Thomas Jefferson, whose radical document declaring American independence we celebrate this month, thought that the primary role of government was to protect its citizens from each other’s darker impulses. By that standard, on any number of levels, our current government has failed.

This is perhaps nowhere more true than in the area of food safety. The problem is not so much one of oversight of food production -- the system of regulation brought into being early last century, in the wake of the revelations of muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair -- although more vigorous enforcement is certainly called for. Americans suffer thousands of unnecessary cases of e. coli and salmonella bacterial infections each year.

But a bigger problem is society’s blind faith in scientific progress, which, coupled with a revolving-door political culture where industry and regulatory agencies shuffle the same personnel back and forth, leaves the average citizen at the dangerous mercy of a technocratic priesthood convinced of its own righteousness and superiority. The most alarming example of this problem (and what may turn out to be a greater environmental threat than global warming) is the genetic engineering of food crops.

In 1992, under the Bush Administration’s policy of "getting government off people’s backs" by scrapping regulations that allegedly hindered American industry’s "competitiveness," the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a "Statement of Policy" on genetically engineered food. The FDA statement assured the public that genes spliced into these foods were "the same as or substantially similar to substances commonly found in food," and so no independent testing of these products would be required before they were put on the market. All gene-altered foods (sometimes referred to as "genetically modified organisms" or GMOs, a term I’ll use hereafter for brevity) were given the official FDA designation of "Generally Regarded As Safe."

This policy has been continued under the Clinton administration, which demonstrated its gratitude for the generous campaign contributions of the biotechnology industry and corporate agribusiness by resisting any attempts to require either testing or labeling of GMOs. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman told a reporter for the New York Times last year that none of the federal agencies under whose jurisdiction GMOs fall, including the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or his own Department of Agriculture, has enough staff or resources to conduct GMO testing. Both the FDA and EPA have been sued by environmental and consumer groups who object to this negligent policy.

In the meantime, the amount of acreage planted with GMO crops in the US has gone from zero in 1994 to almost 100 million acres today. In a report issued this past April, the Sierra Club’s Biotechnology Task Force calls this "the most rapid adoption of a new technology in history" and "a very grave threat to the natural environment."

"If we continue on our present path," the report explains, "we will eventually live in a genetically engineered world, as the genome of each species now on earth is either deliberately altered by genetic engineering or indirectly altered by inheritance of transgenes from a genetically engineered organism." It goes on to give specific examples of the possible effects on plants, animals and soil.

The Sierra Club’s conclusions are backed up by a report also released in April 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Because of the dearth of research done on GMOs in this country (not counting the "voluntary" studies done by the biotechnology industry, the results of which have largely been kept secret from the public), most of the research on which the NAS report is based comes from elsewhere in the world.

Among the potential environmental problems identified by NAS are: the loss of natural biological controls on pests, as insects’ predators are poisoned by unnaturally toxic plants; the inadvertent poisoning of other "non-target" species (confirmed most notably in a study of Monarch butterflies, who fell victim to genetically modified corn); changes in the biological composition or toxicity of soil; and "gene flow" from bioengineered to organically grown or wild species, creating resistant pests (for example, what are being called "superweeds").

In addition to the environmental hazards of GMOs, the NAS report included an assessment of their potential threats to human health. Besides the introduction of new and unknown allergens into food and into the environment, and reduced nutritional content of food, NAS was also concerned about increases in food toxicity, and that the toxins intended for agricultural pests would migrate into the edible portions of plants.

Considering that over 60 percent of the products currently found on the shelves of American grocery stores already contain some genetically engineered ingredients, this should be a concern that goes beyond the environmental community. But until fairly recently, there hasn’t been much information about GMOs in mainstream American media. And even when the issue has been covered, reports have often downplayed the concerns of biotechnology’s critics, and offered assurances about the integrity of the US food regulatory system. A recent "special report" on ABC News might as well have been written by an industry public relations flack.

Nevertheless, thanks mainly to an outraged and vocal European public, which has soundly rejected the introduction of GMOs into their markets and farms, there is a growing worldwide awareness of the dangers of biotechnology, even here in America. Food giant Frito-Lay has announced to great fanfare that it will no longer accept genetically engineered crops; and the McDonalds corporation has said it will no longer use genetically modified potatoes in its popular french fries.

Faced with this consumer backlash, the biotechnology and agribusiness industries have geared up their public relations operations to soothe the public’s worries, and have begun a massive advertising campaign to push their product. A TV ad running regularly in major media markets features a visual panorama of human progress, over a background of stirring music and the gently warm and reassuring voice of a narrator who ends his uplifting paean to science with the words: "Biotechnology – a big word that means hope."

In an article titled "Force Feeding Genetically Engineered Foods" in the Winter 1999 issue of the newsletter PR Watch, writer Karen Charman concludes: "The same vested interests that didn’t trust the public enough to inform us up front that they were introducing genetically engineered food into the environment and our grocery stores are now asking us to trust them as reliable experts on the questions of whether this innovation is safe and good. Their fear -- and our hope -- is that the debate on biotech foods could be the issue that awakens the public to the realization that government food and environment regulators are not presently functioning to safeguard the public’s best interests."