TL: GENETICALLY ALTERED SOYBEANS - BACKGROUNDER
SO: Greenpeace Germany [GPI]
DT: September 19, 1996
Keywords: environment biotechnology agriculture us europe
trade health food /

THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTS IN BRIEF
The genetically manipulated soybean on its way to Europe

In November 1996, genetically manipulated soybeans from the
USA are to be put on the market in Europe for the first time.
This means that the confrontation surrounding the use of
genetic engineering in agriculture has now moved to a new
level. For the first time, a plant with genes which have been
manipulated by human beings is to be distributed in large
quantities. Apart from this, soya is to be found in many
different kinds of food - from margarine to baby food and
chocolate bars.

The genetically manipulated soybeans sold under the brand name
Roundup Ready Soybean (RRS) have been made resistant to the
herbicide Roundup (active agent glyphosate). The herbicide
Roundup kills plants and is also used in agriculture as a
"weedkiller". A gene inserted in the soybeans ensures that
they can survive twice the normal dose of Roundup.

This latest development means that the chemical industry and
industrial agriculture are moving in a dangerous direction:
they are adapting plants to chemical poisons. But the future
of agriculture cannot lie in the continued use of herbicides
and the genetic manipulation of useful plants. Only ecological
farming, without the use of pesticides, can guarantee the
survival of natural habitats and biodiversity, and the
protection of the soil and water.

The seed patented by Monsanto has been on sale in the USA
since the spring of this year. Monsanto's strategy is clear:
now this chemical group will not only rake in the profits from
the development of the genetically manipulated seed - they
have also given a huge boost to

sales of Roundup. Worried by fears that they might end up
getting stuck with their genetically manipulated soybeans,
Monsanto, together with the US authorities, have taken the
greatest pains to ensure that these beans need not be
labelled, with the result that consumers remain in the dark as
to what they are getting. Harvests of natural soya and
genetically manipulated soya will be mixed in the USA.

More than 80 per cent of consumers in Germany (according to an
Emnid survey in September 1996) have expressed their
disapproval of genetically engineered food. But in March 1996
the Commission of the European Union gave the green light for
the export to Europe of Monsanto beans and their further
processing here. The EU Commission even voted against the
labelling of genetically engineered products -also with the
support of the German delegates - after the American
government had threatened Europe with trade sanctions.

De facto this means that the rights of the consumer are being
completely ignored. Consumers are not consulted. They are
simply presented with a fait accompli along the lines of "eat
or die". Nor can they use their purchasing power to decide
whether or not they want to support this form of highly
industrialised agriculture. Once genetically manipulated
soybeans have established themselves on the European market it
will be too late to reverse the development.

Greenpeace is strictly opposed to the release into the
environment of genetically engineered organisms as the risks
for the environment and health cannot be calculated.
Genetically manipulated soya must not be allowed in food
products.

THE PROBLEM IN DETAIL:
The risks of genetic engineering
Unchecked spread

With genetically manipulated plants there is always the danger
that as a result of the foreign genes added unpredicted and
unpredictable properties will be developed which also give
them an advantage outside their growing fields in their
competition with wild plants for light, water and nutrients.
The spread of these plants could result in a

long-term change in flora and would mean that the list of
species threatened with extinction will get even longer.

Although Roundup Ready soybeans have been studied for their
agricultural properties in field tests, there are still large
gaps in our knowledge. With the leap from limited experimental
release in small fields to large-scale growth the risk also
increases. Will the new bean force out other plants? Will it
enter other ecosystems? Will it change in the long term due to
its resistance to toxic substances?

The soybean is also exported to Asia, Australia and the
Pacific islands. Here there is the risk of cross-breeding with
wild soybean species as this is where the original growth
areas of the soybean are located. In this way the foreign
genes will find their way into the wild populations of the
soya and spread. The term "genetic
environmental pollution" has already been coined for this. And
nobody can predict the effects that this will have, above all
on the evolution of flora.

Allergies as a result of genetically manipulated soya

Monsanto claims their tests show that there is no change in
the risk of allergy compared tothe standard soybean, referring
to tests conducted by Monsanto on rats, cows, chickens and
fish.

Most of the soya meal is used as animal feed. The Monsanto
application forms show that the feeding tests were conducted
for a maximum of ten weeks. This means that it is completely
impossible to forecast possible long-term effects and the
effects on future generations.

After the introduction of the new GE soya , people would act
as unsuspecting guinea-pigs as even slight changes in protein
structure can trigger off new allergies. When a soybean strain
to which the genetic engineers had added a gene from the
Brazil nut was
investigated at the University of Nebraska, it was discovered
that the ability to trigger off allergies had also been
transferred. People who

were allergic to Brazil nuts could no longer eat these only
slightly manipulated soybeans.

Monsanto then retreats to the position that these are only
suspected risks, for which there is no proof. It's always easy
to be wise after the event, but especially in the food
industry the precautionary principle should be applied. When
sheep cadavers were fed to cows, nobody thought that this
could lead to the BSE epidemic.


Soya in foodstuffs
From baby food to chocolate

To date the plan for the autumn harvest is to mix genetically
manipulated soybeans from the USA with the rest of the harvest
and to export this to the oil mils in Europe. There, these
beans, which are rich in protein and natural fat, are mainly
processed into soya oil and soya meal. By far the greater part
of the soya meal is used to make high-protein animal feed; the
remainder is used in food for human consumption. The extracted
oils, on the other hand, are principally supplied to food

producers for further processing. For numerous products,
lecithin, which is obtained mainly from soya oil, is added as
a stabiliser and emulsifier, for example to ensure that the
fat and water contained in margarine do not separate and that
the margarine can be easily spread. Soya can be found in
muesli and smoked herring, in sweets, cakes, pastries and
biscuits, in meat or in baby food and slimming food, to name
just a few. A consumer action group in Bonn estimates that
there are 20,000 to 30,000 food products in Germany which may
in one form or the other contain components of the GE soybean
developed by the America chemical multinational Monsanto. Both
soya and rape-seed oil can be labelled "vegetable fats" or
"hydrogenated vegetable fat". It is also permitted to label
lecithin as E 322.

Monsanto's new creation
Agriculture on the wrong track

There are very concrete economic interests behind Monsanto's
commitment to the soya business. Farming methods and
processing methods in the food industry are no longer adapted
to the useful plants involved; the opposite is now the case -
plants are being designed for the requirements of industry and
trade, or "optimised" as the plant engineers say. The gene
responsible for softening, for example, in the allegedly
always firm, non-squashable tomato Flavr Savr has only been
"switched off" using genetic tricks so that the fruit will
last longer on supermarket shelves.

In the case of Monsanto beans parts of a gene from a virus, a
bacterium and the petunia have been added. With this gene the
soybeans can bridge the effect of the poison Roundup, which
with other plants blocks the metabolic processes, thus leading
to the death of the plant. In the meantime a whole range of
other useful plants have been made tolerant to weedkiller.

The soybean has been genetically engineered so that farmers
can and indeed have to use Monsanto's Roundup during the
entire growing period, making their dependence on both the
seed and the pesticide even greater. Monsanto sells the Ready
Roundup soybean as an ecological success. The chemical group
calls their soya creation from the genetic engineering
laboratory "an intelligent solution in favor of the
environment". They claim that in future much fewer herbicides
will have to be spread over the soya fields. Whether the
farmers in fact increase the toxic substances used, as the
soya can handle this, is left open. On top of this, the
genetic engineers still know much too little about the
interaction of the genes with each other and the environment
to be able to predict whether their "building block
constructions" actually work. Monsanto has already been
through some disasters in connection with resistance to pests
and have not always been able to keep their promises, for
example with regard to cotton (see Monsanto - the Poison and
Gene group)

Doing business in beans
There is still enough soya which has not been genetically
manipulated

This year for the first time in the USA the new soya plants
will grow "to start with on one to two per cent" of the soya
fields. The harvest is expected to amount to around 62 million
tonnes. This makes the USA the main producer of soybeans
world-wide, the total volume produced amounting to around 135
million tonnes. In contrast to this, there are only very few
soya fields in the European Union. Soya is only grown in
France and Italy. The European oil mills, which in 1995
processed approx. 15 million tonnes of soybeans into raw oil,
soya meal and soya concentrates, thus depend on imports. 60
per cent of the beans imported to the EU come from the USA, a
further third from the two South American countries which grow
it, Brazil and Argentina.

As yet there is till a chance to ensure that only soya that
has not been genetically manipulated is used in European food
products. But time is running out. In Brazil Monsanto has
already submitted

applications for growing the Roundup Ready soybean. In
Argentina permission to grow it has now been granted.

The argument put forward by European oil mills and the food
industry, namely

that it is already impossible to exclusively use products
which have not been genetically engineered, does not hold
water. If the majority of consumers do not want GE soya, the
mills and the food-processing companies will find ways to
manage without it. At the moment they are taking the path of
least resistance. The Association of German Oil Mills showed
its opposition to the labelling of GE soya at a very early
stage and is even glad that the European Commission decided
against a GE label.

For the food industry, which has come out in favour of genetic
engineering, the soybean will be a test case. This is the
first time that a genetically manipulated plant is being
processed in such a large number of products. The pioneers are
the major foodstuff groups, which hope to be able to cut costs
by changing to genetic engineering

production methods and to obtain access to cheaper raw
materials. The giants in the food sector, Unilever, Nestli and
Danone are taking the standpoint that Monsanto's soybeans are
safe and that the raw materials produced from them are no
different from the conventional materials hitherto processed.

The majority of consumers are opposed to genetically
manipulated food. Some of the risks of releasing genetically
manipulated plants into the environment are known. Up to now
the opinion of consumers, who do not want to take this risk,
has simply been ignored. The introduction of the GE soybean is
the test case which will decide to what extent consumers in
Europe can determine the direction to be taken by the food
industry and agriculture. The future of agriculture and the
world food supply lies in environment-friendly, pesticide-free
ecological farming. Roundup and the Roundup Ready Soybean are
a dead end.

THIS IS WHY GREENPEACE DEMANDS:

Genetically engineered organisms must no be released into the
environment Genetically manipulated soya must not be used in
foodstuffs

MONSANTO
The poison and gene Group

With annual sales amounting to approx. nine billion US
dollars, Monsanto is not exactly a major league player in the
chemical sector. Monsanto became famous, or better infamous,
in the Vietnam war as the company that developed and produced
the defoliant "Agent Orange". The people of Vietnam are still
suffering from the consequences of the widespread use of this
toxicant even today.

Monsanto describe themselves as "leaders" in the field of
biotechnology and indeed with more than 30,000 employees on
the payroll world-wide the company does have a wide range of
products where genetic engineering is used.

The Group is organised in four divisions: the agro-group is

responsible for foodstuffs and herbicides and the chemical
group for plastics and industrial chemicals, amongst other
products. Up to just a few years ago Monsanto was one of the
largest and most scandalous producers of carcinogenic
polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). The Group subsidiary, Searle,
is active in the pharmaceutical area and NutraSweet makes most
of its money with the sweetener of the same name, which
contains aspartame.

The herbicide Roundup

* It is estimated that approx. 15 per cent of Monsanto's total
sales is accounted for by Roundup. The herbicide Roundup with
its active agent glyphosate is the most widely sold herbicide
world-wide. In the USA alone it is estimated that up to 11,800
tonnes annually are sprayed on fields, roadside verges and
gardens. The patent for this 25-year-old herbicide expires in
four years time. It is obvious that the Group wants to use
Roundup Soybeans to secure the market after the patent has
expired in the year 2000.

"The herbicide is rapidly degraded in the soil", states
Monsanto. "Even after long-term application there are no
effects on the environment". This deliberately ignores the
fact that every kind of herbicide leaves traces in the
environment - after all its aim is to destroy unwanted weeds
in the fields. Furthermore, in California Roundup has been
identified as the third most commonly reported cause of
pesticide-related illness amongst agricultural workers.
 Monsanto proudly states above all that Roundup "is rapidly
degraded  by natural micro-organisms into carbon monoxide,
ammoniac and  phosphate". They claim that after a few weeks
there are
no detectable traces left. Subsequent tests are very expensive
and in Germany, for example, they are not part of standard
investigations. When they are carried out, however, they
produce different results to those arrived at by Monsanto:
depending on the type of soil, glyphosate could be traced in
the soil one year later; in Swedish forests residues could
still be found after three years. There have been several
instances where degradation product AMPA has already been
found in the groundwater.

The cotton flop


* The genetic manipulation of cotton turned out to be a
gigantic flop. Monsanto promised that their new cotton from
the genetic engineering laboratory would form a poison against
caterpillar attack without using chemicals, i.e. with a "self-
protecting gene" against insect larvae. Furnished with the
gene from the bacterium bacillus thuringiensis, the so-called
Bollgard plants were now supposed to produce a poison, the Bt
toxin, in its own leaves, which was deadly for these
caterpillars. In the very first year American cotton farmers
planted this new strain over an area of 700,000 hectares. But
Monsanto's calculations went wrong: experts found out that
Bollgard did not produce enough of the insecticide and not
fast enough to protect the young shoots against the
caterpillars. The consequence was that in some fields up to 60
per cent of the of the plants were attacked by the
caterpillars and at least 8,000 hectares in Texas were
destroyed by the bollworm. The damage for this harvest period
is put at 1.5 billion deutschmarks.

The consequences may be incalculable if it turns out that in
failing to become resistant to the insect larvae Bollgard has
become resistant to the Bt toxin. The bacterium bacillus
thuringiensis and its toxins are a popular insecticide
particularly with "bio-farmers". It is used in many countries
as a "biological toxin". Although the insect larvae are now
exposed to the Bt toxin, it does not kill them, and this
creates ideal conditions for them to become resistant to this
bacterial toxin.

The milk hormone

* Monsanto's best known genetically engineered product is
probably the cattle growth hormone rBST (= recombining bovine
somatotropin), which was first used as a milk drug in the
cowsheds of American farmers under the brand name Posilac in
the spring of 1994. Although it is proven that the animals'
health suffers from this milk hormone, which has to be
injected every two months, Monsanto managed to obtain
registration of this drug with the American Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) in spite of protests from consumers,
farmers' organisations and even the trade.

In Germany  even the German Farmers' Association and dairies
have spoken out against the hormone.

German veterinary surgeons have declared that the use of rBST
runs counter to veterinary ethics. In the EU the use of the
milk drug is forbidden, initially until the year 2000. Then
the European Commission has to make a new decision. For years
now Monsanto has not published any sales figures for Posilac.
It is said that it is used in about 30 per cent of dairy-cow
herds in the USA. Monsanto's actions in the USA against
companies which refuse to use the hormone milk is highly
informative: food companies which mark their products "rBST-
free" have been sued by the Group. One example of this was an
action brought against the "Pure Milk and Icecream Company" to
force them to withdraw this measure, but in this case they
lost in court.


The non-squashable tomato

* Monsanto was the last-minute rescuer for the Californian
company, Calgene, which had developed the non-squashable
tomato Flavr Savr. The growing and marketing of GE tomatoes
has been permitted in the USA since 1994. However, for Calgene
the tomato was an economic disaster. Consumers complained of
its metallic taste. Apart from this, thirty per cent of the
tomato was squashed in the packaging process with the result
that the packaging had  to be redesigned at great expense.
Only Monsanto's financial support saved this GE company from
bankruptcy.

The genetic kitchen

* In the USA Monsanto already has authorisation to market
several genetically manipulated plants: apart from soybeans
and Bollgard cotton, an insect-resistant potato line called
NewLeaf has also been registered. And it will not stop here.
The chemical group has already announced the marketing of
further genetically manipulated useful plants for the coming
years:

Roundup Ready corn
Roundup Ready cotton
Roundup Ready oil seed rape
Roundup Ready sugar beet
Monsanto non-squashable tomato
Insect-resistant corn
Virus-resistant potatoes
firmer potatoes

This chemical group is clearly planning to make Roundup-
resistant plants an important part of future Group policy.
Only recently they announced that in the coming years they
plan to invest around 200 million US dollars in modernising
the production facilities for Roundup. They hope to increase
sales in the herbicide business and want to establish highly
industrialised agriculture using pesticides

and suitable plants for the next decades

Jvrg Naumann
Greenpeace September 1996