Alexander Golikov, Yury Eldyshev

Alexander Golikov is Director of the Centre for the Policy for Risk Management in Genetic Engineering of Live Organisms. Yury Eldyshev is Deputy Chief Editor of the “Ecology and Life” magazine
 

Security of food supply of the country may be threatened as a result of underhand intrigues by "fighters" against genetic engineering.

Recently we have witnessed a series of interesting events, more or less related to the use of genetic engineering in agriculture and food production. The EU has approved as food the genetically modified (GM) corn variety produced by the Syngenta company, thus putting an end to the de-facto moratorium, in place since 1998, on commercialization of novel GM foods. According to David Byrne, EU Commissioner for Health Care and Consumer Rights Protection, even though the Europeans had been using quite a few GM foods before, the abolition of the moratorium is a major step towards achieving genuine freedom of choice for the consumers. At the same time, the EU turned down an application for approval of another GM corn variety by the Monsanto company (probably due to the fact that Syngenta is a European company whereas Monsanto is a US company).

Yet again the news headlines featured "professional protestants" from Greenpeace, who blockaded a port in South America to stop a shipment of GM soybeans. The UN Food and Agriculture Agency published a statement to the effect that it considers GM foods in no way inferior to the conventional foods and that it gives the agricultural biotechnology its full support. The Monsanto Company said in an official statement that it suspends till better times commercialization of GM wheat variety, which is resistant to the RoundUp herbicide and promises a marked improvement in crop performance (which could be a catalyst for a radical restructuring of the global grain market). The Syngenta company, on the other hand, announced that it was continuing its research into development of GM wheat…

These events are undoubtedly of major importance for the world agriculture and food supply security of many countries, where genetic engineering has become its basis, but they would seem to have hardly any bearing on Russia, where, to put it mildly, the situation is different. And yet it turns out that they do have a bearing, albeit a strange one.

On 29 December 2003, the RF State Committee for Standardization and Metrology (GosStandart) enacted two standards:

GOST R 52173-2003 "Raw Materials and Foodstuffs. Method for Identifying Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) of Vegetative Origin" and GOST R 52174-2003 "Biological Safety. Method for Identifying Genetically Modified Sources of Vegetative Origin Using a Biological Microchip.”

But, strange as it may seem, the follow-up letter of GosStandart Chairman V.V. Usov, Ref. No VU-110-29/1/1064 of 10 March 2004, gives the committee's recommendation that only the second standard be used. On 24 May, however, there was an agreement signed between the RF Federal Service for Ensuring Consumer Rights Protection and Human Well-Being and RF Federal Service for Technical Regulation and Metrology (GosStandart successor) to the effect that both GOST standards are of equal force and either may be applied. It looks like an excellent example of coordination between state agencies, and our only regret is that there are no more than two GOST standards of such scope: we need others, too--for instance, a standard that would be based on protein analysis as well rather than DNA only.

But Mr Usov's letter has surprised us to such an extent that we feel compelled to review it in greater detail. This is an agency that is entrusted with the power to establish regulations, which are vital for the country, with the power to assign "good" and "bad" labels, and this agency releases an official document, which can be clearly read as posing a threat to the food supply security of the state!

The GosStandard procedure is good, but not as a universal (applicable in each case) tool for identifying GMO. It looks like the desire of its author, who is also the chairman of the GosStandart Technical Committee for Monitoring Biological Safety, to cash in on detecting GMO in "food raw (including seeding and planting stock), food stuffs, flowers" got the better of his professional integrity. The GOST procedure, the way it is presented, provides for detection of no more than five GMO indicators (genetic sequence fragments). But some of these indicators are inherent not only in GM plants, but conventional crops as well (rape, cauliflower and nearly all the cruciferous varieties) so that it would hardly be a problem to identify GMO even in those foods where a GMO content is absent and impossible provided one is bent on "finding" it. Other genes, again, even though recognized as "evidence," are not necessarily present in GM plants. Moreover, even with such "evidence" in place, it is far from clear what it signifies, i.e., what genetic construct (approved in Russia or not) is involved, and it will be necessary to repeat the tests following the classic procedure set forth in the first of the GOST standards named. The new GOST standard will not perform unless it is applied to cases of a "specific genetic construct" the biological microchip is designed to identify. With this fact in view, the task of providing dedicated chips for all the constructs used in genetic engineering is clearly beyond the authors of the proposed procedure (because of the work scope involved). That is precisely the reason why nowhere else in the world is it considered standard procedure in this day and age.

But the most surprising bit is yet to come. What are the samples that are to be tested in order to identify transgenic DNA? For instance, sugar (each 5 tons' worth), vegetable oil (10 tons in case of imports, and 30 tons in case of domestic origin), starch (5 tons, imports; 10 tons, domestic), milk (5 tons). One is hard put to decide whether this is due mostly to the desire to make money by fair means or foul or plain ignorance. Well, there IS no DNA in sugar, vegetable oil, starch or milk (unless it is added on purpose)!

But the best is yet to come. The tests are to be performed both on imported foods and those produced in Russia. We are curious: who will do the sampling, testing and at what point? Taking the domestic wheat production alone, even with the lowest yield of 60 million tons, we would have to have a minimum of 400 thousand tests, each taking over two days to complete. And who will pay for them? With a single test costing around thousand dollars, a ton of leguminous plants will have to be marked up by 7–20 dollars; sugar and vegetable oil, by $80–100; milk, by $160-200; and each flower, by $1.5–2. In point of fact, this would mean one thing and one thing only--the end of national agriculture because it could never survive such a price explosion.

But even this is not all. The regulation provides for the sampling to be done at the shipping point. Who will do this to comply with the Russian GOST standards and who will bring the samples into Russia? For instance, an average dry cargo ship carrying maize would mean 5 thousand samples, in other words, 5 million dollars worth of tests, plus the cost of sampling and sample transportation, with additional expenses incurred in demurrage while the transport lies in wait for the permission to bring the cargo in. This means that imports of agricultural produce will become an impossibility.

Can it be that this was the objective that the developers had their sights on (the fallout on the domestic market to be considered under the scenario as a side effect)? Well, in this case the document is not entirely void of sense, even though of a totally amoral and anti-Russian nature. Otherwise, we would have to infer that government regulations aimed at ensuring the security of the country are elaborated in such a thoughtless manner that one can't help feeling uneasy.