Report Says GMOs Offer No Risk To Human Health
May 24, 2016 A study conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has found no difference in the risks to human health between genetically engineered (GE) crops, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and traditionally bred crops.
The recently released study, also found no conclusive cause-and-effect evidence of environmental problems from GMOs. Although the study did indicate evolved resistance to current GE characteristics is of concern.
The committee recommends new crop varieties should be evaluated and regulated by characteristics instead of by the process in which they were developed. The study’s committee used data logged over the past two decades to evaluate the effects and benefits of current GE crops. The committee also heard from 80 speakers at public meetings, held 15 webinars, and read more than 700 comments from members of the public.
“We dug deeply into the literature to take a fresh look at the data on GE and conventionally bred crops,” Fred Gould, committee chair and co-director of the genetic engineering and society center at North Carolina State University said.
The committee searched all available studies for evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to consumption of foods derived from GE crops, but found none. Studies with animals and research on the chemical composition of GE foods revealed no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health and safety than from eating their non-GE counterparts.
Loading ...The committee indicates some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops have had benefits to human health. In addition, several GE crops are in development that are designed to benefit human health, such as rice with increased beta-carotene content to help prevent blindness and death caused by vitamin A deficiencies in some developing nations.
The use of insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant crops did not reduce the overall diversity of plant and insect life on farms, and sometimes insect-resistant crops resulted in increased insect diversity, the report says. While gene flow – the transfer of genes from a GE crop to a wild relative species – has occurred, no examples have demonstrated an adverse environmental effect from this transfer.
Overall, the committee found no conclusive evidence of GMOs causing environmental problems. However, the complex nature of assessing long-term environmental changes often made it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.
The available evidence indicates that GE soybean, cotton, and maize have generally had favorable economic outcomes for producers who have adopted these crops, but outcomes have varied depending on pest abundance, farming practices, and agricultural infrastructure.
Although GE crops have provided economic benefits to many small-scale farmers in the early years of adoption, enduring and widespread gains will depend on such farmers receiving institutional support, such as access to credit, affordable inputs such as fertilizer, Extension services, and access to profitable local and global markets.
The report says where insect-resistant crops were planted but resistance-management strategies were not followed, damaging levels of resistance evolved in some target insects. If GE crops are to be used sustainably, regulations and incentives are needed so that more integrated and sustainable pest-management approaches become economically feasible.
The committee also found that in many locations some weeds had evolved resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide to which most GE crops were engineered to be resistant. Resistance evolution in weeds could be delayed by the use of integrated weed-management approaches, says the report, which recommends further research to determine better approaches for weed resistance management.
Insect-resistant GE crops have decreased crop loss due to plant pests. However, the committee examined data on overall rates of increase in yields of soybean, cotton, and maize in the U.S. for the decades preceding introduction of GE crops and after their introduction, and there was no evidence that GE crops had changed the rate of increase in yields.
It is feasible that emerging genetic-engineering technologies will speed the rate of increase in yield, but this is not certain, so the committee recommended funding of diverse approaches for increasing and stabilizing crop yield.
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