Posted on 3-6-2003

GM About Killers
Independent Newspaper, UK

The fear that has held up the commercialisation of genetically modified
(GM) crops in Britain for four years is not in any way about eating GM
produce. It is about the potential effect on wildlife of the extra-powerful
herbicides that all four GM crops currently intended for planting in
Britain have been genetically-engineered to tolerate.

These chemicals - Monsanto's Roundup and Bayer's Liberty are the best-known
- are "broad-spectrum" herbicides, which means they are so deadly they kill
every plant that they encounter. Their previous use was to clear fields
entirely - they could not be used in the growing season, as they would kill
the crop plants themselves. But with GM crops developed that can take these
weedkillers, they can be used throughout the year. And the fear of the
English Nature, the Government's wildlife advisory body, is that the
insect, plant and bird life that has been enormously damaged by four
decades of intensive farming, in which chemical weedkillers and pesticides
have played a leading role, will be damaged even further.

With GM herbicide-tolerant crops, they fear, there will be nothing left at
all in the farmer's fields but the crop - it will be "green concrete".

In 1999 English Nature persuaded the government to carry out a four-year
programme of trials to see if the GM crops and their weedkillers really did
make things worse for wildlife. The GM companies agreed to a planting
moratorium while this was done. The trials were carried out on a large
scale ("farm-scale") across the country, eventually at 263 sites for four
crops (fodder maize, beet, and winter- and spring-sown oilseed rape). They
matched the weedkiller regime of the GM crops against that of conventional
crops, and compared the effect on plants, insects, snails and other small
lifeforms, of both.

Some anti-GM campaign groups protested against the trials themselves,
saying they risked the escape of GM genes into the environment. A number of
attacks on trial sites were made by activists, the most celebrated being
that by Lord Melchett, executive director of Greenpeace, and 27 other
Greenpeace members, on a Norfolk farm in July 1999. Lord Melchett and his
colleagues were arrested and charged with criminal damage, but they were
later acquitted by a jury at Norwich Crown Court. The trials will finish in
July when the last crop of winter-sown oilseed rape is harvested. The
results will then be analysed, peer-reviewed, and published by the Royal
Society.

If they show real increased harm to the environment, the Government could
halt the commercialisation of GM crops in Britain, despite the fact that
one crop has already been authorised for release by the European Union, and
the other three are close to their authorisation.