The subject of genetically modified organisms (or GMOs as they’re commonly called), is coming up more and more as people are questioning the health effects of the technology and its impact on our environment. In last week’s election, Monsanto and other major chemical, seed, and fast-food companies only narrowly defeated a grass-roots effort in California to require the labeling of GMO products, something that is already done throughout Europe and most of the developed world. Meanwhile during the same election, voters in San Juan County Washington passed a ballot initiative to ban the growing of GMOs in the county altogether. The states of Washington, Connecticut, and Minnesota are currently working on their own GMO labeling initiatives, and the movement will continue its momentum, pressuring the FDA for a national label.
Because of the increasing concern over and interest in GMOs, I decided to bop down to central Illinois last Sunday to chat with someone who has considerable insight into GMOs and genetic engineering in general, Herman Brockman. Herman is Distinguished Professor of Genetics at Illinois State University, where he was a professor and researcher for 35 years. Raised in rural Danforth as the third generation of a farm family, Herman continues to farm, working with his son Henry on a farm that provides organic produce to well over a thousand Illinois households (including mine). As a geneticist and farmer, Herman has a unique perspective about genetically engineered crops.
Herman’s daughter, Terra Brockman, also participated in the interview. Terra has worked as a teacher, writer, and editor in Japan and in New York City, and has travelled extensively. She founded an educational, non-profit organization, The Land Connection, in 2001, which is dedicated to preserving farmland, training new farmers, and connecting consumers with local producers. She is author of The Seasons on Henry’s Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm, one of three finalists for the 2010 James Beard Award in the writing and literature category.
Herman Brockman with his wife Marlene (left), and daughter Terra.
The interview was so informative and so many compelling concepts were introduced, that I decided to write up the most salient points, preserving the interview format as much as possible. With this write-up, I invite you to share in the discussion that begins with an overview of the Green Revolution, and delves into the difficulties we face today in feeding the world. It examines GMO technology, and summarizes some of the risks posed by GMOs to our health and environment.
The Green Revolution
Mary: Norman Borlaug led the introduction of high-yield crops, and is often credited with saving over a billion people’s lives worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of this achievement, and he has been called the “Father of the Green Revolution”. Can you talk about that and how it relates to what we now refer to as GMOs?
Herman: It was, as always, a temporary technological fix.
Terra: And it was based on classical breeding.
Herman: That’s right, it had nothing to do with GMOs. That’s important. I’ll give you a real quick history.
History
Herman: The Japanese found a gene that caused dwarfing in wheat. This was significant because previously, attempts to grow wheat crops with fertilizer resulted in strains whose large grains were so heavy they would topple over as the stems were too weak to support the load. Those old strains of wheat did not grow well with fertilizer. Dwarfing was achieved with a single gene mutation. With dwarfing, instead of growing tall with thin stems, the plants were short but had thicker stems, and the new wheat crops responded enormously to fertilizer. The plants could stay upright and hold the heavier, denser grains. The crops also responded more to irrigation. They weren't what you would say intrinsically better; the improvement was only in terms of yield. So of course when they used fertilizer, particularly in those parts of the world such as India where they had not used much fertilizer before, they did get a big boost. They did the same thing in China with rice, with similar results, and it spread throughout Asia. Yes, the Green Revolution worked as a short-term technological fix. It increased the yield a lot, and fed a lot of people.
Mary: Just so I understand, the fertilization and irrigation are valid in dry climates?
Herman: Valid in terms of increased yield, yes. But here’s a book that you need to read: Full Planet, Empty Plates, by Lester R. Brown. He goes through a lot of this about the Green Revolution. The down side of course in terms of water is this: Water scarcity is all over the world. There’s a huge part of India and China and Pakistan, where they’ve been irrigating from what’s called fossil aquifers. You know about the Ogallala aquifer in Texas and Oklahoma? When it’s gone, it’s gone forever. It was deposited a long time ago; it’s not replenished from surface water. It’s the same in huge areas of China, Pakistan, and India, and they’re just about gone. In the places where they’ve been raising wheat like crazy, they won’t be able to, once the aquifers are gone. They’ve been using water for irrigation, and the water level has dropped. They keep dropping the depth of the wells, and the water keeps going down, and it’s not replenished.
But, going back to the Green Revolution, the main point, I think, is this high use of fertilizer. There are three of them of course: nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. They are the three macro nutrients, the ones that are used in huge quantities. Phosphates come out of the ground as rock phosphate. Farmers, including my dad, would simply use the ground-up rock, spreading it on the fields. Organic farmers still occasionally use it. Because it’s not water-soluble, it’s available to the plants only very slowly. At some point they came up with this process of treating the rock phosphate with some acid, getting what they call “super phosphate”. That’s what’s sold to all the industrial farmers in this country, and is exactly what’s used over in Asia on the wheat and the rice. It’s highly water-soluble. So when farmers apply it, it’s immediately available to the plants, just like that. You get a huge response, right away, the year that you put it on. Whereas when the organic farmer puts it on, it lasts for ten years, slowly released each year.
Well, it turns out that this fertilizer still comes from those rock-phosphate deposits, from different parts of the world. Some are in the U.S.; the biggest one is in China. There are estimates as to how long those deposits will last. One estimate is I think from the Arizona State site, and you can argue about which estimate is right: 40 years. 40 years! And it’s gone, forever. There will be no more phosphate to put on the crops. The yields of corn and wheat and rice will plummet. And even before they plummet, the grains will become more expensive, and the poor countries, especially, won’t be able to afford them.
The Green Revolution was a technological fix that yes, saved a lot of people’s lives, but has not proven to be a sustainable solution to world malnutrition, hunger, and starvation. Unintended, but predictable consequences of the Green Revolution include depleted soils, declining surface and subsurface water, lost crop diversity, poisoned ecosystems, farmers indebted by the high costs of external inputs, increased rural-to-urban migration, deforestation, and increased CO2 production from the increased use of fossil fuels. A lot of people who know about these problems say scientists will solve everything; they’ll do something. I don’t know what the heck it would be in this case, but that’s what a lot of people always think.
Mary: Quick question, we have two things here. One was the rock phosphate that comes from the ground, and it’s available slowly, and you also have the industrial method, which is treated with an acid…
Herman: Some of the big companies do something with it to make it water soluble.
Mary. Oh I see, they process it in some way to make it more water soluble; that was the distinction. But they’re still using the same resource.
Herman: That’s right. And I should know the actual chemical name of it, but the jargon for it is “super phosphate”. “Super” because you get the big boost in yield, because the water soluble version is immediately available. Now, interestingly, this also means that you also get more runoff into the rivers, because it’s so highly water soluble, and you get more bloom in the Gulf of Mexico and a bigger dead zone, and more of a problem in our water sources everywhere. Again, people don’t want to look at the ecological and environmental ramifications.
Mary: There are so many things that they don’t look at, and a lot of it is because it’s hidden; it’s not easy to do it, so they’re trusting that our regulators are taking care of that so that they don’t need to. If they see a product at the store and can afford the price, then they think all is well and good. But that’s not actually the case, unfortunately.
Feeding the World
Mary: We do need to feed the world, and the population is growing. What in your opinion are the most important farming techniques that would not only be sustainable, but also result in high enough yields to “feed the world”?
Herman: A lot of international reports call the solution “agro-ecology”.
Terra: If you’re really talking about high-quality, high-nutrition food to feed a community or to feed the world, then it’s [Herman’s son] Henry’s kind of farm. As Henry says, “highly nutritious food comes from a healthy soil that is part of a healthy farm that is part of a healthy environment. This circle of health is generated by farming practices that are based on the goal of protecting and enhancing all life, from the lives of the insects, worms, and arthropods of the vegetable field to the lives of the wildlife and domesticated life who inhabit the environment around the field. On a grander scale, farming should enhance the very life of the planet by protecting a piece of it and by not polluting the planet’s water and air. The basic tenet of this kind of farming is to protect and enhance the tiny lives of the microorganisms of the soil. The teeming bacteria, fungi, and single-celled organisms are what give the soil its health and fertility. Without a healthy soil, there are no healthy plants. Without healthy plants, there are no healthy plant-eaters, be they insects or rabbits, cattle or humans. Without healthy herbivores, there are no healthy flesh-eaters either. Without healthy animals, there can be no healthy ecosystems and without healthy ecosystems, there can be no healthy planet. Synthetic fertilizer, which should be a life-promoting substance, actually deals in death. And it deals in death in many ways, polluting air and water as well as killing soil life and disrupting the soil’s intricate system for naturally providing plants with nitrogen.”[1]
Herman: Wendell Berry says a lot in his essays that a farm should come as close as it can to the way the land was before it was farmed. The first point is that there were always plants and animals. There’s no place in the world where you have an ecosystem with plants alone, or only animals. And then he goes on and talks about how you can’t completely achieve that ideal, because you’re cultivating some of it. But you can have border areas of trees and shrubs and things, and you have rotations. You use animal manure, and so on. He’s absolutely right.
Terra: And it’s important to have local adaptation. What we’re trying to do in the industrial system is completely wrong. They’re trying to use a factory model system to impose the same techniques everywhere, because that’s how a large corporation can make a lot of money, by selling the same thing every year, producing it in the same way.
Herman: But this business of feeding the world. If we really want to feed the world, we should follow all these U.N. and all the other international reports, which all say the way to do it is to help all these people, in Africa, and Asia, and so on, raise their own food in a sustainable way, not by industrial farming. They all come to the same conclusion. But the large companies can’t make money on that. They can’t sell fertilizer, they can’t sell pesticides, and they can’t sell their GMOs. But the sustainable way is the only way that will work. All those reports come to the same conclusion.
Terra: There are some good organizations that we know of that are trying to do this, trying to help with sustainable diversification, integrated ecological farming in different countries around the world. And it does work better. You can get a lot more food out of a small amount of land by doing an integrated, bio-diverse system. I have a friend who goes all around the world with an organization called Nourishing the Planet.
Herman: It’s exactly how it works for Henry. Per acre, he does much more to feed the people of Illinois, than an acre of corn or an acre of soybeans, way more! The principle that Terra just mentioned in those other countries is exactly the same! The big industrial concerns want to take all that land away from them and put it into soybeans. That won’t feed more people, it feeds less people. And a consequence of that is that there’s no place for the people to live.
Terra: Or eat, anymore. They go to cities; they live in slums.
Herman: It’s just totally misdirected. And my point is, this isn’t just my opinion, it’s in these reports that have upwards of 300 references each, of peer-reviewed papers. If all those experts, all over the world (including the U.N.), say that’s the case, I think they’re right. But companies can’t make money doing that, so they pursue their own unsustainable direction.
Mary: What about those parts of the world where the soil isn’t as fertile as what we have in the Midwest, where they have more severe problems with pests and things like that?
Herman: They still don’t have to use industrial farming.
Mary: Is there a way to improve soil that’s infertile and sandy?
Herman: Sure! It takes time, but what you do is you integrate animals and plants on the same farm. The way it was always done before was by using human waste, and the waste from animals, to get their fertility. There are parts of the world where they use legume trees to fix nitrogen. And they grow vegetable crops next to these trees. They use the leaves of the branches from some of these trees to feed a goat, to give them some milk. It’s very difficult to have a rice patch all by itself, and have it be sustainable, without commercial fertilizer. But if you have a highly diversified, integrated animal-plant community, you will be successful. That’s the way it used to be in the Midwest. Every farm had cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, trees.
Terra: With the industrial model of mono cropping, yes, you do need the fertilizers and all the other things.
Herman: The same thing is true in Illinois. There are farmers now that don’t even do corn-soybean rotation. They raise continuous corn, year after year after year. That works for them only because of the high fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Because they don’t rotate, they have a lot of fungal problems, and a lot of insects, so if they didn’t put on all that nitrogen/N-P-K, their soil fertility would become a problem, too. But again, it’s a temporary technological fix, of pouring the fertilizer and pesticides on. Even when you have some of the best soil in the world, you just keep depleting it by raising corn. The corn uses those things. The yield’s going to go down if you don’t keep putting the fertilizer on every year. Rotation solves those problems without fertilizer and pesticides.
Synthetic Biology
Mary: Herman, as a geneticist, what is your view on synthetic biology in general?
Herman: We need to use the precautionary principle here. I think you need to exercise that in every case, and give a lot of thought to it. I’m not going to say everything is bad. Probably the classic example is that of Craig Venter, who is a genius. When NIH scientists were sequencing the human genome for the first time, he came up independently with an alternative methodology, and beat them, that’s how brilliant he is. He took the bacterium with the smallest genome, the smallest number of base pairs of DNA, and sequenced it. And then instead of using the normal methods of cell duplication, he started from scratch, and re-created that same sequence using individual nucleotides. Then he inserted the result into a bacterial cell that had all the machinery for doing everything else, but had no DNA in it until he inserted the new strand. And, the cell functioned as you would expect it to. Venter now has a huge lab of hundreds of people trying to do all kinds of things, including trying to use algae to make fuel.
That knowledge opens the door to altering any strand of DNA. You can make another strand with any base pair or pairs. You can change any gene. You can quickly make hundreds if you want to, thousands, probably, of variants of that original strain. And then find out what happens to the cell as a consequence.
So that’s what I think is a prime example of synthetic biology.
GMOs are subtly different. GMO means that you are using trans-genes, a gene from a different species. Instead of using the term “genetic modification,” I prefer to talk about transgenic plants. “GMO” is a term that is established in popular literature, so it’s probably here to stay, but you need to remind people that it really means transgenic.
Genetic Modification is NOT the Same as Breeding.
Mary: I heard at a party that using GMOs is no different than breeding, it’s just faster. How would you respond to a statement like that?
Herman: Total nonsense. The first point is: there’s a transgene from a different species. In traditional breeding, you never have that.
The definition of a species is that they are a group of animals or plants that breed among themselves. Like everything in science, there are exceptions. But in general, you can’t breed across species.
Herman: The second point is the mutations. GMO researchers start with a particular variety of corn that doesn’t have a transgene in it, and they want to put, say, a Bt toxin gene in it. They start with cells, not with a plant. A long time ago, someone figured out how to derive a carrot plant on a petri plate from single cells of a carrot. It’s like human stem cells that are pluripotent. They have techniques now where you can take the cell, and under appropriate culture conditions, it will regenerate into a plant. So, they start with those cells, and put the transgene that has the Bt toxin into what they call a vector, such as a virus, or now more commonly, they just take the plain piece of DNA with the gene, and they use a gene gun to blast it through the cell membrane into the cell. One way or another they put multiple copies of the gene into the cell. The proponents say that it’s a very precise process, where the one gene just goes in. But multiple copies are inserted at random in the genome, sometimes right in the middle of a functional gene. The process is not precise at all.
Herman: Finally, the process of culturing those cells is not a normal biological situation. For reasons that no one understands exactly, hundreds to thousands of mutations occur throughout the genome, due to the process itself of making a GMO. I have never seen any pro-GMO person admit to that. Rather, they say, it’s a very precise thing, where you just take this gene and insert it in there. More and more people think that some health problems are related to GMOs. It is very seldom that random mutations will give a benefit to the organism. It’s well known by all geneticists that mutations in an organism are going to, in general, be adverse to the fitness of the organism. People that are involved in this believe that most adverse effects, if any, are coming from all of these other changes, not from the transgene itself. The process just wrecks the genome.
Mary: How is this different from the very precise methodology used by Craig Venter in his synthetic reproduction of the DNA strand? You would think that, with such technology available, more precise control would be possible.
Herman: There’s no specificity. There is a process in all cells known as genetic recombination. When you put DNA in the cell and it happens to lie next to a chromosome; basically it gets inserted by an enzyme into the chromosome by crossing over.
Terra: The impression they want to give you is that it’s a precise process, and you’ll see it on many, many websites. They try to give the impression that it’s like some surgical procedure where you insert the gene precisely in this place, and that’s just not true. But the imagery and the words that they tend to use to explain GMOs give the impression of precision. The accurate image is the one which is blasting multiple copies in with the gene gun. Some take, some don’t. . .
Herman: Then you have that cell, with a bunch of copies of the Bt gene, in the genome. The researchers culture that up and get a plant. Once you get that plant, you can propagate it, it will make seed, and you can cross it to other plants. Hundreds to thousands of mutations occur due to the insertion of the gene, and due to the entire process of making the GMO.[2]
GMO Problems
Mary: What do you think are the most serious problems associated with GMOs?
Herman: The biggest problem is the fact that GMOs have been very little studied, and even less peer-reviewed. We simply don’t know all of the ramifications! Yet GMOs are now ubiquitous in our food supply. There are tremendous risks. The classic example is the Bt toxin. When you eat Bt sweet corn, you’re eating the Bt toxin. The corn itself is an insecticide! They brag that it reduces and prevents below-ground and above-ground insects, so by definition, it’s an insecticide.
Terra: Roundup, which is an herbicide, is the whole reason we really got going with GMOs. The seed companies were able to develop soybean and corn seeds which were tolerant of Roundup. So now farmers can apply 10-12 times as much Roundup as they used to without risk of damaging the crop, and they do so in order to ensure all the weeds are killed.
Herman: That’s Round-up Ready, and they do it for everything: corn, soybeans, canola, alfalfa, even for the grasses they use on the greens of golf courses. Anything they can think of, they put that Roundup-Ready gene into it and try to sell it. Thus they make money in two ways: first, by selling the Roundup, and second, by selling the Roundup-Ready seeds.
And now, of course, as you probably already know, there are Roundup resistant weeds. This is an enormous problem, especially in cotton. In some places they’ve had to abandon planting cotton altogether, because of the weeds. There are about three species of weeds that grow up to ten feet tall with stems an inch or two in diameter, and they’re resistant. And so do you know what GMO companies have done? They now have a gene that makes the plants resistant to 2,4-D. That’s an older, very toxic herbicide that was part of Agent Orange. So now, farmers will buy this seed that is resistant to both Roundup and 2,4-D, because they can’t use just Roundup any more. The company can now charge even more for the seed, and they charge for two herbicides.
Terra: They have a patented blend now of the two, so people can buy their proprietary toxic cocktail, even more toxic now than the one by itself. 2,4-D was seldom used by farmers because it’s so toxic, but now they’re saying they must use it to combat the super weeds. It’s a vicious cycle, a chemical treadmill. As soon as you use one thing, nature adapts and continually evolves things that can resist; nature does that! Nature will always catch up in some way or another.
Herman: It’s just another technological fix. All of these things are technological fixes which ultimately fail. Phosphate fertilizer will fail because we’re going to run out. Roundup will fail because the weeds become resistant. Antibiotic use in animals in confined feeding is failing because the bacteria develop resistance. In the Green Revolution and with every one of these solutions, if you think about it long enough, you will conclude that yes, it worked for a while as a technological fix, but ultimately, it will fail. There are only so many genes they can put in for herbicide resistance, and the weeds will just keep evolving. Now they’re starting to find resistance of rootworms to the Bt toxin. Every one of those pests that the Bt toxin is toxic to will eventually evolve resistances.
Is All GMO Technology Bad?
Mary: Is there a use of GMOs that would be acceptable?
Herman: There are only two major GMOs in the U.S., the Roundup-Ready, and the Bt toxin. They keep claiming that they’re going to have drought-resistant GMOs, and GMOs with improved nutritional value. But as far as I know they haven’t come out with them.
Mary: Coming back to the synthetic biology subject, there is an example of insulin that is synthetically produced.
Terra: That’s a completely different thing than GMOs. They do try to talk about them in the same breath, and I think it should be separated. I don’t see any problem with getting insulin through genetic modification.
Herman: They simply took the human gene that makes insulin, and cloned it into a bacterium. They can grow bacteria in huge vats, producing huge amounts of the insulin. Before that, it all came from the pancreas of pigs. The insulin from the pancreas of pigs is similar, but not identical to that of humans. The insulin produced from the cloned human gene in bacteria is not just similar, but is identical to insulin made by the human pancreas. I would embrace that instantly.
Terra: It’s too bad that they do try to mix these up and say that they’re all the same, all under one umbrella, all good. But the whole agricultural system in the U.S. using GMOs is very different from what Dad just described as this different way of making insulin.
Herman: They put the human gene into the bacteria, so by definition, it’s a transgene. You have a transgenic organism in the bacteria. But the purpose is totally different; it’s not out in the environment.
Terra: It’s not polluting our well water, and air.
Herman: It’s not causing the use of more Roundup; it has nothing to do with an environmental impact of our soil, air, and water. So if there is a truly useful purpose and the GMOs are tested thoroughly for safety, perhaps they could do some good. But in agriculture, traditional plant breeding works – use that!
Mary: What about the use of GMO corn for ethanol and products (like disposable plates and cups) that are traditionally made from paper or plastic?
Herman: Feed the world, first! How much of the USDA food plate is reserved for corn products, or even corn-fed meat? Essentially nothing. The food plate is fruit and vegetables, whole-grains and protein; we ought to be growing more of those.
Terra: The point also about all these other uses for corn has been because we’ve had a surplus. I would say we could and should have recyclable paper and plastic-like products, but they should be made of something that isn’t also a food item; in other words, grass, or bamboo. It’s too bad that corn, which is a very high-calorie product that could be a good source of food for people is being made into non-food products.
Herman: They talk about feeding the world with the corn, and then we’re burning it! 90% goes to feed animals and to make ethanol. Only 10% is used for “food”.
Terra: Meaning corn syrup!
Herman: I think we need to get away from this crazy mindset that farmers should be growing more and more corn, getting higher and higher yields of corn.
Regulating Synthetic Biology
Mary: How should society approach the growth of synthetic biology? Should it be regulated, and if so, how?
Herman: Companies should have to publish their data. They currently submit it to the agencies, and it never sees the light of day. It should be submitted to journals so that it gets peer reviewed. Peer review means that the paper is sent out to at least two scientists in the field. They read it and send it back to the editor for comments. There’s a place where you say whether you reject it and you have to tell why, or accept, or accept with modification, and you tell what you think should have to be modified. Monsanto doesn’t publish in the peer reviewed journals. None of the companies that make the GMOs do that.
Concluding Recommendations About GMOs From Herman
· Follow the money: Don’t accept any non-peer-reviewed information (propaganda) from any entity that makes money, e.g. Monsanto. Or from “think tanks” etc., that they fund. In fact, now we must even be careful of universities, because Monsanto etc. have infiltrated them.
· Don’t use “traditional” agriculture or “modern” agriculture as synonyms for industrial agriculture. If any agriculture deserves the “traditional” label, it is organic.
· GMOs are one piece of industrial agriculture. If you buy into GMOs, you buy all of the unsustainability of industrial agriculture: synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, mono- or bi-culture (lack of biological diversity), poor biological health and physical structure of soil, more use of fossil fuels, more environmental contamination from pesticides and fertilizers, non-integration of crops and animals on the same farm.
· Pesticides is an umbrella term that includes insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, nematocides, bacteriacides (antibiotics), antiviral agents, rodenticides, and …
· When someone makes a claim that says GMO corn is “safe” for animal (including human) consumption, say, “Give me the peer-reviewed papers that support your statement.”
· I would restrict all discussion to peer-reviewed literature (and reviews that cite them), at least in the final analysis.
Suggested Reading
· Failure to Yield: A report that closely evaluates the overall effect genetic engineering has had on crop yields in relation to other agricultural technologies: http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/failure-to-yield.html
· USDA report: The First Decade of Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-information-bulletin/eib11.aspx
· Seeds of doubt: North American Farmers’ Experiences of GM Crops: http://www.soilassociation.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=6lQJZLPalqo%3d&tabid=390
· Agriculture at a Crossroads: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) comprehensive evaluation of world agriculture. This was a three-year collaborative effort with 900 participants and 110 countries, and was co-sponsored by major organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, UNESCO, and WHO. The behemoth effort evaluated the last 50 years of agriculture, and prescribed methods that are needed now to meet the development and sustainability goals of reducing hunger and poverty, improving nutrition, health and rural livelihoods, and facilitating social and environmental sustainability: http://www.agassessment.org/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads_Global%20Report%20(English).pdf
· Shorter summaries of the above report may be found here: http://www.agassessment.org/
· Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply: A summary of studies on farming systems around the world that demonstrates that green and animal manures employed in organic agriculture can produce enough fixed nitrogen to support high crop yields: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1091304
· Letter to UK MP on GMOs: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Letter_to_Hilary_Benn_MP_on_GMOs.php
· Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials: http://www.mindfully.org/GE/RRS-Yield-Drag.htm
· Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel: http://rajpatel.org/2009/10/27/stuffed-and-starved/
· Increasing Cropping System Diversity Balances Productivity, Profitability and Environmental Health: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047149
[1] Brockman, Henry, Organic Matters, published 2001.
[2] See The Mutational Consequences of Plant Transformation, by Jonathan R. Latham, Allison K. Wilson, and Ricarda A. Steinbrecher. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology (Hindawi Publishing Corporation), volume 2006, article ID 25376, pages 1-7, DOI 10.1155/JBB/2006/25376.
