Bad news for organic farmers…
IN THE WILD Genetically engineered versions of the canola plant are thriving.
Since the mid 90’ies, farmers and scientists around the world were fanatically pro or fanatically against the Monsanto’s plants based on GMO’s and the weedkiller produced by this company called “Roundup” that kills everything around the GM plant but not the plant. Quite handy the supporters of GMO’s were saying then. I still remember their voices and their articles as I was starting my PhD in Food Science in the University of Leeds in 1993. By 1998, when I started lecturing…against GMO’s and …Roundup, it was quite obvious that some strong side-effects could potentially arise from the use of GMO’s and Roundup. There was no strong scientific evidence against Monsanto then. Also, there was no evidence at all that GMO’s were safe.
Safety and scientific data
Safety is a tricky concept! What is safe? The non-dangerous is safe? The potentially harmless is safe? How many years of research do we need in order to prove that something is safe?
In the case of GMO’s and Roundup, however, it took some years in order to create strong evidence against their safety for the environment! N.B. I wrote “environment” and not humans! Even today, there is NO evidence that GMO’s are not safe for people but we know beyond any reasonable doubt that GMO’s kill biodiversity and also can destroy organic farming.
Genetically engineered versions of the canola plant are flourishing in the form of roadside weeds in North Dakota, scientists say, in one of the first instances of a genetically modified crop establishing itself in the wild. How much of a problem this might be is still a subject to debate. But critics of GMO’s have long warned that it is hard to keep genes in a box. So, genes conferring resistance to common herbicides have started spreading with unwanted consequences.
“If there’s a problem in North Dakota, it’s that these crop plants are becoming weeds,” said Cynthia L. Sagers to NYT, a biology professor at the University of Arkansas, who led the study. Results were presented few days ago at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Canola, whose seeds are pressed to make the popular cooking oil, is a type of oilseed rape developed by breeders in Canada. In the United States, it is grown mainly in North Dakota and Minnesota, though cultivation is spreading.
The roadside plants apparently start growing when seeds blow from fields or fall out of trucks carrying the crops to market. In the plains of Canada, where canola is widely grown, roadside biotech plants resistant to the herbicide Roundup have become a problem, said Alexis Knispel, who has just completed her PhD on the subject at the University of Manitoba. Some farmers, she said, have had to return to plowing their fields to control weeds — a practice that contributes to soil erosion — because they can no longer use Roundup to control the stray canola plants. She also said the proliferation of roadside canola would make it difficult to keep organic canola free of genetically engineered material.
For the North Dakota study, Meredith G. Schafer, a graduate student at Arkansas, and colleagues traversed 3,000 miles of roads, stopping every five miles and taking a sample of one canola plant if there were any growing. Of the 604 plants collected, 80 percent were genetically engineered, Dr. Sagers said. Some were Roundup Ready, with a gene conferring resistance to Roundup, also known as glyphosate. Others were Liberty Link crops, with a gene conferring resistance to glufosinate. Two plants were found to have genes conferring resistance to both herbicides, suggesting that the crops resistant to each herbicide had mated.
Conclusion
The GM genes have escaped the Pandora’s box and if you are an organic farmer…it will almost impossible to keep your plants free of GM material. Eventually, this will mean that you are going to have legal problems since legislation in EU allows organic material to have only up to 0.9% GM DNA. If more than 0.9% GM DNA is detected in any organic produce, then the farmer can not call it …”organic” .
Tricky times for organic farming…
related links
EU Commission washes her hands about GM safety
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