Gene Regulation Hard to Swallow
Sounding like an Arnie-style cyborg heavy, the gene technology regulator is potentially more scary, more real, and far more our problem than any wired-up Hollywood freak.
Announced quietly last week, the GTR is the Federal government's regulatory attempt to appease the concerns of many scientists, doctors, farmers, fisherfolk, and other food eaters about genetically modified organisms or GMOs.
GMOs, or gene foods, can include foods with enhancing additives like GM rice with extra vitamin A, or processed foods containing GMOs such as GM grains in packaged cereals, or whole foods greatly modified by gene technology such as GM tomatoes which are a startling blend of animal and vegetable genes - so much for vegetarianism.
The immediate reality is that eating gene food could change your DNA, the most basic structure of your human body, in ways even sci-fi freaks have not imagined. The experts admit they do not yet understand all the consequences of gene food on the human genetic code, on us now or for our children and children's children.
Gene technology in itself is not evil, any more than nuclear fission is evil; how it is used determines its good or evil outcomes. This is the growing fear from ordinary people, particularly in Europe, UK, and Japan, where comprehensive bans on gene foods are occurring - that our governments and bureaucrats might roll over for the biotech industry which stands to gain megabucks through gene foods.
With the growing distrust of government and their short term profit oriented decision making, some Australians viewed with cynicism the announcement that the GTR would ensure that only safe uses of gene technology would be permitted in our clean and green land. You can almost hear the “trust us” phrase sliding off the lips of the GTR bureaucrats.
The fears are sharply focussed on the labeling of food - do we have the right to know if the food we are eating contains GMOs? The GTR seems to say: “only sometimes - not when the GMO is either a small proportion of the food, or the GMO additive is only one of many additives in the food.”
Does this mean, to use an unfair and highly emotional example because this is a very very serious issue for the future of all people and the planet, that it is okay to sell boxes of cereal with only a small number or proportion of things that could cause malformed foetuses or leukemia or who knows what aberrations, and not tell us on the packet?
The Feds also praise the GTR as a one stop shop for regulating gene technology. In a climate of public distrust and lack of faith in fair or open government, establishing a single all-powerful government agency increases the fear that short term decisions will prevail.
Sometimes a temporary halt to progress is preferable to bad progress.
Business News 29 June 2000
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