Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
NARRATOR: Europe was already reeling from another, unrelated food crisis. Mad cow disease
was condemned as a disastrous failure of science and regulation.
DAVID BOWE: The confidence in government agencies to stand up for people, and not roll over
to private companies who are trying to make a profit, was just not there.
NARRATOR: Farmers had their GM crops pulled up. Food companies had their brands targeted.
Supermarkets were pressured to dump GMOs from their shelves. There was now a broad-based
popular movement, angry that GM food had been introduced without consultation.
JEREMY RIFKIN: In Europe there's a seamless web between culture and cuisine. The way food
is grown, the way the agricultural areas are preserved, the way food is processed and served,
all of that is a deep statement of the values of each country in which that food is grown.
The Europeans were saying, "We don't want a handful of life-science companies to undermine
the cultural values behind our food and food policies in Europe."
GORDON CONWAY, President, The Rockefeller Foundation: There's no benefit to European
consumers, and there are risks, of course. And so it's quite logical, if you buy up the
fact there are no benefits and there are risks, that you will be against them. At the moment,
all the benefits are going to American farmers, and I think that isn't appreciated in Europe.
NARRATOR: As public opinion hardened, the European Union voted for a ban. No new genetically
modified organisms would be commercialized until further notice, and all imported GMOs
would have to be labeled.
The scale of the European opposition called into question the entire future of GM food.
U.S. exports would be affected, but far more important to U.S. companies was the risk that
American consumers might turn against GM food, which had now penetrated throughout the $600
billion U.S. food industry.
At the University of New Mexico, political scientist Hank Jenkins-Smith has embarked
on a major opinion survey about genetically modified organisms
TELEPHONE POLLSTER: Do you currently eat any genetically modified foods or foods that include
genetically modified ingredients?
NARRATOR: He wants to know if we are likely to reject GMOs, like the Europeans.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH, University of New Mexico: The stakes are high. Food is such an intimate
thing for most people. We consume those items. We take them into our bodies. We're dependent
on the producers of those foods to make sure that they're safe, that they are of high quality.
That is what makes this such a fascinating public policy question.
NARRATOR: In designing surveys, researchers use focus groups to get an idea of what snippets
people have picked up about a controversy.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: Have any of you eaten genetically modified foods, to the best of
your knowledge?
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: No.
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: Not knowingly.
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: There were taco shells.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: Only roughly 20 percent of the people we talked to would say, yes,
that they do eat genetically modified organisms. A fair number simply say they don't know.
And then the majority say no, they don't.
Any of you ever consume any of that?
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: Yes.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: We're getting close to home here?
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: Uh-oh.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: This is soy oil. It's cheese.
NARRATOR: The research is clear. Most Americans have no idea they've been eating GM foods
for over five years. And when they find out, they get upset.
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: And why weren't we allowed to be in on that? Yeah.
FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT: What's it going to do to my daughter? What's it going to do to
my 8-year-old little boy when he- you know, for reproducing later on? Is there going to
be a problem?
NARRATOR: A key element of any controversy is trust. Europeans didn't trust their regulators.
What about Americans?
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: The department of Agriculture, interestingly, gets quite high ratings of
trust. On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is not at all trusted and 10 is completely
trusted, they rank close to a 7. And we don't see agencies that get that high very often.
Not far behind them comes the FDA.
TELEPHONE POLLSTER: Suppose a spokesperson from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
said the-
NARRATOR: But as happened in Europe with mad cow disease, trust in regulators can be lost
overnight. It's a critical time.
HANK C. JENKINS-SMITH: If there were to be some event that galvanized public concern,
you can change an issue like this substantially, as Three Mile Island did, for example, with
the nuclear technology policy debate. We haven't seen such a thing yet. If it were to happen,
it could be devastating.
TELEPHONE POLLSTER: To the best of your knowledge, have most scientists concluded that genetically
modified foods are unsafe for human consumption, safe for human consumption, or they haven't
yet reached a conclusion?
Are GMOs safe to eat?
NARRATOR: Unraveling the truth about GM foods means confronting some difficult questions.
Are scientists tampering with nature? Will genetically modified organisms damage the
environment? Does the world really need GMOs?
But first a more fundamental question. How do we know they're safe to eat?
In the coming years, biotech companies have plans to introduce dozens of new genetically
modified organisms - vegetables, fruits, nuts and more. What guarantees do we have that
these GMOs will be safe to eat?
[www.pbs.org: What's coming in GM foods?]
JEREMY RIFKIN, The Foundation on Economic Trends: We've spent a long part of our history
testing various things we could eat, and a lot of people have died as part of this grand
experiment to see what we could consume. Here, for the first time in history, because we're
introducing genes from novel sources, we're introducing genes that code for proteins we've
never put in the human body. Many of them will be safe, I am sure. Will most of them
be safe? Nobody knows.
GORDON CONWAY, President, The Rockefeller Foundation: You cannot prove that it's safe.
You can't prove that any new technology that we have in the world today is absolutely safe.
Whether you have a mobile phone that you're listening to, whether that affects you, whether
overhead power lines affect you, whether you are a woman and you take a birth control pill
or take hormone replacement therapy, we cannot in any of those circumstances prove that it's
absolutely safe. What you can do is try and minimize the risks by doing proper testing,
and that's what we have to do with genetically modified foods.
NARRATOR: Biotech companies argue that's just what they've done. The new crops are tested
for toxicity by feeding the genetically engineered proteins to mice in doses 1,000 times greater
than humans would receive. According to Monsanto's chief operating officer, Hugh Grant, such
tests have failed to find any evidence of harm.
HUGH GRANT, Chief Operating Officer, Monsanto: These are products, these are crops that the
technologies have been more widely tested than any other food product that came before
them in history.
NARRATOR: To test that the GM foods are substantially the same as their non-GM equivalents, company
scientists compare the chemistry in minute detail. Molecule by molecule, they analyze
the GM and non-GM crops. If the resulting graphs from a mass spectrometer line up exactly,
the two products are chemically identical. This is what the regulators call "substantial
equivalence," and it is one reason GM foods normally do not require special labels.
JANE HENNEY, Former Commissioner, FDA: Most of these foods that are being changed are
foods we know very well- corn, soybeans and the like. And what is being changed is usually
something that is very- today has been something of very small difference.
NARRATOR: The regulation of GMOs is shared between three agencies that treat them in
the way they treat regular crops. The USDA checks that they're safe to grow, the FDA
checks they're safe to eat, and the EPA also gets involved with crops, like Bt corn, that
contain pesticides.
DAN GLICKMAN, Former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture: I don't think we're going to have the same
problems here they have in Europe, and the simple reason why is because our food safety
regulatory system is head and shoulders above anybody else's in the world.
NARRATOR: But critics worry that in regulating GMOs no differently from traditional foods,
the agencies may be exposing the public to unknown risks, like allergies.
JEREMY RIFKIN, Author, "The Biotech Century": We know that 8 percent of children and 2 percent
of adults have allergenic reaction to traditional foods. What we're dealing with is the introduction
of new genetic foods that have genes that code for proteins that we've never consumed.
We just don't know what the reaction's likely to be.
NARRATOR: At Cornell's Department of Food Science, scientist Joe Hotchkiss is an expert
on food safety.