GM food is here
“Whether you want it or not, you might have eaten GM food in China’s restaurants, roadside eateries, school canteens and hotels, which are running on the oil extracted from GM soybeans and rapeseed,” said Professor Luo Yunbo, head of the Food Science and Nutrition Engineering Department at Chinese Agricultural University in Beijing. He addressed the GM food “gala.”
As a matter of fact, China imports more than 58 million tons of soybeans, mostly GM, every year from the United States and Argentina (Brazil will also be exporting from next year). The China-grown non-GM soybeans used to make edible oil only amount to around 10 million tons.
“More than half of the cooking oil is soybean oil and almost 90 percent of the soybeans are genetically modified,” said Wang Xiaoyu, deputy secretary-general of the Heilongjiang Province Soybean Association.
Because of high imports in recent years, around 90 percent of the soybean oil extraction plants have been shut down in Heilongjiang, the country’s biggest soybean oil producer, Wang said.
To some extent, Professor Luo said, China’s soybean industry is “controlled” by foreign countries. “Now foreign GM corn is knocking at our door,” he told the conference in Beijing. “Time is pressing and we must industrialize our own GM crops.”
“Any new crops must be the result of a change of genes,” said GM supporter Chen Junshi, a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering and a research professor at the National Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Genes are part protein,” he told the gala. “Animal protein or plant protein, GM or non-GM, are all treated in the same way by our gastric acid and digestive enzymes. We won’t be affected by the alien genes. If our body could be affected, then why wouldn’t we be changed to be pigs by eating pork?”
GM rice and GM soybeans, for example, are engineered with alien genes transferred from non-related, nonfood species. An herbicide gene is inserted into soybeans and a pesticide gene is inserted into rice, a method used in GM crops planted on around 160 million hectares worldwide.
Counterattack
“More than 90 percent of them are grown and engineered with genes from bacteria, helping eliminate the need to apply chemical pesticides,” said Zhu Zhen, a researcher from the Institute of Genetics and Development Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It sounds creepy but it is safer than chemicals. It decreases more of the hazardous chemicals that we would eat in conventional food.”
The anti-GM camp has marshalled its forces.
Tong Pingya, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has consistently opposed industrialization of GM staple foods in China and is a pioneer of the anti-GM camp.
“No scientific research so far has proved that GM techniques can increase production. In other words, the so-called high-yield GM technology is a fraud,” Tong wrote on his blog. “I’m not against GM technology. What I’m fighting against is industrialization of GM staple food in China.”
He says there is no gene that itself can increase crop production, which depends on seeding, fertilizing, irrigation, weeding, drainage and other factors.
Another opponent of industrialization is molecular biologist Fang Yifang, a visiting scholar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has spoken out since 2010.
“China’s GM technology is very backward and has fallen behind. We’re now just copying the techniques from the 1980s,” Fang told Shanghai Daily. “Take GM rice. A pesticide gene is inserted into the GM rice. What is that? It’s a thing that even God doesn’t recognize.”
He said some people are trying to mislead the public by confusing crossbreeding and GM. “Here is my explanation. Crossbreeding is like a Chinese marrying an American, while GM is like a human marrying a tree.”
Warning of GM rice, Fudan life sciences professor Yang Jinshui recently told a newspaper, “GM soybean oil, cotton and papaya that have got transgenic safety certificates issued by the government are safe, but when it comes to rice, it is a different thing.” Yang is a member of the genetic research team at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
“The bacteria genes in GM soybean oil and corn oil can be completely metabolized and eliminated, but those alien genes in GM rice cannot be,” Yang said. “Eating the rice will definitely bring the bacteria genes into the human body. Whether they will affect our body, whether they are hazardous and what kind of hazard are still uncertain today.”
Furthermore, rice is the staple food of the Chinese, so the issue concerns everyone, he said. “If industrialized and commercialized on a large scale, there is no turning back in our country. So we have to be extremely careful.”
Proponents counter that Chinese GM technology is mature and the food is safe.
“The gene segment can be inserted into a place where we want it. If it had any harmful effect on other places, we could just discard those affected places,” said Professor Lu Baorong from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Fudan University. He is a member of the National Bio-safety Committee.
Foreign companies
In addition to the dispute over science, the GM discussion online has become ensnared in nationalist sentiment, with talk of a conspiracy to undermine China by making it dependent on imported GM staple seeds.
Since 2001, Monsanto Co, the American agricultural biotechnology multinational, has entered the China market, running a large-scale corn seed cross-breeding program, developing seeds especially for China. No GM is involved.
There was no response to e-mails to Monsanto and telephone calls to its Beijing office seeking comment over the Christmas holiday.
Monsanto is not a big player in China; only around 1 percent of its global revenue comes from China.
Monsanto Chairman and CEO Hugh Grant was recently interviewed by Caixin online, which published an article on Tuesday. Monsanto supplies 70 percent of the world’s GM seed stock.
Asked about GM issues in China, Grant told the magazine that the government and scientists should decide whether GM crops have a place in the country’s future. “I don’t think Monsanto has a say in those decisions,” he said.
About whether Monsanto has plans to develop GM products in China, Grant said, “It will take a long time, I think. Chinese scientists and researchers are making significant progress. But in the near future, I think it will be about breeding.
“All the drama is about biotechnology, but the untold story is modern breeding systems,” Grant told Caixin. “China’s yields today are a bit less than 6 tons per hectare, and the US has more like 11 tons per hectare. There’s no reason why China’s yields can’t match those in the US.”
Critics have another narrative.
“It’s (Monsanto’s) ultimate goal is to plant each piece of China’s farmland with their GM seeds,” said Tong Pingya, a researcher in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Professor Jiang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University warned, “Industrialization is very dangerous. Once industrialized, we’re making money for foreign companies like Monsanto. Our people are used as guinea pigs.”
Rules and labels
China has strict rules on approving GM food safety. It also has labeling rules that critics call inadequate.
Primary products such as soy sauce, soy milk, oil and tofu are labeled, but not necessarily the secondary GM ingredients in processed foods such as fried chicken (using GM oil) or cakes containing sugar from GM beets.
There is no “GM” mark or Chinese equivalent and the size of lettering can be quite small. China requires three major labels, including “GM Food,” “Produced and processed by GM ingredients” or “Made from GM ingredients but containing no transgenic components.”
“You can minimize the GM label, just like the ‘Smoking is dangerous to your health’ warning on cigarettes,” Yang Tongdan, PhD, from the Health Law Research Center of Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told Shanghai Daily. She is secretary-general of the Shanghai Law Society, Health Law Association.
It usually takes eight to 10 years in China for a domestic GM crop to enter the market. At this time, only GM papaya and cotton are on the market.
A GM seed goes through laboratory evaluation, intermediate experiments, limited environmental release, productivity testing (planted on 10,000 square meters in a closed environment), and final safety certification. Each step takes two to three years.
Foreign companies must file documents on intermediate experiments, environmental release, and productivity testing. They must submit safety certificates from their countries’ authorities.
They then must go through evaluations in China to get safety approval before they can be imported.
The procedure for foreign GMOs takes more than three years.
