Europe Has New Beef With Biotech Foods

The spread of “mad cow” disease that is fueling food fears in Europe also is clouding the already dim future of biotech foods across the Continent, government officials and environmental groups say.

The recent discovery of cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, in Germany, and the deaths of two people from the human form of the disease in France are adding to consumer scrutiny of the foods they eat. The events will probably increase skepticism that government and industry know what they’re doing when it comes to food safety, advocates and opponents of the new technology predict.

Although there is no link between genetically modified foods and plants and the BSE crisis, consumers often make one, effectively saying, “It’s the food, stupid.”

“The public is very nervous and very critical right now,” said Josef Scherer, head of the German Economics Ministry’s plant, animal and veterinary department. “Naturally, these incidents have aroused new suspicions about genetically modified food and ingredients.”

The British, who first confronted mad cow disease in the 1980s, have been going down this road for more than a decade. Logically or not, fear of BSE has helped spur Britain’s deepening suspicion of genetically modified foods.

The European Union, following Britain’s lead, has banned cattle feed containing bone meal and other animal parts, which are suspected carriers of BSE. This means producers will face a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of tons of feed, which they will seek to fill with imports from countries such as the United States and Brazil, where genetically modified corn, soybean and rapeseed are prevalent.

So as they scramble for alternative feed, cattle growers are under increased pressure from consumer and environmental groups to make sure the feed they buy abroad is not genetically modified. Even before the latest BSE crisis, environmental groups had identified animal feed as the next battlefront in the war against genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, as the crops and foods are collectively known.

It is a war the “green” groups have been winning in Europe for several years, much to the surprise of producers and retailers.

GMOs are created when new genes are introduced into a plant or animal to give it new characteristics, such as a longer shelf life and resistance to pests and disease. Some crops are altered to become resistant to a particular herbicide so farmers can spray weeds without killing the plants.

Advocates say genetic modification of plants is the way to produce cheaper, more plentiful and more healthful foods for the world’s growing population, and that biotech foods are as important for humankind as biotech medicines or the breeding of animals for use in organ transplants.

Critics say the genetically modified seeds and crops on the market have not led to cheaper foods for the world’s poor--that’s a distribution, not a production problem, they say--or to more healthful crops raised with fewer herbicides and pesticides. They say genetically engineered crops are often grown adjacent to unaltered crops, leading to crossbreeding, without full knowledge of the environmental consequences. And they say the effects of genetically modified food on human health haven’t been adequately tested.

Although such foods form an ever larger part of the American diet, European doubts about them have cost U.S. corn growers $200 million in lost sales and possibly contributed to a depressed market in Europe for U.S. soybeans. About half of the U.S. soybean crop is genetically modified, and effectively all of the U.S. corn crop contains at least some GMOs.

Stringent Labeling Laws in Place

Unlike in the United States, European Union law already requires labeling on all foods containing 1% or more of GMO ingredients, which are identified by DNA testing. Restaurants and caterers are required to state on the menu whether they are using genetically modified ingredients in their dishes.

In November, McDonald’s in Britain told its suppliers to look for beef and chicken that has not been raised on genetically modified feed. Days before, the Italian government announced the introduction of organic meals in school cafeterias.

“The aim is to ensure that genetically modified foods don’t end up in our schools, as well as getting rid of foods containing pesticides, within the next three years,” Italian Agriculture Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio said.

European governments have been reluctant to approve the use of biotech seeds and cultivation of genetically modified crops that are certified in the United States. Commercial and experimental planting of the altered crops has been banned in Switzerland, Austria and Greece.

There is limited commercial production of genetically modified corn in Spain and France, and Germany and Britain have only experimental trials of the biotech crops. But even those are unpopular. Greenpeace activists who tore up a field of genetically altered corn in Norfolk, England, were acquitted in September of criminal damage charges. The jury accepted the activists’ defense that they were protecting the environment.

In Britain, food stores learned the hard way that they can’t make money on genetically modified foods.

When British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s launched its first genetically modified product, California Tomato Puree, in 1996, the company hailed it as cheaper and more environmentally friendly than conventional tomato paste and believed it heralded a food revolution.

But the revolution wasn’t what they envisioned. As they embarked on a high-tech future, British consumers decided that they preferred low-tech fare to what they soon began to call “Frankenstein foods.”

Sainsbury’s, the country’s second-largest supermarket chain, made a quick U-turn. The company not only pulled California Tomato Puree off the shelves, but also revamped about 4,000 products to eliminate genetically modified ingredients from Sainsbury’s house-brand foods.

Meanwhile, the company vastly expanded its offerings of organic foods--free of GMOs and chemicals--from just a few products a decade ago to more than 900 lines today. Sales of organic foods have doubled each year, and its competitors have followed suit by expanding their lines of organic foods.

“One of the main reasons people say they are buying organic is because it is non-GM,” Sainsbury’s spokeswoman Rachel Wilson said. “We’re not anti-GM or anti-biotech, but customers have said they don’t want it.”

The safety and value of GMOs are still hotly debated throughout Europe and even within Britain’s royal family. Prince Charles last year denounced scientists who “treat the world like a giant laboratory,” whereas Princess Anne, his sister and the president of the British Assn. for the Advancement of Science, advocated GM foods to feed the world’s growing population.

Pope John Paul II recently urged farmers to seek a “healthy balance” between biotechnology and nature and avoid putting people’s lives at risk. “Resist the temptations of productivity and profit that work to the detriment of the respect of nature,” John Paul said.

Many scientists respond that GMOs will help save the planet, not destroy it, and they argue that nature always can be improved upon.

“Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer,” Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in the Observer newspaper in response to Prince Charles. “Darwin himself said it: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.’ ”

Axel Ullrich, a German biotech entrepreneur who cloned the first gene for insulin, said, “This technology will change our lives, especially if we overcome our food phobia. There are all kinds of advantages for environment, health [and] ending world hunger that we are ignoring because of the public’s instant objection to any kind of genetic manipulation.”

U.S. Government Views GMOs as Positive

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers genetically modified crops to be the same as those produced by conventional methods. For that reason, it has rejected the kind of food labeling that Europeans require.

Like most growers and biotechnology companies, the U.S. government views the creation of GMOs as a positive development that can offer farmers higher yields using fewer harmful herbicides and pesticides. Officials say nothing is approved until it is shown to be safe for humans and the environment, and they are irritated by what many consider to be knee-jerk European resistance.

“We spend a lot of time on the issue and are very frustrated by the lack of progress in the last couple of years,” said Tim Galvin, administrator of the Foreign Agriculture Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.

“Decisions to approve or reject GM should be based on sound science and not simply on an emotional reaction to new technology,” Galvin said. “We believe that’s what’s happening. It mirrors the debate in Europe 10 years ago over personal computers and tends to reflect a conservative European view toward new technology and its impact on society.”

A new study by Lancaster University’s Center for the Study of Environmental Change released in November suggests something quite different: a discerning audience.

On the basis of individual and focus group interviews, the study found that many Britons view information technology as offering choice and opportunity, although they believe the opposite is true with genetically modified foods.

“GMO was characterized recurrently as being imposed and as inherently restrictive of choice,” the study said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has declared his neutrality on genetically altered foods, although he generally regards biotechnology as the next wave of the knowledge-based economy and wants his nation to be at the forefront. He told a European bioscience conference in London on Nov. 17 that he would not allow warriors against GMOs to get in the way of scientific research.

British Skeptical of Public Assurances

“Sometimes [biotechnology] is controversial, as with GMO crops or animal testing. Such research is rightly strictly regulated,” Blair said. “But this government will not tolerate blackmail, even physical assault, by those who oppose it.”

But a British government report issued in November confirmed the long-standing belief of many Britons that for years their government had misled them about the threat of BSE to human beings to prevent consumer panic and to protect British beef exports. Nearly a decade passed between the confirmation of the first cases of BSE in British cattle in 1986 and a government acknowledgment that 10 people had contracted a human variant of BSE. The effect has been to increase consumer distrust of government assurances about GMO foods, although there has been no clinical evidence that they have any harmful effect on human health.

“Whenever anyone in government says it is safe to eat something, it so much sounds like exactly what they said around BSE that people almost believe the opposite,” said Sue Mayer, director of GeneWatch UK.

Moreover, critics say, Europeans do not want to feel the GM foods are being forced on them.

Said Andrew Tingey, a biologist with independent testing firm Reading Scientific Services: “Consumers in the UK and Europe definitely like to have a choice. They don’t like to be told what to eat.”

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Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Berlin and special correspondents Maria De Cristofaro in Rome and Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris contributed to this report.