WASHINGTON, DC, December 16, 2004 (ENS) – The Union of Concerned Scientists today called on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to immediately ban the field production of corn, soybeans, and other food crops genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals.
After commissioning a technical analysis, the scientists conclude there is no sure way to keep these biopharm crops from contaminating human food or animal feed.
"It is sobering that drugs and industrial chemicals could have so many routes to the food supply," said Dr. David Andow, editor of the technical report and a professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Minnesota.
"Pollen can be carried to fields with food crops by the wind or insects, seeds lodged in the crevices of harvesting equipment could come loose while harvesting food, and plants can come up as volunteers in the middle of a food crop," Andow said. "To protect the food supply, each potential route has to be blocked."
The organization of scientists recommends that the USDA establish a major campaign to encourage and fund safer alternatives like non-food crops or growing pharmaceutical food crops indoors. "Nobody wants drugs in their cornflakes," said Dr. Margaret Mellon, director of the Food and Environment Program at Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). "Consumers who discover that they have unwittingly ingested drugs in their cereal and taco shells are likely to direct their ire – and their lawsuits – against the companies that sold them the food."
UCS convened a panel of six experts to determine whether it is possible to produce pharmaceuticals in familiar food crops like corn or soybean, the two plants most often used for pharmaceutical production, without contaminating human food or animal feed.
Scientists at Iowa State University, University of Central Florida, University of California at Davis, University of Illinois, and University of Minnesota participated in the analysis and wrote a technical report together with an agricultural management expert based in Hudson, Iowa.
The panel, "acting independently of UCS," the scientists are careful to say, analyzed the current system for growing food and feed grade corn and soybeans and identified many points where drugs and plastics could pass to the food supply if pharmaceutical crops were grown under the same system.
After evaluating various approaches to blocking contamination at those points, the panel concluded that the current corn and soybean production system cannot be used for pharmaceutical corn and soybean in the United States while ensuring virtually no contamination of the food and feed system.
The expert panel said it is theoretically possible for the government to create a new system that would allow corn or soybean to be safely used as pharmaceutical crops.
Establishing that system would require new management systems, new oversight, and new uses of some equipment and technologies – all built from the ground up, said the panel, which strongly encouraged development of such a system. Over the past few years, the federal government has put together what the UCS calls "a piecemeal system, which, while moving in the right direction, is not enough to protect the food supply."
"Consumers and food companies alike will not accept a system that allows drugs to seep into the food supply-even at very low levels," said Dr. Jane Rissler, deputy director of UCS's Food and Environment Program. "But alternatives will not emerge overnight. That's why the USDA must embark immediately on a major campaign to encourage and fund alternatives to the outdoor use of food and feed crops in pharmaceutical and industrial crop production."
An introduction to the technical report and UCS conclusions and recommendations were written by Drs. Mellon and Rissler. "A Growing Concern: Protecting the Food Supply in an Era of Pharmaceutical and Industrial Crops" was released Wednesday as one document.
Find the Union of Concerned Scientists' report online.
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