“Food Evolution” Film Misleads

Take pro-GMO documentary with grain of salt

Reprint of op-ed in the Oregonian

Four decades ago when Monsanto rolled out the product that would become the world’s most-used pesticide, it assured farmers that glyphosate — the main ingredient in Roundup — was safer than table salt.

The new documentary celebrating genetically modified crops, Food Evolution, makes clear many farmers weren’t the only ones who swallowed the pesticide-maker’s happy message, hook, line, and sinker.

During one segment of the much-hyped film showing Aug. 29 and Aug. 31 at OMSI, the camera cuts to a farmer who, as if speaking directly from a Monsanto script, assures viewers the pesticide is less toxic than salt.

For reasons only they can explain, the filmmakers fail to probe the truth of the assertion.

We’re left to guess why the filmmakers chose not to even mention the finding two years ago by a highly respected World Health Organization panel that glyphosate is a probable cause of cancer. Last month, the analysis prompted the state of California to list the pesticide as a known cause of cancer.

Bankrolled by the Institute of Food Technologists, a nonprofit funded mainly by makers of processed foods and food additives, Food Evolution claims to offer viewers an unbiased look at genetic engineering.

To drive home its pro-GE message, the film focuses almost entirely on a small minority of specialty crops, like papayas and bananas, engineered to resist a specific disease. But the film doesn’t say that genetic engineering is used almost exclusively to alter plants so they’ll either produce pesticides or survive being sprayed with pesticides, mainly glyphosate.

A full 90 percent of the nation’s corn, cotton and soybeans — half of all American farmland — are engineered to resist herbicides. But the film fails to make clear that this single fact is directly responsible for the ballooning use of herbicides, especially glyphosate, over the past 20 years.

Nowhere does the film tell us that thanks mainly to GE crops, glyphosate is now so pervasive across U.S. landscapes and waterways it’s found in baby food and products like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

To be clear, I am not opposed to genetic engineering.

During my 10 years as a researcher at Oregon Health and Sciences University, I genetically engineered human cells and many strains of bacteria to explore the genetic basis of disease.

Still, I know enough to not let the possibilities of the technology blind me to its limitations. And you don’t have to be a scientist to see the folly of our dead-end march on the pesticide treadmill.

The mushrooming environmental risks associated with GE crops are highlighted by Monsanto’s recent response to increasing weed-resistance to glyphosate: The company has developed new GE crops that withstand not just glyphosate but another carcinogenic pesticide called dicamba.

Although you won’t hear about it in Food Evolution, Monsanto predicts its latest GE product will trigger an increase in annual dicamba use from around 5 million pounds in 2014 to at least 30 million pounds in the next few years.

And weeds are already developing resistance to dicamba.

Nathan Donley, Ph.D, is a former OHSU cancer researcher who is now a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.