Ottawa, Canada —
Today the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) demanded that the federal government immediately withdraw authorization for ‘SmartStax,’ a genetically engineered (GE), eight-trait corn, until Health Canada undertakes exhaustive and independent tests.
CBAN made the demand
after learning that Health Canada has not assessed the human health safety of ‘SmartStax’.
Safety assessment of multi-trait crops is part of the guidelines adopted by the
Codex Alimentarius—a United Nations body that develops food-safety guidelines recognized
by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and used to settle trade disputes.
‘SmartStax,’ a
multi-herbicide tolerant and multi-insecticide-producing corn developed by Monsanto
and Dow AgroSciences, has been authorized by the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency but not by Health Canada.
“Health Canada did
not conduct or require any testing for this new eight-trait GE corn and did not
even officially authorize it for release into the food system,” said Lucy
Sharratt, CBAN’s Coordinator. “Health Canada has entirely abdicated its
responsibility and just shrugged off the potential health risks of eating eight
GE traits in one corn flake.”
“Combining
many GE traits together can give rise to unintended effects which could
adversely affect health, such as creating new allergies or toxins, or exacerbating
existing allergies,” said Dr. Michael
Hansen of the Consumers Union in the US, a leading global expert on the
potential health risks of GE.
“This GE crop should have gone through a new safety
assessment, as recommended by Codex in its
‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Food Safety Assessment of Foods Derived from
Recombinant-DNA Plants’ adopted in 2003. Codex standards and guidelines are
used to settle trade disputes and the lack of a new safety assessment for this
GE corn means that other countries could reject ‘SmartStax’ without running
afoul of WTO rules,” said Dr. Hansen.
“Canada is
ignoring the Codex guideline to test stacked-trait plants – a guideline our
government negotiated. Our standards should be at least as high as Codex, if
not higher,” said Sharratt. “This
scandal exposes the deepest and most dangerous nonchalance of Health Canada
towards the risks of GE foods and the safety of Canadians,”
“Health Canada is
protecting the interests of biotechnology corporations rather than the health of
Canadians,” said Dr. Shiv Chopra, a former scientific evaluator for Health
Canada and whistleblower in Health Canada’s review of Monsanto’s recombinant
bovine growth hormone.
“Releasing ‘SmartStax’ without evaluating safety, just a day
after the release of the blistering report on the listeriosis crisis, confirms
deep structural problems and government mismanagement of GE foods and crops,”
said Éric Darier from Greenpeace Canada.
