Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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WA Government Swallows Carmen’s Large Hook

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My 16 year old daughter told me some weeks ago that she had just heard on local FM radio that “the government” was going to fund an independent assessment into the safety of GM food.

What she didn’t know was that the WA government is going to funding a known anti-GM activist with no laboratories or expertise to undertake studies that require both expert knowledge and facilities.

Dr Rick Roush an Australian based at the University of California was one of several signatories to the following letter of protest sent to the Premier of Western Australia on 5th December:

The Hon Dr Geoff Gallop, BEc MA MPhil DPhil MLA

Dear Premier Gallop,

We were shocked and disappointed to see media reports that Agriculture Minister Kim Chance will fund a long-term animal feeding trial with the Institute for Health and Environmental Research in Adelaide. We note that Mr. Chance’s website confirms your government will fund an “independent’ study to gain data on the safety or otherwise of GM food crops.

There is universal support among all major scientific societies around the world for the safety of the regulatory system and all currently registered GM foods. Contrary to the assertions in Mr. Chance’s media release, these current food assessments (including those by Food Standards Australia New Zealand) do actively and intensively review the possibility that “when a gene is taken out of one organism and put into another, the protein expressed by that gene may be different.”

There is substantial scientific evidence confirming the safety of currently approved biotech crops, and absent new questions, there is little or no basis for further animal studies. Nobody, of course, will object to properly conducted further studies if your government wishes to fund them. Our concern is that Mr. Chance has apparently decided to award funds for this research to a group with a well-known agenda against GM crops, and worse, apparently with no technical expertise, no reputable scientific track record and no facilities suitable for conducting the study!

In his media release, Mr. Chance expressed concern that adverse effects from a novel type of GM pea “had only come to light recently, despite 10 years of research and development.” In fact, the pea project has been underway for ten years precisely because GM research is undertaken in great detail and products are not rushed to market. Mr. Chance seems unaware that CSIRO has been conducting other safety tests on this crop for a number of years, including some in the 1990s in collaboration with anti-GM critic Arpad Pusztai; the detrimental effects found were minimal (citation below). The facts remain both that the current review process did find the problems in the GM peas and that no foods with this specific insecticide resistance gene are grown anywhere in the world other than in well-controlled, small-scale experiments.

Most of us became aware of the Institute for Health and Environmental Research (SA) in 2003, when their leading figure, Dr. Judy Carmen, toured around with UK activist Dr Mae-Wan Ho to speak against GM crops and food safety. Ho has a relentlessly anti-science agenda against GM crops (and modern Darwinian theory).

The Institute for Health and Environmental Research seems to consist of two other people in addition to Carmen, and a website. None of them have scientific records in conducting or analyzing long term feeding studies, certainly no refereed papers in this area (or many in any other area of science), which is the usual measure of scientific quality.
Moreoever, the bios on the IHER website reveal the clear anti-biotech bias of all three.

We are sure that there are far better qualified and unprejudiced scientists in Australia, including in Western Australia, who could carry out this research. We are therefore alarmed at an apparent lack of adherence to scientific norms in awarding this project to the Institute for Health and Environmental Research. Following reports that Mr. Chance has previously declared that he would not eat GM food, we are deeply disturbed about the objectivity of the agenda being pursued by Mr.
Chance.

In sum, Mr. Chance’s decision gives us great concern for the respect your government shows for scientific enquiry, peer review, international standards, and the processes of competitively awarding research funds.
We look forward to hearing from you that proper, internationally upheld standards will be observed in awarding this research competitively to qualified researchers, if the research is to be undertaken at all.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Klaus Ammann, Honorary Professor University of Bern, Director of the Bern Botanic Garden

Professor Bruce M. Chassy, Campus Biotechnology Center, University of Illinois, Urbana

Professor Bruce D. Hammock, Distinguished Professor of Entomology & Cancer Research Center, University of California, Davis

Dr. Martina Newell-McGloughlin, Director University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program, and Co-Director NIH Training Program in Biomolecular Technology

Professor Vivian Moses, CropGen, London

Dr. Alan McHughen, Biotechnology Specialist University of California, Riverside

Dr. Drew L. Kershen, Earl Sneed Centennial Professor of Law, University of Oklahoma

Dr. Tom DeGregori , Professor of Economics, University of Houston

Dr. Alex Avery, Director of Research, Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute

Dr. Rick Roush, Director of University of California Integrated Pest Management and Sustainable Agriculture Programs

Dr. Henry Miller, MD, Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University [Founding director of the U.S. FDA’s Office of Biotechnology,1989-1993]

Dr. Piero Morandini, Department of Biology, University of Milan

Professor C. S. Prakash, Director, Center for Plant Biotechnology Research, Tuskegee University

Reference Cited

Pusztai A, Grant G, Bardocz S, Alonso R, Chrispeels MJ, Schroeder HE, Tabe LM, Higgins TJV. Expression of the insecticidal bean alpha-amylase inhibitor transgene has minimal detrimental effect on the nutritional value of peas fed to rats at 30% of the diet. J Nutr 1999; 129: 1597-603. end of letter

I worry, given the extent to which government and the media are so quick to embrace pseudo-environmental causes in the name of ‘independent’ science.

Go Wikipedia

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A few weeks ago I loaded my many volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica into my mother’s car and suggested she flog them at her church fete. I gather they didn’t sell, but Dad has kept them.

I used to tell my 16 year old daughter to check The Encyclopadeia, but more recently have just suggested she search Wikipaedia on the internet. I had been feeling a bit guilty, but given today’s article in The Australian – well I feel vindicated.

Wikipaedia takes up a lot less room in a small house than the Britannicas!

The article in The Australia reads along the following lines:

PARIS (AFP) – The free Internet encyclopaedia Wikipaedia, recently embroiled in controversy over a fake entry, reportedly comes close in accuracy to the paid-for Encyclopaedia Britannica in its articles on science.

In a report published in this Thursday’s issue, the British journal Nature says it gave independent reviewers 42 pairs of articles from both encyclopaedias, covering subjects that ranged from Archimedes’ Principle and Dolly the Sheep to field-effect transistors and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The reviewers were not told which article came from where, and were asked to check the entries for accuracy.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia,” Nature reports.

“But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

Nature says “Britannica’s advantage (over Wikipedia) may not be great” when it comes to science, and comments that this result is “surprising” given the eclectic way that Wikipedia’s articles are written.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is an “open source” of information that asks its users to write, edit and update entries.

In contrast to traditional encyclopaedias, there is no hierarchy of experts through which material is vetted before being accepted for publication. Any user can contribute.

Wikipedia has more than two million articles, including over 850,000 in English. It has sites in 200 languages, 10 with more than 50,000 articles — in English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish.

The US survey firm Nielsen/Netratings found that Wikipedia had more than 12.7 million US users in September, up nearly 300 percent from a year ago. It was ranked as the 35th most popular global website by Alexa.com.

Wikipedia came under criticism when a spoof biography was posted on its site this year purporting to be that of John Siegenthaler, a retired journalist who was an aide in the 1960s to attorney general Robert Kennedy.

The joke entry said: “For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

Wikipedia says it has tightened up procedures in an effort to avoid further abuse, although its policy of open sourcing will not be changed.

Nature says that the science reviewers’ main criticism of Wikipedia was that its articles were often poorly structured and confused, and gave undue prominence to controversial theories.

People and National Parks: Are They Compatible?

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The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That’s an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa writes Mark Dowie in the latest issue of Orion magazine.

Mark writes that he was curious about “this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people” and visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories he heard.

Maasai.jpg

He concludes:

“Many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake – not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.

More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan – particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.

I don’t think it is as simple as Mark suggests.

There are instances where even recent arrivals, for example foresters in the Pilliga-Goonoo region of north west New South Wales, have been excluded from forest areas they were sustainably harvesting. While there are indigenous groups who have access to, for example, power boats for hunting dugongs, and appear to be harvesting beyond the sustainable capacity of these populations.

I have some sympathy for Duke University’s John Terborgh position which is, “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says.

According to Mark Dowie, John Terborgh bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer.

I hope that the Machiguenga people do acquire guns and motorboats. I don’t suggest that this be a reason for preventing their access to Manu National Park, but there will be a need to determine quota for sustainable harvest. And the only way to be sure any system is working is to have a proper monitoring program in place.

What Was Special About 2005?

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According to Foreign Policy magazine the world will remember 2005 for its natural disasters, the passing of a pope, and the ongoing insurgency in Iraq.

In terms of environmental issues that “fell through the cracks” the magazine focused on reduced greenhouse emission in the US and peak oil.

Reduced emissions in the US came in as no. 4 in terms of overall issues, it was reported as follows:

When it comes to emitting greenhouse gases, the United States is usually seen as the bad guy, content to belch out fumes at its pleasure. But reports released in late November show that U.S. emissions have fallen for the first time in more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2003, U.S. emissions fell by 0.8 percent. By contrast, global goody-two-shoes Canada saw a 24.2 percent increase in 2003 from its 1990 levels. Even the sanctimonious Europeans are set to miss their Kyoto targets by 6.4 percent. Uncle Sam’s emissions dropped partly because U.S. firms introduced clean coal technologies and reduced their methane emissions. So, is the United States turning into the Green Giant? Hardly. The most important reason for its drop in emissions was the migration of heavy manufacturing to industrializing countries such as China, the world’s second-biggest emitter.

At number nine was a peak oils story, reported as follows:

With oil prices soaring this year, the debate over the future of this precious commodity heated up. But lost in the mix was ExxonMobil’s report The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View. The total oil output of non-OPEC producers, according to ExxonMobil’s projection, will peak around 2010, after which OPEC will have to add more than 1 million barrels per day, every year, to keep up with world demand by 2030. “In 2003, Algeria produced 1.1 million barrels per day,” wrote energy analyst Alfred J. Cavallo in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “A new Algeria would need to be brought on line in the Persian Gulf each and every year beyond 2010 just to keep up with the projected increase in demand.” That’s no easy prospect. To make matters worse, most OPEC countries, including vital “swing producer” Saudi Arabia, do not allow independent audits of their oil reserves, so we may have even less warning of any future shortfalls. Under OPEC’s quota system, members have every incentive to inflate their reserve figures: The more they claim to have, the more they can sell. The price of a barrel of black gold just went up-again.

So few Australian environmental stories are properly reported in the mainstream media. But which is the really big one that “fell through the cracks”?