How Not to Label Biotech Foods: Should Foods Made From Genetically Modified Plants or Animals Be Specially Labeled?
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When Californians go to the polls this November, one of the ballot initiatives they will vote on will be the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act, a proposed law that would require that foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) be specially labeled. This move for mandatory labeling is just the latest development in the ongoing controversy over the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods.
Proponents of the technology argue that creating GM plants and animals for human consumption is essentially no different from the selective breeding that farmers have carried out for millennia, which resulted in accumulated genetic changes over time. But the methods used to create today’s genetically modified organisms allow for more rapid and dramatic changes. Modern GMOs are often created using recombinant DNA techniques in which an organism’s genes are directly altered, often by inserting DNA fragments from other organisms. This approach offers much greater precision than selective breeding, removing the requirement of several generations of breeding for a particular trait to become widespread in a population. It also allows for the direct addition to an organism of novel traits that do not occur naturally in the species.
Critics cite concerns like the potential for loss of biodiversity, and fear that the widespread use of recombinant DNA techniques in agriculture represents a vast and as yet unproven experiment with uncertain consequences for human health and the environment. There are a few known cases of unintended negative consequences resulting from the use of GMOs: for example, the use of crops genetically engineered to be resistant to the powerful herbicide Roundup may have accelerated the emergence of weeds that are also resistant, and are spreading in the wild, in some cases creating a sort of war of attrition in which farmers must use additional herbicides or revert to manually removing the weeds. Although there is no evidence that these or any other GMOs have had adverse impacts on human health or safety — and indeed, the National Academies have repeatedly concluded that GM techniques pose no known unique risks to human health as compared to more traditional plant-breeding methods — some critics contend that GM foods should be considered unsafe for human consumption until proven otherwise, and others fear the possibilities of genetically modified organisms being released into the wild and damaging ecosystems, and believe they should not be permitted at all.