These GMO products aren’t limited to corn and soy – GMO potatoes and salmon are already being raised, and GMO apples are poised for approval. GMO wheat has not been approved, but has already entered the food supply in the US. I have also read recently of a new GMO rice. High-fructose corn syrup is widely used as a sweetener in everything from soft drinks to pancake syrup in the US, and other corn and soy products can be found in almost any processed food.

If the food industry simply labeled GMO products universally, as they do for export to some 64 countries (even China), people could choose to avoid them. I would like to see CR join those countries, which would not be burdensome to food manufacturers because they already label GMOs for several other Latin American countries. The fact that the industry refuses to be honest with consumers unless forced to do so is what really gets to me.

My sense as a science outsider, and I wonder if you agree, is that the fundamental problems are political and economic, not scientific. I think we want some pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, as well as some GMOs, insofar as there has been sufficient unbiased research to suggest that the yield/risk tradeoff is beneficial in a given case. Starvation and malnutrition aren’t desirable goals either. The problem however is that the outfits doing the research and promoting the products are hardly unbiased, but are rather out to make a buck, and there’s a lot of at least anecdotal evidence of these corporations tweaking and even falsifying the evidence. The responsibility for assessing the innovations therefore falls on public entities like the Ministry of Agriculture, which raises the questions of (1) whether they are competent and (2) whether they are honest. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they are understaffed and overworked as well frankly tempted by bribes. At minimum, the information they receive probably comes mostly from industry representatives. In all, we may have a situation in which the fox is guarding the hen house.

My concern at this point in CR is that I’m not sure many of the activists opposing GMOs know the science any better than I do. (One of my bartenders is an agronomy major at UCR and swears that many of the opponents of GMOs are science illiterates.) It’s no better to have unformed public opinion direct public policy than it is for corporations to direct it. What we need, I think, is a good committee of independent scientists to assess the evidence on a case-by-case basis.

Of course, with you I prefer proceeding very slowly. Too many of these kinds of innovations are introduced too quickly, IMO, and only later do we discover that the introduction was a bad call. Plus, CR isn’t confronting the kind of famine situation that would justify taking unnecessary risks. There’s no reason to rush this stuff. However, I hate to see an overreaction in the other direction. Ideally the policy decisions will be made based upon the science rather than profits or public sentiment.

Ironically, while most cantons in CR have now resolved to be GMO-free, most are probably already home to GMOs. Almost all Hawaiian papayas have been GMOs for twenty years or longer (they made the genetic change to save the industry from a fungus). As many of us have papaya plants grown from these seeds, many of our local papayas are GMOs. While I know of no health problems related to GMO papayas, there are probably local growers who are now violating their cantons’ positions.

My bottom line is that much more research is required to prove GMOs to be safe and nutritious before they should be in the food supply. Some, like papayas, are probably OK, but we simply do not know enough. Likewise, chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers need to be tested thoroughly before they should be put into wide use. New research shows that our DNA “hangs on to” chemicals to which our grandparents were exposed. If chemical contaminants can affect later generations, I am concerned for not only the health of my grandchildren but also for their grandchildren. I strongly suspect that we, and our parents, have cursed all future generations.