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Engineering the foodchain: Gyorgy Scrinis asks us to look the gift horse of GM wholefoods squarely in the mouth.

Article Excerpt
In the face of strong opposition from civil society groups, farmers and consumers around the world to genetically engineered (GE) foods, the biotech industry has been hoping that the development and heavy promotion of GE foods with some direct consumer or humanitarian appeal will be a way of gaining public and regulatory acceptance of GE products.

Two GE crops with modified nutritional profiles that are currently being developed and trialled are a low-GI (glycemic index) wheat and pro-Vitamin A-enhanced 'Golden Rice'. While low-GI wheat is a product that would be marketed to diabetics and weight-watchers, Golden Rice has been promoted as a way of addressing the problems of malnutrition in the countries of the global South.

These nutritionally modified GE crops may not only be used to overcome public and farmer resistance to GE foods. They are also likely to be stacked with a number of other GE traits that will benefit the corporations that own and control them. At the same time, these essentially reductive approaches to tackling the problems of over- and under-nutrition may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating the very conditions that give rise to these problems.

Stacking GE Input and Output Traits

The overwhelming majority of commercially grown GE crops and animals today have had some of their 'input' characteristics modified, which means that genetic modification has changed some aspect of the plant or animal's growth patterns or the farming practices and inputs associated with their production. This 'first generation' of GE crops predominantly incorporated one of two input traits: the trait for herbicide tolerance (herbicide-tolerant crops), and the trait for insecticidal toxin production (Bt insecticidal crops). These two applications are about finding new ways of producing and new opportunities for applying pesticides.

GE crops and animals with altered 'output' characteristics, on the other hand, are those whose end-product characteristics have been modified in some way. These in turn can be divided into those output traits which are designed to meet the requirements of the food distribution--processing, retailing and animal-feed industries for example--and those with output traits that may have a more direct appeal to consumers.

While we can distinguish between these various input and output characteristics, these traits will not stand alone but will ultimately be 'stacked' together into multi-trait seed packages. In particular, output traits such as...

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