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GM foods

11 March 2004, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Zeba I Seraj, Dhaka University
11 March 2004, 18:00 PM
You gave a good coverage (DS, 8 March) to the seminar titled 'GM foods and Consumers Rights' organised by the Consumers Association of Bangladesh. The Minister has very correctly said that any GM food has to be tested before release to the public. However, the keynote paper by Mr. Khalilur Rahman Sajal, which your paper has also quoted extensively, had a lot of one-sided, incomplete and even incorrect information. For example, it was quoted, "hybrid seeds have been driving out local seeds from the market that can cause a disaster in agricultural sector in the long run." I would like to mention here that BRRI hybriddhanproduced locally has done extremely well in Jessore and farmers are very happy with this seed. Some farmers have also been trained to produce their own hybrid seeds, because hybrid seeds have to be produced from their parents every year and cannot be preserved from the crop.

Another quote, "GM foods should not be used as protein as it can be harmful to human health" is a partially correct statement. Some types of GM food such as BT corn has caused allergies in a few individuals from amongst millions who ate these. I would like to point out here that some individuals are allergic to specific kinds of foods, in this case to the BT protein. BT corn is only a little percentage of the different kinds of GM foods being grown all over the world, including China in a big way. Last year, 170 million acres of agricultural land was used for growing GM food. If it was all bad, why are so many countries adopting this. It is also funny how journalists do not ask the public not to eat egg plants which are sprayed with so much pesticide.

We are surely ingesting these toxic substances along with the egg plants. I can assure you that no GM food has been shown to be as toxic as the egg plants we are eating regularly.

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Negative propaganda about GM foods by NGOs and some news media has delayed the setting up of the governmental bio-safety committee by four years. If this was operational now, then perhaps we would be sure of the quality of the American cooking oil in the market, instead of making wild guesses about it being GM.