A few months ago, I received a surprise invitation to speak at a conference on genetic engineering (GE). It came about thanks to my piece in the Star on July 2, 'The case against genetic manipulation', which caught the eye of one Helena Veldman who issued the invitation to me.

She said she enjoyed reading my article, a critique of a piece by Star columnist See Yee Ai who was then from the Malaysian Biotechnology Information Centre (MABIC). But it wasn't until I met Veldman in person that I found out the real reason for my 'incongruent' presence at an industry conference that's out to promote the technology. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I visited the conference website and noted the speakers. One was from the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy (NCFAP), a Washington-based biotech-funded body. Another was a former Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) official, Prof RB Singh, and now probably a consultant to the biotech industry. There was also a Johnjoe McFadden, a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Surrey, England, probably to lend 'scientific credibility' to the technology.

And of course, it would not be complete without a speaker from Monsanto, the aggressive US biotech corporation. But there was also our very own Ms See, to speak on public awareness of biotech issues. Not only that, MABIC was described as an "endorser" of the conference, whatever that means.

MABIC

, which aspires to being a "sound, factual resource" on biotechnology, specifically GE, is actually a biotech industry-funded body that promotes GE. It is the Malaysian chapter attached to Monash University Malaysia of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agi-botech Applications (ISAAA), also a biotech industry-funded body. This fact you'll be hard pressed to obtain from their publications, preferring to present their material as "rational, science-based information".

I suspected it was MABIC that suggested the list of speakers to Veldman.

Conspiracy theories

By now my imagination was working overtime. All sorts of conspiracy theories were running amok in my mind. They were inviting me for the turkey shoot, to discredit me. Till conference day (and till now), there was still no reply from See to my article. So, she's keeping all her ammo for the shoot. But I decided, whatever their dastardly intentions, I would still go. At least the conference will have a chance to hear an alternative view. I will sacrifice myself.

I didn't realise then, in this scenario, the one thing that did not add up was that I didn't have much credibility or reputation in the first place to be destroyed. But, never mind.

And so, on Sept 24, I made my way to the conference. I arrived just as Veldman finished introducing RB Singh. He was a practiced speaker, arguing why the new technology was needed. One of the main arguments was the population explosion and thus the need to increase food. The assumption being, GE is the answer.

During the Q&A session I put it to him that his own organisation, FAO, in a document, 'Agriculture towards 2015-2030', states that even by 2030, when the population is expected to be eight billion, present methods without major advances in GE can provide enough food.

He agreed but added that certain areas unsuitable for present agriculture could use GE methods. However, he ended with "but I don't want to go against my own organisation's report". So I left it at that.

Distribution argument

The next speaker, McFadden, took up the theme of GE providing food for the future. His presentation as a whole, however, instead of providing a facade of scientific objectivity and credibility to the GE enterprise, was an outright voice for the industry, arguing against some of the anti-GE arguments.

One anti-GE argument is that there is more than enough food available to meet demand. In fact, in the West, some farmers are paid not to grow crops. In the South, crops grown for exports on farms owned by rich local farmers or by Western corporations are among the reasons for people, especially the poor, not having enough to eat. The other reasons are famines, wars and poverty.

India is often cited by GE promoters but without checking the facts as a country that needs their technology. According to Devinder Sharma, an Indian food and trade policy analyst (speaking at another conference I attended), in India, 65 million tonnes of food rot in storage because the poor could not pay for them.

McFadden acknowledged that food supply is more than required. Arguing against this, he latched to another argument of the anti-GE group, that the problem is in the distribution of food. He said this was argued 20 years ago about the Green Revolution and the same thing is being argued now.

As if that invalidates the argument of the anti-GE group. As if that massive problem could be solved overnight. Or, if not solved, you can't bring it up again, because you have used it once already, I thought.

Also, to the anti-GE group, the distribution argument is not limited only to the physical distribution of food but extended to the economic pie: distribution of income and wealth, that is, again back to the poverty question. It's all about a few people owning a disproportionately large chunk of the world's wealth and the many left with the crumbs. Too many are too poor to afford food. We have an economic system that is so stacked against the majority (and of course those in power have no incentive to change it why should they? They benefited from it!).

So, one question I had burning for McFadden was, how would GE help? He never explained it in his talk.

'Form six' arguments

From past experience of big corporations, I couldn't see them suddenly acquiring a conscience, donating their seeds or technology to the poor.

To buy their seeds, which are more expensive than conventional seeds (unless they dump them), is not an option. For poor countries to obtain the technology is an expensive and prohibitive affair (apart from the lack of expertise) because of the numerous patents tied to the technology, owned by corporations or their western governments. For example, the patent to GE "Golden rice" with extra pro-vitamin A, touted as a blindness prevention for the poor, is owned by a Swiss research body.

McFadden's other arguments, I was thinking to myself, ought to be left for sixth form students learning to write their first essays. Things like, GM technology is controlled by multinational companies "but that doesn't stop us from driving cars and taking medicines"; that GM food is unsafe yet "millions of us smoke cigarettes or eat high fat diets"; and "is natural all that great?" and then pointing out "many of our most prevalent diseases in the West are related to perfectly natural ingredients in our food salt, fat, carcinogens".

On the last point, according to RM Nesse and GC Williams in their book Why we get sick (1995), we eat more than we should of salt and fat because our bodies are still adapted to the Stone Age, when those ingredients, which are essential in small amounts, were scarce. Now when they are in abundance, our bodies do not have mechanisms to tell us to stop till we get a disease, that is.

I never got a chance to put the counter-arguments. Tea time it was.

Unintended effects

After being refreshed, the next speaker was Nik Shabnam Nik Mohd Salleh, from the Health Ministry's Food Quality Control. She spoke like a believer, which by now is hardly surprising of my fellow speakers, and explained the need for GE the population growth again being used.

She then made a mistake many GE supporters make. She claimed that GE is more precise than conventional breeding because the function of a gene to be inserted is known. In the Q&A, I put it to her that in the GE literature, the one word that often comes out is "pleiotrophy", meaning unintended effects. Even though the function of the gene is known in the original organism its function in the new host could have some surprises in store.

For example, in one experiment on petunias in Germany, a gene from maize was inserted to produce a new red colour in petunias. Instead of getting uniform red petunias, a variety of colours were obtained: red, weakly red, white, and variegated colour (different sectors of the flower coloured differently).

Not only that, the proportion of those different colours changes towards the end of the growing season, with the mostly red at the beginning being reduced to only 38 percent at the end. This shows the instability of the insertion process or of the transgene, and the gene-silencing phenomenon (turning off the transgene in its new host).

Nik Shabnam mentioned the need for labeling of food if it contains engineered stuff. For example, she said, GM rice might have an instruction to cook an extra five minutes for safety.

Labeling

She also mentioned that the US has no requirement for labeling. During the Q&A, the NCFAP person tried to refute that but (at least to me) her answer was gobbledygook; she said that the US has labeling but it was voluntary. In the end I think everybody was confused whether there was labeling or not. So I told the conference of what I know: Only in May this year was a federal legislation tabled in Congress to introduce labeling and liability rules in the US. Its fate is still unknown.

The NCFAP did not respond to that but later told me that she did not catch what I was saying (and I thought my English was as understandable as anybody's!).

I also responded that, it is dangerous to assume the public will do something different from normal practice for normal food than for GE food. Food is food and most people just do what they have been doing, cook it or process it, as how they have been doing before. Not many would read the label and do the right thing. Is the ministry then to wash its hands off if tragedy happens and merely say, they did not read the label?

I proposed then that when GE food requires special processing from the norm, then approval should not be given. This is analogous to the Royal Society of Canada's report, 'Expert panel on the future of food biotechnology', which recommended not to approve GE products from GE crops that could be approved for animal feed but not for humans where the possibility of contamination exists that is, no approval for that crop at all, not even for animals. This is based on the GE Starlink maize contamination of normal maize, where the GE maize was approved for animals but not for human consumption because of allergenic fears.

Nik Shabnam did not answer to my point on pleiotrophy and merely said the rice example was just that maybe a bad example. My quick reply was that my point was meant to a general point about safety and prudence concerning normal practice.

Simplest, correct reason

My own presentation was an overly long one, to cover the different points against GE, ranging from environmental, health, economics, the impact on farmers, and the question of foreign control of our food supply and thus food insecurity and dependency. (Watch this space for the details later.) RB who chaired the whole conference cut short my presentation. There was only room for one question on one detail by McFadden and even my answer was cut short.

And finally, I had a chat with Veldman who told me the reason for her invitation. She saw that the others were all pro-GE and she wanted at least one alternative view and a debate going. She told me she herself wouldn't feed her children GM food.

There, that's the simplest and correct 'reason' behind the invitation.

Dr ROSLI OMAR is an academic interested in the impact of science and technology on society and environment (being bred on the white heat of technology creed himself), be they dams, genetic engineering, or machines. He believes that science and technology, as used at present, is sustaining an unsustainable development the worst of all possible paradoxes.