GM crops breeding with plants in the wild

January 3, 2003

GM Crops Breeding With Many Plants In The Wild

http://www.rense.com/general33/gmcvrop.htm

Alarming new results from official trials of GM crops are severelyjeopardising Government plans for growing them commercially in Britain.

The results, in a new Government report, show - for the first time inBritain - that genes from GM crops are interbreeding on a large scalewith conventional ones, and also with weeds.

The report is so devastating to the Government's case for GM crops thatministers last week sought to bury it by slipping the first informationon it out on the website of the Department of the Environment, Food andRural Affairs (Defra) on Christmas Eve, the one day in the year when nonewspapers are being prepared.

Even then, the department published only a heavily edited summary ofthe main report. Unusually, the full report, which will contain muchmore devastating detail, was withheld from publication on the website.Defra said it was available on request, but when The Independent onSunday tried to ask for it last week, the department said no one wasavailable to provide it.

The report, the result of six years of monitoring of GM crops inBritain, is particularly politically explosive and it gives the firstresults from the official farm-scale trials, which ministers have beenrunning to test the suitability of growing GM crops in Britain.

The Government has repeatedly said that the results of the trials wouldsettle the question of whether GM crops endangered the environment but -perhaps because it knew what the research had found - it has beendownplaying their significance in recent weeks.

The trials - originally set up to buy time in the face of strong publichostility to the crops - were not designed to look at the possibility ofgenes from GM crops contaminating nearby plants, but focusedon theeffects 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 theNational Institute of Agricultural Botany and the Laboratory of theGovernment Chemist. It shows that genes from GM oil seed rape, speciallyengineered to be resistant to herbicides, contaminated con- ventionalcrops as far as 200 yards away.

Equally alarmingly, GM oil seed rape that escaped from a crop harvestedin 1996 persisted for at least four years, until studies ended in 2000.

In another case, the report adds: "It was found that some combineharvesters were not cleaned after the harvesting of the GM crop,'' and"subsequently flushed out'' the GM seed on to ground intended forconventional crops "causing contamination of this field.''

Most worryingly of all, the report shows that the GM crop readilyinterbred with a weed, wild turnip, giving it resistance to herbicidesand thus raising the prospect of the development of "super weeds".

The report concludes that the research "indicates that commercial-scalereleases of GM oil seed rape in future could pollinate other crops andwild turnip''.

Other studies from elsewhere in the world have shown that interbreedingoccurs, and English Nature, the Government's wildlife watchdog, has saidsuper weeds will "inevitably'' emerge in Britain if GM crops are growncommercially.

In a commentary also published by Defra on Christmas Eve, the officialadvisory committee on releases to the environment said that thecontamination was "entirely within expectations''.

The committee added that "in itself'' gene flow did not constitute arisk to the environment. But Pete Riley of Friends of the Earth said theresults showed that if GM crops became widespread, almost all similarcrops would inevitably become contaminated, severely threatening organicagriculture. He added: "It is not surprising that the Government hastried to cover up this report.

"It shows that we need to know a great deal more about these issuesbefore we even contemplate growing GM crops commercially.''