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.''