Posted on 31-12-2002
GM
Crops Contagion
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor, The Independent, 29 December
2002
Intro, Alan Marston: The implications of the UK report far transcend
national boundaries. The NZ Labour Government insistence, against
huge
public opposition, on lifting a ban on commercial release of
GM technology
in Oct 2003 must, now, be overturned and the ban remain. Any
other response
from Labour would be irresponsible.
Alarming new results from official trials of GM crops are severely
jeopardising Government plans for growing them commercially
in Britain. The
results, in a new Government report, show – for the first time
in Britain –
that genes from GM crops are interbreeding on a large scale
with
conventional ones, and also with weeds.
The report is so devastating to the Government's case for GM
crops that
ministers last week sought to bury it by slipping the first
information on
it out on the website of the Department of the Environment,
Food and Rural
Affairs (Defra) on Christmas Eve, the one day in the year when
no
newspapers are being prepared. Even then, the department published
only a
heavily edited summary of the main report. Unusually, the full
report,
which will contain much more devastating detail, was withheld
from
publication on the website. Defra said it was available on request,
but
when The Independent on Sunday tried to ask for it last week,
the
department said no one was available to provide it.
The report, the result of six years of monitoring of GM crops
in Britain,
is particularly politically explosive and it gives the first
results from
the official farm-scale trials, which ministers have been running
to test
the suitability of growing GM crops in Britain. The Government
has
repeatedly said that the results of the trials would settle
the question of
whether GM crops endangered the environment but – perhaps because
it knew
what the research had found – it has been downplaying their
significance in
recent weeks.
The trials – originally set up to buy time in the face of strong
public
hostility to the crops – were not designed to look at the possibility
of
genes from GM crops contaminating nearby plants, but focusedon
the effects
of different uses of pesticides on GM and non-GM plants. But,
after this
was criticised, studies of this "gene flow'' were bolted on.
The report
covers true studies carried out between 1994 and 2000 by the
National
Institute of Agricultural Botany and the Laboratory of the Government
Chemist. It shows that genes from GM oil seed rape, specially
engineered to
be resistant to herbicides, contaminated con- ventional crops
as far as 200
yards away.
Equally alarmingly, GM oil seed rape that escaped from a crop
harvested in
1996 persisted for at least four years, until studies ended
in 2000.
In another case, the report adds: "It was found that some combine
harvesters were not cleaned after the harvesting of the GM crop,''
and
"subsequently flushed out'' the GM seed on to ground intended
for
conventional crops "causing contamination of this field.''
Most worryingly of all, the report shows that the GM crop readily
interbred
with a weed, wild turnip, giving it resistance to herbicides
and thus
raising the prospect of the development of "super weeds".
The report concludes that the research "indicates that commercial-scale
releases of GM oil seed rape in future could pollinate other
crops and wild
turnip''.
Other studies from elsewhere in the world have shown that interbreeding
occurs, and English Nature, the Government's wildlife watchdog,
has said
super weeds will "inevitably'' emerge in Britain if GM crops
are grown
commercially. In a commentary also published by Defra on Christmas
Eve, the
official advisory committee on releases to the environment said
that the
contamination was "entirely within expectations''. The committee
added that
"in itself'' gene flow did not constitute a risk to the environment.
But
Pete Riley of Friends of the Earth said the results showed that
if GM crops
became widespread, almost all similar crops would inevitably
become
contaminated, severely threatening organic agriculture. He added:
"It is
not surprising that the Government has tried to cover up this
report. "It
shows that we need to know a great deal more about these issues
before we
even contemplate growing GM crops commercially.''
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