Aug 26, 1997
NATURAL LAW PARTY WINS CASE AGAINST BIGGEST SUPERMARKET CHAIN IN THE NETHERLANDS
The Natural Law Party of the Netherlands filed a complaint with the Advertisement Code Commission against Albert Heijn, the biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, following an article published in the February issue of the company’s free magazine (circulation 1.8 million) which gave an untrue and misleading representation of Monsanto’s genetically manipulated soybean. The Advertisement Code Commission has ruled that three out of four charges of the Natural Law Party are justified and stated that Albert Heijn should stop such misleading advertising. Albert Heijn is part of the Dutch multinational Ahold which own supermarket chains in many countries around the world (eg. Stop & Shop in the US).
The most important charge made by the Natural Law Party regarded Albert Heijn’s claim that the quality of the soybean had "remained the same" after genetic manipulation. The company admitted that the composition of the manipulated soy is different, but still maintained that the quality has remained the same. The Advertisement Code Commission ruled against this, concluding: "The quality of the genetically manipulated soy... is not the same as the quality of non-manipulated soy. The composition has been changed and in that case one cannot simply state that the quality has remained the same. For this reason the statement is misleading."
Monsanto, a multinational chemical company has genetically manipulated soy by shooting genetic material into it derived from a flower (petunia), a bacterium, and a virus. The bacterium is the Agrobacterium Tumefaciens, a parasite that causes cancer in plants. The genetic material from this parasite produces, with the help of a so called promoter of the cauliflower mosaic virus, a protein in the soybean which has never before been part of the human diet. The long term effects of consumption of this protein are not known.
Dr Joseph Cummins, Professor Emeritus in Genetics from the University of West-Ontario, warns: "Probably the greatest threat from genetically altered crops is the insertion of modified virus and insect virus genes into crops. It has been shown in the laboratory that genetic recombination will create highly virulent new viruses from such constructions. Certainly the widely used cauliflower mosaic virus is a potentially dangerous gene. It is a pararetrovirus meaning that it multiplies by making DNA from RNA messages. It is very similar to the Hepatitus B virus and related to HIV."
The Natural Law Party and the Advertisement Code Commission also objected to the way Albert Heijn referred to risk assessments of the bean by the Dutch government, the European Union, and the Consumers Union. It created the impression that these institutions had themselves researched the bean while they had in fact only reviewed summaries of the literature.