I'm Bruce Chassey. I'm a professor of food safety and food microbiology at the
University of Illinois and I'm also a professor of nutritional sciences.
I teach toxicology
and food safety.
I also teach science communication and bioethics
and I've been involved for over twenty years
in evaluating the safety of
foods and feeds produced through biotechnology.
Animal feeds that are produced using biotechnology
are very carefully evaluated before they're put on the market.
It's necessary to show that they have the same composition
as any other form of that same crop
and that they perform
in animals exactly like you'd expect that
crop feed to perform.
Federal regulators in the United States would be responsible
for ensuring
that that's the case and that would be the USDA and the FDA.
Globally
international standards for this evaluation
are set by CODEX alimentarius,
which is a joint venture
between two UN agencies: the World Health Organization
and the Food and Agriculture Organization. In other countries, for
example in Europe,
the European Food Safety Authority
describes the kind of experiments that need to be done to show
that feeds and foods produced through biotechnology are comparable
to exactly the same food produced using conventional means.
And there is also a rich scientific literature from university researchers
and other government researchers
who basically are checking up on what the companies and the regulators are
doing.
So there are over two hundred papers
in dozens of animal species,
covering most of the biotech crops that are in the market today, that
basically show exactly what the regulators said and exactly what the
companies said:
that soybeans or corn or alfalfa produced using biotechnology
is essentially soybean, corn or alfalfa.
One of the questions that there are
quite a few studies that have addressed is whether meat, milk, eggs -- you know,
animal products that come from animals
that have been fed biotech crops,
is the same
as those products that we would expect them to be.
What we know from a number of scientific publications is actually
you can't tell if an animal has been fed a biotech crop
because there's no sign of the DNA or the proteins
from that biotech
crop plant
in the milk or meat or eggs or other products that come from those animals.
And, because there's no difference in performance or composition of the animal
itself or the quality
of these products themselves it's pretty safe to say that
a biotech feed
has no effect on the quality or composition
of the animal products you isolate from that animal, be it milk, eggs, meat, etc.
You have to recognize that there are critics of this technology that are constantly
making claims about
the technology not being as good as the regulators and the companies
say it is.
That gives rise to more papers being published in scientific
journals.
And, on balance, those papers -- the good ones, the ones that have passed
critical peer review --
continue to support the same finding.
And that is: that when you use genetic engineering to change a feed
there are no differences in that feed
with regard to animal nutrition and performance.
You will find claims by people who are concerned about this technology for a
variety of reasons
that
animals suffer from one kind of problem or other
when they're fed
genetically modified crops.
And
one of the things that regulators have to do
very often is look at bad or who incomplete studies
that make false claims about
genetically modified feeds. And there are some very good reviews done by the
European Food Safety Authority
which basically document
that many of the very inflammatory claims that are made
about genetically modified feeds,
when they're carefully scrutinized, turn out to be
basically because people have done the experiments wrong or haven't done a
complete and robust experiment. And the really good experiments that are in the
peer review literature
support
the finding in fact which is
these are pretty healthy animals and I'll guarantee you they're being fed
genetically modified feeds.
I think I could summarize the situation this way:
when when a crop is approved
such as soybeans, corn,
cotton, alfalfa
for use
in the field by farmers as a genetically-engineered crop
and that crop is then used as a feed
there's plenty of evidence, both from laboratory research which is published
but also
from years of using crops to feed animals like those you see behind me,
that those animals
are exactly the same. They'll grow the same; they'll perform the same; they have the same
composition.
And the products that come from them are the same. What this indicates is that the
rigorous safety assessment we do is really working, you know, extremely well.