The Future We Cannot Afford to Lose in the GMO Gamble

Text | Chen Ru-wei

In May 2015, the 85-minute documentary Seeds of Deception"author Jeffrey Smith shot in 2012, Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives" (Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives), was officially released in Taiwan.

August 25, 2009, I will never forget that day. What my son ate that day was raw corn, and he almost died because of corn. He made a wheezing sound, scratched himself nonstop, his face turned red, and he had trouble breathing. I was so panicked that I called 119. I thought he had a food allergy. After all kinds of tests, he now cannot eat even a little corn.

Every five to eight minutes forms a short segment on a theme, from autism, allergies, gastrointestinal diseases, pesticide abuse, infertility, rising livestock miscarriage rates, the lack of nutrients in GM feed, infant formula, bovine growth hormone (rBGH), academic persecution, the government-business complex, the impact of India's BT cotton on the ecological environment and livestock health, GM food labeling regulations, to ways to avoid GM risks in daily life. The flood of various pieces of information tells only one fact: the impact of GM technology on society is far beyond your imagination.

My fourth child has allergic symptoms, but our family has no history of it, and there was no abnormality during pregnancy. Ever since I learned about the relationship between GM food and allergies, I found the answer. Within just twenty-four hours, I emptied the kitchen. All the food I had fed my children over the past six years went into the trash. At first I was happy to finally find the cause, but later I felt very sad and cried nonstop, thinking, oh my God, what have I done to my children? Without my consent, what else have they eaten?

Family physicians, veterinarians, mothers, professors, farmers, livestock raisers and environmental advocates, one segment of expert testimony after another, one research report document after another, and one personal experience after another, point directly to many doubts in the discourse on GM food safety.

Advocates often say GM food can feed the Earth. That is really brainwashing that has been too successful. Today's food problem is mainly a problem of unequal distribution, and GM also increases the use of herbicides.

Whether GM food poses health risks to the human body is still debated endlessly, with new evidence continuing to emerge. If one were to divide people into pro and con camps, Jeffrey Smith could probably be listed as a representative figure in the camp of "GM food carries extremely high risk." Therefore, if after watching the whole film you find that there is almost no positive argument for GM food, naturally there is no need to be too surprised.

If GM food is really as good as the industry says, then label it! We have the right to choose not to buy it.

The dense government-business network revealed in the film on the GM food issue, corporations' control of the right to interpret science, and their boundless media influence are also important links in breaking through the view that GM technology is neutral.

Michael Taylor was Monsanto's defense lawyer and vice president, and later went to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to serve as a reviewer of GM food safety. From this one may infer that when the government boasts that GM food is safe and free of concern, could it be a grand play performed jointly by multinational agribusiness corporations and the regulatory agency?

Monsanto claims GM crops can feed the world and lead the globe toward sustainable living, but with its left hand it sells herbicide-resistant GM seeds, while with its right hand it also sells the ecologically destructive Roundup pesticide. How can such a self-contradictory practice convince anyone?

If GM food really is the dream crop that will save the future, why, when U.S. states launched efforts to enact GM food labeling laws, did companies such as Monsanto spend large sums of money on advertisements or hire lobbyists to stop citizens from pursuing the right to information disclosure? Could it be because the truth underneath is unbearably ugly?

To be fair, in some segments that resemble a testimonial rally of experiencers, one cannot help but wonder: could this be Jeffrey Smith's filming strategy of standing on a particular position and gathering and selecting particular cases to amplify the argument that GM food has harmful risks? Yet such self-reflection always reminds me of what the French researcher Gilles-Éric Séralini said when facing doubts from all sides about his published paper that GM food caused tumors and liver and kidney lesions in rats:

I am not saying that all problems are related to GM, but it is obvious that GM really does cause certain problems, so we should immediately take certain preventive measures.

In 2003, Jeffrey Smith wrote the book Seeds of Deception, boldly revealing how multinational GM agribusiness corporations lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to formulate policies favorable to GM food, used their power over research funding to influence the results of published academic papers, and chose to conceal research data showing that GM really caused certain harms while continuously spreading through advertising and media the message that GM food would be the dream product to save the world from food shortage. Ten years later, he chose to continue tracking the current state of the GM food issue over these more than ten years through a large number of interview video records.

Is GM food really safe? Jeffrey Smith gave his answer with words and images.

Deep in the GM food gamble, what we bet is all human health and the environmental future that we cannot afford to lose.

However, the surging anti-GM movement in recent years has brought us a ray of light. The global March Against Monsanto has entered its third year, citizens across U.S. states have been demanding GM food labeling, more than four hundred U.S. companies and more than thirty thousand products have obtained non-GMO certification, the World Health Organization (WHO) has listed glyphosate as a possible carcinogen, and scientists and governments in various countries are beginning to consider tightening regulation or banning glyphosate pesticides.

The day when we break through that dark fog of the GM century, filled with flows of money, academic interpretation and government-business power, perhaps is no longer out of reach.