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Another “big list of studies” on GMO safety rolls off the production line – but much of what’s being said about it is demonstrably false, says Claire Robinson

The pro-GMO lobby group Biology Fortified, Inc. (BFI) has launched its new database of GMO studies, GENERA.

BFI’s press release says that the database challenges claims that there is “little independent research” on the safety of GMOs for consumption or the environment. The press release says, “The results show that independent peer-reviewed research on GMOs is common, conducted worldwide, and makes up half of the total of all research on risks associated with genetic engineering.”

It adds, “The government-funded research is worldwide in scope – concentrated in Europe and Asia, followed by North America and Australia. These findings should turn the heads of people who thought it was skewed to private, U.S.-based laboratories.”

The farming website AgProfessional swallowed BFI’s line, publishing an article headlined, like BFI’s press release, “New resource shows half of GMO research is independent”.

But BFI’s argument is a misleading piece of spin. We didn’t need BFI or GENERA to tell us that half of GMO research is independent of the industry. That is old news – revealed back in 2011 by Johan Diels and colleagues, who conducted a review of studies on health risks or nutritional assessments of GMOs.

Diels found that 47% of the studies had at least one author with an professional or financial affiliation to the GMO industry or an organisation tied to it. The rest of the studies’ authors either had no such conflict of interest (39%) or gave insufficient information about funding sources to judge (14%).

But the central point of Diels’ review is completely ignored by BFI. It is not the proportion of industry studies that is of interest. It is what those studies tell us.

Diels found that the industry-linked studies were much more likely to find that the GMO was safe. In contrast, studies where no such conflict of interest was present were more likely to reach unfavourable conclusions about the GMO.

BFI disingenuously fails to mention this inconvenient truth.