GM Crop Ruins Fields For 15 Years

Independent Online

October 9, 2005

GM crops contaminate the countryside for up to 15 years after they have been harvested, startling new government research shows.

The findings cast a cloud over the prospects of growing the modified crops in Britain, suggesting that farmers who try them out for one season will find fields blighted for a decade and a half.

Financed by GM companies and Margaret Beckett´s Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the report effectively torpedoes the Government´s strategy for introducing GM oilseed rape to this country.

Ministers have stipulated that the crops should not be grown until rules are worked out to enable them to "co-exist" with conventional ones. But the research shows that this is effectively impossible.

The study, published by the Royal Society, examined five sites across England and Scotland where modified oilseed rape has been cultivated, and found significant amounts of GM plants growing even after the sites had been returned to ordinary crops. It concludes that the research reveals "a potentially serious problem associated with the temporal persistence of rape seeds in soil."

The researchers found that nine years after a single modified crop, an average of two GM rape plants would grow in every square metre of an affected field. After 15 years, this came down to one plant per square metre - still enough to break the EC limits on permissible GM contamination.

Last night Pete Riley, the director of GM Freeze, said; "It is becoming clearer and clearer that it is going to be impossible to grow GM crops in Britain."

Why is this a "danger"?

"The British Medical Association (BMA), which has a membership of over 120,000 and represents more than 80% of British doctors, has called for a moratorium on GM crop trials in Scotland. Lim Li Ching reports.

In its submission to the Scottish Parliament’s Health and Community Care Committee on 20 November 2002, the BMA urged that GM crop trials be stopped immediately, as a precautionary measure to safeguard public health. It said that "insufficient care" has been taken over public health and concerns are "serious enough" to justify an immediate end to the trials.
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, the BMA said that not enough is known to give an accurate risk assessment of the health impact of GM crops on the health of local communities. It thus called for independently funded and reviewed research in the public domain, which considers the long term health and environmental health impacts of GM crop planting and the consumption of GM food. Until such research is conducted, GM crops should not be freely cultivated and extension of the current farm-scale trials would be "ill advised" and "potentially irresponsible".

According to the BMA, the most worrying issue is the potential danger posed by GM crops in creating antibiotic resistant pathogenic organisms. ISIS has been consistently drawing attention to this issue and to the dangers of horizontal gene transfer. The BMA asserted that there is evidence that these genes may be transferred to non-GM plants and that there is significant risk of antibiotic resistance transferring "possibly into pathogenic organisms causing human disease".

Any increase in the number of resistant micro-organisms through the transfer of marker genes from GM foods would potentially have very serious adverse effects on human health.The BMA cited the use of antibiotic resistant markers in GM foods as a completely unacceptable risk, however slight to human health, and called for the use of antibiotic resistant markers in GMOs to be prohibited immediately.

Another concern expressed was the potential adverse effects of allergenicity on human health from GM products. The BMA called for further research and tests on GM foodstuffs for allergenicity, pending which there should be an open-ended moratorium on transgenic products, and especially on introducing nut genes and proteins etc. into cereals."

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