Posted on 25-6-2003

GE Accidents Overshadow Plans
By Michael McCarthy

LONDON - Britain's growing row over genetically-engineered crops will be
stepped up today with the news that "superweeds" have evolved which are
resistant to the powerful weedkillers for which GE crops were specially
designed.

The development, which comes as the sacked former Environment Minister
Michael Meacher puts himself at the head of the anti-GE campaign, will be
seized on by opponents of GE technology as undermining its whole rationale.

It means that more weedkillers `not less, as the biotechnology companies
have claimed' will be needed in GE crop fields, thus further intensifying
the intensive agriculture that has wiped out a large portion of Britain's
farmland wildlife in the last four decades.

Monsanto, the GE market leader, confirmed to the Independent at the weekend
that its solution for dealing with resistant weeds was further applications
of different weedkillers.

Coming on top of Mr Meacher's open accusation, in yesterday's Independent
on Sunday, that Tony Blair, as a GE supporter, was seeking to bury health
warnings about GE produce and "rushing to desired conclusions" [about the
worth of GE] that cannot be scientifically supported", the news about
superweeds will further intensify the GE debate.

It has been communicated to the Government by an American academic
specialist in weed control, who has posted a paper about it on the website
of the official GE science review, headed by the Government's chief
scientific adviser, Professor David King.

This will report soon, with an overview of GE science, in advance of the
long-delayed decision, due this autumn, on whether GE crops should be
commercialised in Britain.

The paper, by Professor Bob Hartzler of the Department of Agronomy at Iowa
State University, reveals that in the last seven years four, and perhaps
five, weed species have been found with resistance to the herbicide
glyphosate `which is best-known around the world under the Monsanto trade
name Roundup

The resistance has come about not through gene transfer from GE
herbicide-tolerant crops, as some have feared, but through natural evolution.

Glyphosate is a "broad spectrum" herbicide, meaning that originally `it
killed everything in the fields where it was applied, including crops. GE
crops were specifically developed to be tolerant of it, so it could be
applied throughout the growing season, keeping the fields weed-free, and
two GE crops proposed for commercial growth in Britain, fodder beet and
sugar beet, are glyphosate-tolerant. But now weeds have been found in
Australia, California, Chile, Malaysia and various parts of the US which it
cannot kill.

Dr Greg Elmore, Monsanto's US technical manager for soybeans (one of the
largest GE crops) said at the weekend that Monsanto was taking the question
of glyphosate resistance very seriously, and tackling it with a series of
weed control management practices. With soybeans, he said, resistant weeds
were controlled with a pre-planting "burn down" (killing of everything)
with another weed killer, 2,4-D.

At least three of the resistant weeds had evolved in situations where
glyphosate was being used with non-GE crops, he said, adding that it was
far from the only weedkiller for which weeds had evolved resistance some
herbicides had as many as 70 weeds resistant to them.

But Friends of the Earth's GE campaigner Pete Riley took a different view.
"Companies like Monsanto have spun GE crops and their weedkillers as having
less impact on the environment, but the fact of resistant weeds undoubtedly
means more weedkillers, and means the impact on the environment will be
greater," he said.

"These discoveries remove a central plank from the whole argument for GE
crops in the UK."

The situation would worsen, he said. "As resistance spreads, the complexity
and cost of weed control for farmers will both increase. The overuse of
Roundup on GE crops provides the ideal conditions for resistance to spread
from field to field. Roundup-resistant genes escaping from GE crops via
split seeds and cross-pollination will add to these problems."

The intervention of Mr Meacher yesterday, with a TV interview as well as
his Independent on Sunday article, is one of the most significant events in
the whole five years of argument over GE crops in Britain.

Having left the Government, he is now free to be open with his opposition
to GE commercialisation, and it is clear that he will be its most
formidable opponent. This is not least as his article showed because of his
mastery of the technical detail. As the long-time minister in charge, he
has closely read and absorbed everything to do with the argument that has
been published in recent years. Yesterday he listed a series of reports and
findings suggesting that the full impact of GE technology was still
dangerously unpredictable, saying that many of the health tests carried out
were "scientifically vacuous".