of people, out of potentially life altering discoveries, all from unjustified fears.

So Ben, if you had the choice, which of these illnesses would you like your child to have an increased sensitivity for;
asthma, food allergy, chemical allergy, diabetes (increased sensitivity to carbohydrate content of food), chronic heart disease, obesity, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, or one of the rarer genetically-linked diseases which I won’t go into.

There is already a measurable increase in the proportion of the population suffering from allergy-type illnesses, which in NZ is mainly due to our successes in keeping allergic children alive to adulthood, which enables the genes for allergic disease to continue in the population.

Diagnosis and treatment keep improving in quality; do we really want to stress an already stretched system by incrementally increasing the numbers of allergy-affected infants, children and adults?

The only choice is to keep it in the lab until it can be seen to be safe over multiple generations of the organism ingesting GMO; until then, the viral-transfer method of gene-splicing can only be regarded with scepticism by those who make our food safety laws.

Sorry to be flippant, but I can’t buy it. Nature itself can change alarmingly fast and you can’t legislate against that. Why hinder our own ability to adapt?