Playing God in the Garden

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  • Playing God in the Garden - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html?pagewanted=5

    Un article de 1998 : la #FDA compte sur la bonne volonté des Monsanto pour évaluer l’innocuité des #OGM, alors que les #Monsanto affirment que leur boulot à eux est de faire du #profit et seulement de faire du profit.

    At the F.D.A., I was referred to James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the agency. I began by asking him why the F.D.A. didn’t consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must — unless it is ’’generally regarded as safe’’ (’’GRAS,’’ in F.D.A. parlance) — be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled.

    ’’That’s easy,’’ Maryanski said. ’’Bt is a pesticide, so it’s exempt’’ from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A.

    Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, I learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992 , when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration’s campaign for ’’regulatory relief.’’

    (...)

    I thought about Maryanski’s candid and wondrous explanations the next time I met Phil Angell [Monsanto’s director of corporate communications], who again cited the critical role of the F.D.A. in assuring Americans that biotech food is safe. But this time he went even further. ’’Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,’’ he said. ’’Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.’

    • Eat at Your Own Risk : Flawed FDA Risk Assessments Strengthen Arguments for Labeling GMOs
      http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/29287-eat-at-your-own-risk-flawed-fda-risk-assessments-strengthen-argumen

      What’s the problem?

      A problem arises when independent researchers appeal to these risk assessments of GE crops, and their subsequent FDA “approval” as testaments to their inherent safety. Further problems occur when independent studies are conducted on various aspects of GMO and GE crop safety, but often after the products are already on the market.

      Too often, the independent nature of these studies is dubious to begin with. Alison Van Eenennaam’s recent literature review, for example, received a great deal of media attention, and though touted as independent, was sponsored by the Kellogg Company which spent $1 million fighting GMO labeling initiatives in California and Washington State in 2013.

      The literature reviewed by Van Eenennaam was a collection of animal feeding studies, conducted by six researchers all of whom work with AgroParisTech, which considers Monsanto a business partner and sponsor of its research.