The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

conclusion 323plained Gérard Pascal, director of research at INRA and member of theCGB since its creation in 1986. “There are too many areas here where oneobserves significant variations. I’ve never seen that in another case. It has tobe reconsidered.” 4The “variations” included a “significant increase in white blood cells andlymphocytes in males in the sample fed with MON 863; a reduction inreticulocytes (immature red blood cells) in females; and a higher frequencyof anomalies (inflammation, regeneration) of kidneys in males,” as well as areduction in weight in the test animals. 5 As Kempf points out, “no one wouldhave known anything about it” if the lawyer Corinne Lepage, former environmentminister in the government of Alain Juppé and president of CRII-GEN,* “had not forced entry into the CGB” to obtain, after a legal battlelasting a year, the transcripts of discussions leading to the CGB’s negativeopinion, which was “unusual for a commission that had always tended tosupport the authorization of GMOs.” The deliberations of the scientificcommittees of member states of the European Union, like those of EFSA,are indeed confidential, which gives one an idea of the transparency of theprocess for the evaluation of GMOs.There was a new development in the affair on April 19, 2004, when EFSAissued an opinion in favor of marketing MON 863. According to the authority,the anomalies observed by the CGB “are part of the normal variation ofcontrol populations”; as for the kidney deformities, they were “of minimalimportance.” 6How could two scientific committees express such different opinions onthe same case? The answer to this question was provided by the Europeanbranch of Friends of the Earth, which in 2004 published a very detailed (andvery troubling) report on the operations of EFSA. 7 Established in 2002 underthe authority of European directive 178/2002 on the safety of food products,this institution includes eight scientific committees, one of which ischarged exclusively with the evaluation of GMOs. It is precisely this committee,known as the GMO panel, that the report considers.Friends of the Earth begins by observing: “In just over a year [the GMOpanel] has published twelve scientific opinions, virtually all favourable to thebiotechnology industry. These opinions have been used by the European*CRII-GEN is the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering,of which Professor Gilles-Éric Séralini is a member.