The United States Environment Protection Agency has renewed the registration of Bt corn based on new studies that claim the impact of Bt-corn pollen on monarch butterfly is "negligible". But Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins say that is playing fast and loose with scientific evidence.
When John Losey and colleagues in Cornell University published their findings that Bt-corn pollen harmed monarch butterflies, the concern raised was not just over monarch butterflies, but on all other (non-target) species in the environment. (Bt-corn is transgenic corn expressing a protein, Bt, isolated from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which kills specific insect pests.) Unfortunately, amid the enormous publicity generated, the broader issue became reduced to the impact of Bt-corn on monarch butterflies.
So, when the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) issued a data call-in on December 1999 to consider re-registration of Bt corn, the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) responded by sponsoring a Monarch Research Workshop in Feb. 2000 to identify research priorities regarding Bt-corn and monarch butterflies. A request for proposals was announced in April, after which a steering committee selected projects to be funded from a grant pool provided by the USDA-ARS and the Agricultural Biotechnology Stewardship Technical Committee.
The results of those projects were published in PNAS, the house journal of the US National Academy of Science, giving clearance to the EPA’s re-registration of Bt-corn for an additional seven years.
The first paper in the series is on risk assessment based on data collected in all the studies. It states, "This 2-year study suggests that the impact of Bt corn pollen from current commercial hybrids on monarch butterfly populations is negligible."
On reading the fine print, one discovers that,
But, these observations are not considered sufficient to cause concern, why not?
What matters in the first instance, we are told, is the probability of exposure, which in turn depends on the proportion of monarchs that visit cornfields, the overlap of pollen-shed with susceptible larval stages and the adoption rate of Bt corn.
Furthermore, the actual risk depends, not just on the probability of exposure, but on the proportion of monarchs that would be exposed to pollen levels that exceed the lethal threshold, ie, that which would kill them
By such means, the risk becomes reduced to less than 1% or, better still, less than 0.1%.
Should we be impressed with this kind of special pleading in the light of clear evidence that the Bt protein is harmful, and admitted to be so?
The authors devoted several pages of unconvincing arguments in order to come up with estimates, the only reliable one is perhaps the adoption rate of Bt corn. All estimates are for the year under study, and could drastically change in future in any case.
The studies on toxicity are on acute effects, ignoring both long-term cumulative and non-linear effects that are well known in the ecological literature, especially with regard to extinction and population density. These short-term studies on monarch butterflies do not address impacts on other non-target species, nor on the multiplier ecological consequences of all the impacts interacting with each other.
Bt has already been shown to have the following additional negative impacts, as reviewed elsewhere by the two research teams who found clear evidence that Bt-corn pollen harmed the larvae of Monarch butterflies,
Increased mortality of lacewing larvae fed on an artificial diet containing Bt-toxin or on corn-borer larvae that had eaten Bt-corn.
Bt sprays used to reduce caterpillars in forests led to fewer black-throated blue warbler nests.
A parasite of corn-borers, Macrocentris cingulum, was found to be reduced in Bt-cornfields compared with non-Bt corn fields.
One preparation of Bt (var. tenebrionis), reported to be specific for Coleoptera, caused significant mortality in domestic bees.
Soil-dwelling collembola, Folsomia candida, an important decomposer, suffered significant mortality from transgenic corn with Cry1 Ab.
Bt not only remains in the soil with Bt-plant debris, it is actively exuded from the plant roots where it binds to soil particles and persists for 180 days or more, so its effects on soil decomposers and other beneficial arthropods may be extensive.
Bt-crops have speeded up the evolution of Bt-resistance in pest populations.
In addition, Bt-toxins are actual and potential allergens for human beings. A Bt strain that caused severe human necrosis (tissue death) killed mice infected through the nose within 8 hours, from clinical toxic-shock syndrome. Both Bt protein and Bt-potato harmed mice in feeding experiments.
Of course, proponents of Bt-crops can easily reduce all of those impacts, one at a time, to "negligible" levels by the same kind of exercise carried out in the ‘risk assessment’ described above; ignoring the complex interactions between the individual impacts which can have catastrophic long-term consequences.
The proponents will still claim that the benefit of Bt-crops in reducing the use of broad-spectrum insecticides outweighs the risks. Unfortunately, that claim is not borne out by the evidence. During the past five years, the percentage of field corn treated with insecticides in the US has remained at approximately 30%, despite a significant increase in the hectares of Bt corn planted. Corn borer is not a serious pest, and only 1% to 2% of the crops in Iowa were treated with insecticide for corn borer between 1995 and 1998. Most farmers in Iowa and Minnesota had never used insecticides for the corn borer. Only during years when corn borer densities are high do transgenic crops out-perform the non-transgenic.
Article first published February 2002