This impressive and meaty volume, properties reflected both in its price and weight (literally so: it tipped this reviewer’s kitchen scales at 3 lbs 5-7/8 oz, or 1,526 g on the other setting, too heavy, therefore, for bed-time reading), represents the collected outcome of the EU-funded “Co-Extra” project, an acronym for the “Co-Existence and Traceability” in the subtitle. The project ran from 2005–2009, comprising, we are told, 53 partners from 18 countries (including Argentina, Brazil and Russia), involving more than 200 scientists and having a budget of €24 million. It was hardly a trivial exercise, one devoted entirely to the problems of distinguishing between two aspects of crops and their products which were essentially indistinguishable by consumers unless they were labelled which, of course in Europe, they were and are. And with that labelling came the entire raison d’être for the study. For, if you label, you need to make sure, don’t you? That you don’t mix things up.
In the European Union nations, and other countries including Japan, Australia and Malaysia, it is a legal requirement that food products containing genetically modified organism (GMO) materials are labelled as such in order that customers may make informed purchasing decisions. For manufacturers and consumers to be confident about these assertions, systems must be in place along the entire food chain which supports the co-existence of GM and non GM materials whilst maintaining a strict segregation between the two. The objective of this four year project was thus to provide practical tools and methods for implementing co-existence that would enable the co-existence of genetically modified (GM) and non-GM crops, enable the segregation and tracing of genetically modified organism (GMO) materials and derived products along the food and feed chains, and anticipate the future expansion of the use of GMOs
The project was designed to foster a robustly science-based debate amongst all of the stakeholders involved in the food and feed chains, and the tools were to be assessed not only from a technical point of view but with regard to the economic and legal aspects. The project also undertook to survey the GMO-related legal regimes and practices that exist in and beyond the EU. This book therefore reports on the practical tools and methods available to implement the co-existence and traceability of GM and non-GM food materials along the entire food and feed chains, as demanded by consumers and by legislation in force in the EU and elsewhere. GM and Non-GM Food Supply Chains is intended to be a source of valuable information for food manufacturers, food research institutions and regulatory bodies internationally.Citation1
As the Foreword notes, the programme embraced technical, legal and socio-economic issues, from seed production including the long-term availability of non-GM varieties, to the economic costs of traceability, pollen flow and the detection of GMOs. This book offers an oversight of the whole enterprise.
There is so much material provided that merely listing the chapter titles would take up almost all the space of a normal review. There are 32 of them in eight sections, in summary:
(1) Introduction (1 chapter);
(2) Managing gene flow (6 chapters);
(3) Co-existence in food and feed supply chains (7 chapters);
(4) Traceability and controls in food and feed supply chains (7 chapters);
(5) Legal regimes, liability and redress issues (3 chapters);
(6) Data integration and DSS (Decision Support System) (1 chapter);
(7) Related issues (6 chapters);
(8) Conclusion (1 chapter).
While this compendium hardly lends itself to being read cover-to-cover, it does constitute an extremely valuable sourcebook for the in-depth exploration of co-existence and traceability. Each of the individual chapters is extensively referenced and the volume as a whole has 20-page index so that finding topics among the mass of material available is not difficult. It is not a book for someone looking for a broad overview of the field but, If co-existence and traceability are your interests, this is a book you need to have on your shelves.
In a short review it is clearly impossible to do justice to the publication as a whole so, as an indicator of interest and quality, consider in a little detail just some of Part 3 which comprises:
Chapter 8: Consumers’ Opinions and Attitudes Towards Co-Existence of GM and Non-GM Food Products;
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Collection Strategies for landscape and Product Flow Management;
Chapter 10: Empirical Analysis of Co-Existence in Commodity Supply Chains
Chapter 11: Modelling and Assessing the Impacts of the Co-Existence Between GM and non-GM Supply Chains: The Starch Maize Supply Chain Example
Chapter 12: Costs of Segregation and Traceability between GM and Non-GM Supply Chains of Single Crop and Compound Food/Feed Products
Chapter 13: Labelling and Co-Existence Regulation of GMOs and Non-GMOs: An Economic Perspective
Chapter 14: Co-Existence and Traceability in Supply Chains: A Case Study on Belgian Compound Feed
Let us take a look, for example, at Chapter 8. The mathematics of the methodology fall rather beyond the capabilities of this reviewer who accordingly went for preference to the results of consumer surveys based, as so often on consumer questionnaires but also including “choice experiments”. The authors of that particular study concluded that “respondents in all study countries, on average overwhelmingly preferred conventional food over GM food, consistent with other studies although Spanish consumers were willing to pay a premium for GM corn-flakes and tomatoes with associated health benefits” (just like Australians, it seems).
The trouble is, of course, that surveys reveal the answers people give to the specific questions posed, while choice “experiments” suffer from the disadvantage that the participants know that the choices are not for real. People choose foods in grocery stores, not under conditions that are clearly part of an experiment. Since the chapter refers to studies accessed as late as May 2012, one would have expected the authors to have been aware of another EU study, the results of which were published online in October 2008 and were hence available to the authors of Chapter 8. That study asked a simple question: “Do European consumers buy GM-foods?” And the answer, too, was simple: “Yes, if GM-foods are offered on the shelves of their grocery stores”—which they had been for years in a number of EU countries, labelled as required by law. Grocery stores and supermarkets do not waste shelf space on products which consumers do not buy: if they are on offer for years, it is because they are being purchased for years. Interestingly, that study also found that what consumers tell you they would do as far as GM-food purchases are concerned, and even what they tell you they actually bought in the food store, did not correspond well with what in fact they took home as revealed by bar code analyses of their actual purchases.
Chapter 12 seems to be on safer ground: one major point in its favour was that the authors did notice that other EU study and acknowledged that “a large proportion of European consumers are not dramatically (sic!) concerned about GMOs in food products. But then they went off into uncharted territory by claiming that “This does not mean that they would openly accept GM food as a matter of course (were their purchases of such products then covert and concealed, even from the purchasers themselves?), but rather more that they currently pay little attention to their purchasing behaviour and they exhibit a lack of knowledge about GMO issues”. No evidence is offered for either of those categorical statements. Rather than saying that consumers were not dramatically concerned and ignorant of the issues, it might be both fairer and closer to the mark to suggest that perhaps they were not frightened by all the public fuss, including the efforts at segregation and labelling at their (the consumers’) ultimate expense. Perhaps GM was just an issue about which, when left to themselves, they did not care much, one way or the other.
The fact of this much bustle with so much to write about speaks volumes for an industry and an economic activity totally devoted to discriminating between two categories of the same material which many people feel is totally and utterly irrelevant, while others equally forcefully think it vital to make such a distinction. One wonders whether the need for segregation of GM from non-GM products might not be based on misconceptions of the level of public interest and antipathy to GM and all its works. Be that as it may, it is clear that such segregation, with all its regulation, checking and testing, is of both commercial and other concerns to various groups and activities in society. Quite a lot of people do, indeed, earn their living swimming in that particular sea.
What would happen (will happen?) if (when?) people generally were to (do?) in due course come to understand that there is no more than an esoteric difference between crops bred by the random and uncontrolled “traditional” gene manipulations of cross-breeding and forced mutagenesis with high-energy radiation or mutagenic compounds versus the much more precise methods of transgenesis. A leading question, perhaps, but one which cannot fail to come to mind when confronted with nearly 700 pages of carefully documented activity important for the moment but at which many people in the not too distant future may well look back with dismay and wonder.
The present reviewer readily confesses that he has not read every page of this remarkable compendium. Yet he comes away from what he has read with a distinct feeling that the mood is rather against GM-technology and its products, very probably for the reason hinted at above that all the activities such antipathies generate are bread and butter for those who practice them and who, perhaps, were to be counted among some of participants of the Co-Extra project.
Right at the very end of the book’s concluding chapter is the following passage: “Some authors consider GM crops to be the third agricultural revolution. As with all agricultural innovations, GMOs are rejected by a proportion of the population and of producers. This rejection is often misunderstood by scientists in charge of risk assessment or co-existence measures”.
If they say so. This reviewer has been an observer of the Western European and North American scene for a number of decades, years that have witnessed some rather major agricultural developments. Productivities have increased several-fold for some products in some places; major advances have been made in overcoming difficult environmental conditions, diseases have been successfully fought and food has never been cheaper or more plentiful. Yet among those “agricultural innovations”, only one has resulted in vandalism in the field and incessant propaganda directed towards all comers: the public, the politicians and, of course, the seed producers and their lackeys, the scientists whom they employ and who seem to understand and favour what they are doing. GM technology may be just another agricultural innovation of interest mainly to the practitioners and the specialists but it has clearly been hijacked for political and commercial purposes in ways not normally encountered in agriculture.
And so the book comes to an end with yet more paragraphs demanding transparency and participatory assessments, with co-existence between GMO and non-GMO crops to be achieved through specific and general surveillance plans for human and environmental health. “Co-existence and traceability in GMO and non-GMO supply chains, and more particularly in the field, cannot therefore be dissociated from a broader social movement that calls into question technological decisions, societal choice and who bears the cost.”
Someone is banging a drum.
References
- Bertheau Y. Genetically modified and non-genetically modified food supply chains: co-existence and traceability. 2012. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 4443 3778 5.