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Seeds of doubt over GM crop experiments

July 31
The Scotsman

HAVE you heard of the Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology Commission (AEBC)? Probably not - which is strange because it was set up by Tony Blair last year as the primary agency to consult with the general public on the future of GM crops in Britain. Its official remit is to "keep under review current and possible future developments in biotechnology with actual or potential implications for agriculture and the environment" and "advise government on the ethical and social implications arising from these developments and their public acceptability". So far, it has held five meetings around the UK, including one in Edinburgh last April, as part of its formal program of consultation before publishing its first report, probably sometime in September.

While the AEBC has a membership balanced between green activists, academics and GM scientists, there are those who worry that its low profile suggests it might be more a government sop to public opinion than a genuine consultation exercise. If the latter is true, even in part, it suggests Mr Blair is strangely out of touch with current public anxieties. Mr Blair has taken a consistently hard line on supporting GM crop experiments as part of his vision of a modern, high-tech Britain almost to the point where it has become his version of George Bush’s Missile Defense Strategy. But now there are signs some of his ministers are unhappy with this stance and want any decision to introduce commercial GM crops postponed till after the next general election. One worried minister has been heard to mutter: "The last thing we want is a public uprising with demonstrations all over the country."

One indication of the public mood is seen in the growing unwillingness of English courts to convict GM protesters. Earlier this month, charges of aggravated trespass were dropped against seven protesters who damaged a GM crop in Dorset, while last month a judge acquitted 11 people charged with criminal damage on a GM maize crop in Essex. The protesters claimed a poll showed the local community supported them. Another 28 activists were cleared of criminal damage in Norfolk last September.

However, the Government has announced locations for another round of GM trials, including three in Aberdeenshire and another in Ross-shire. Ministers and the AEBC are worried by the possibility that these trials could indicate that GM crops are theoretically safe. That would lead to pressure from the biotechnology industry to begin commercial exploitation while the public still remains suspicious of GM foods to say the least. And that could set the public and the activists on a collision course with the government.

There is now a very clear need for the AEBC to report urgently before the next round of GM crop experiments. And for the Commission to take some of the heat out of the current debate by acting as a more visible lightning-rod for public opinion than self-appointed activists trashing farmers’ crops. Ultimately, the consumers will decide the future of GM foods through their spending, or the lack of it.

But at the moment, in the light of the BSE and foot-and-mouth fiascos, the public urgently needs independent assurance on GM foods rather than Mr Blair’s pious sermons.

A new strain of tomatoes, and don't hold the salt

Saline tolerance allows growth in dry soil

July 31
Washington Post

Researchers have genetically engineered the world's first tomato that can grow in salty water -- an advance that could help solve one of the biggest problems in agriculture.

The salt-tolerant tomato has been endowed with a gene from another plant that enables it to shunt salt into storage cavities, allowing the plant to thrive in what otherwise would be marginal cropland.

"Salty water is generally toxic to plants, but we have found a way to increase the tomato's ability to transport it away and isolate it from the rest of the plant cell," said Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California at Davis, a lead researcher on the project. "The sodium is taken up and kept in the leaves, away from the tomato itself."

Blumwald said the tomatoes taste no different from conventional varieties, but cautioned that was a personal rather than a scientific conclusion.

Global food specialists say the discovery could help address one of the most serious problems in agriculture: Irrigation, particularly in very dry areas, tends to leave behind salt deposits that make cropland increasingly less productive. Some researchers have estimated that as much as 25 percent of irrigated land -- which produces 40 percent of the world's food -- is threatened by growing salt deposits.

Those lands are concentrated in dry sections of India, China, Pakistan and the western United States, where salts are not regularly flushed by rainfall. Agricultural specialists have estimated that as much as one-third of India's irrigated land has a significant and growing problem with salt, and that 1 percent of irrigated land globally is lost annually to salinization.

Farmers have long cross-bred plants to create varieties more resistant to salt; a major international effort to develop a more salt-resistant rice is underway in Egypt, for instance. Researchers are optimistic that through biotechnology they could quickly create crops resistant to salt at much higher levels than traditional breeding could achieve.

"Any technology that makes salt-damaged cropland more productive would be a real breakthrough," said Stan Wood, who studies global agriculture for the International Food Policy Research Institute.

According to Blumwald, the genetically engineered tomato can grow in soil irrigated by water that is about 50 times saltier than normal. He said that although his research was on tomatoes growing in water made salty through irrigation, the technology would theoretically apply to naturally brackish water as well.

Blumwald and University of Toronto researcher Hong-Xia Zhang used a gene from the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a widely researched relative of the cabbage, to transform their tomatoes. Their work is published in this month's edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and was released yesterday.

Blumwald said another potential use of the modified tomatoes (or other crops made similarly salt-resistant) is to reclaim damaged soil by soaking up the salts.

According to Val Giddings, of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, there is active academic and corporate research into the fields of salt tolerance and water use in plants.

"This research has very clear and enormous potential," he said. "Water is a huge issue now in agriculture and will be getting bigger, so technology that allows plants to use water more efficiently could have great benefits."

Giddings also said the relatively simple genetic modification that allowed the tomatoes to grow in salty conditions could have positive implications for making other crops salt-resistant and for understanding how plants use water generally. The entire genome of the Arabidopsis plant used to modify the salt-resistant tomato has been mapped, making it an especially useful tool for plant researchers.

The history of genetically transformed tomatoes has been mixed. The first genetically engineered food approved by federal regulators was the Flavr Savr tomato, which had been engineered to stay ripe for a longer time after being picked from the vine. The product was initially successful, then was pulled from the market for commercial reasons.

Any effort to commercialize the engineered, salt-resistant tomatoes would require new regulatory approvals and field testing, which Blumwald said could be completed within three years.

In the Nature Biotechnology article, the authors reported that their tomatoes, which were grown in University of Toronto greenhouses, did have slightly increased levels of sodium and chlorine, which together make salt. They also said the tomatoes were somewhat smaller than conventional varieties.

Blumwald said he and his colleagues are working to create salt-resistant canola.

GM pigs are a fecal attraction

July 31
Agence France Presse

Paris -- Scientists have genetically modified pigs so that they excrete less phosphorus, thus easing one of the biggest pollution problems in livestock farming, the journal Nature Biotechnology reports on Monday.

The GM swine have had a gene added which causes their saliva glands to produce phytase, an enzyme that is needed to digest plant phosphorus but is naturally absent in porkers.

A Canadian team led by microbiologist Cecil Forsberg of the University of Guelph, Ontario, bred 25 pigs with the phytase gene, and found that this reduced phosporus in their excretions by 75 percent.

The authors say pig manure is not a problem to be sniffed at.

Tens of millions of tons of excretions from pigs and chickens - "monogastric" creatures that do not digest plant phosphorus - are deposited on farm soil as fertilizer each year.

The problem has become critical in countries like the Netherlands, where land is scarce and the pig farming is intensive.

Rain washes the phosphate into the water table, thus potentially contaminating supplies for humans, and into rivers, where it becomes nutrition for algae.

The resultant algal "blooms" can deplete oxygen, killing fish and other aquatic life.

Until now, the usual way to reduce manure phosphorus was to supplement pigfeed with phytase, so that the unwanted element was fully digested. This can cut the excreted phosphorus by 56 percent, but it is expensive and raises pollution worries in its own right.

"Pigs producing phytase in the saliva present a new biological approach for reducing phosphorus pollution in animal agriculture and for reducing dependence on diminishing global phosphate reserves," says Forsberg's team.

Genetically-modified food is a matter of big controversy.

A first wave of engineered crops, such as corn, cotton and tomatoes, has been been fervently embraced by the United States and Canada and some developing countries, especially China, are eager to follow suit.

In contrast, governments in Western Europe, under pressure from environment groups, have widely banned or suspended commercial use of these crops.

There are no genetically-modified farm animals on the market at the moment, but there is plenty of experimental work under way to produce animals that grow faster or produce less fat thanks to genes introduced from other species.

Critics say the long-term consequences of these foods on human health and the environment remain unclear, and it is wise to shelve such work for the time being.

Genetically modified pig passes on cleaner manure

University of Guelph's 'Enviropig' could be in supermarket within five years

July 31
Ottawa Citizen

Ontario pigs genetically engineered to produce less-polluting manure will be the first genetically modified farm animals to reach market anywhere in the world, their creators at the University of Guelph believe.

The "Enviropigs," three generations of them so far, have a gene built in the laboratory from other organisms that allows their digestion to work much more efficiently, removing 50 to 75 per cent of the phosphorus in their manure.

Phosphorus in pig manure is a major environmental problem that saturates soil and leaks into groundwater and lakes and rivers. There it makes algae and weeds grow, and these use up oxygen from the water when they die and rot. That's what happened to Lake Erie in the 1960s, and still happens in many Canadian bodies of water.

Now John Phillips and his fellow researchers at Guelph have taken a gene from the E. coli bacterium, added a piece of mouse gene, and injected the blend into pig embryos at the single-cell stage.

Two more generations of pigs bred the normal way from the original lab animals all carry the same gene.

Bacon and ham from these pigs could be in supermarkets in three to five years, the length of time it will take to get federal approval to sell their meat to humans, says Mr. Phillips, a geneticist.

Apart from a better digestive system, he says, the pigs look, act, and behave just like ordinary pigs. They probably taste the same too, but no one has actually eaten one yet.

The pigs make anti-GM food groups such as the Council of Canadians nervous. The council wants longer-term testing of all genetically modified foods, both crops and livestock.

"It may sound like a great idea: the Enviropig," said council spokeswoman Nadege Adam. "We don't want to eat it until we can be assured that it's safe. Right now there isn't a way" to prove this through the federal review process.

The ordinary pig's problem is that it can't digest phytate, a molecule in plants that stores phosphorus.

"Pigs can't digest that. It goes right through the animal into the manure," says Mr. Phillips.

As pig farms grow from family operations into giant factory operations with 5,000 or more hogs in a single barn, farmers are running out of places to spray the manure, which is liquefied and kept in large holding tanks.

"That's where the manure pollution problem is really at its peak, in these big, several-thousand-animal units, where the manure output from this point source is far greater than they can reasonably transport out and apply onto fields in the surrounding area. There's just not enough land base," Mr. Phillips said.

He and colleagues Cecil Forsberg and Serguei Golovan added a gene from E. coli that creates an enzyme that digests phytate, the molecule pigs have trouble with.

They added the mouse DNA to regulate the first gene, making it work only in the saliva glands of pigs.

So far two parents who both carry the transgene have passed it on successfully to all their piglets.

Are they normal otherwise?

"They appear to be quite fine," he said. "We don't know the complete answer yet, but in all of our fishing and digging and prying we haven't found anything unusual yet."

The research is described in tomorrow's edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

GM wheat panned by Canadian consumers, farmers

July 31
Reuters

Winnipeg -- Canadian consumer groups, scientists and farmers joined forces on Tuesday to demand the federal government postpone approval of genetically modified wheat, saying the engineered crop could devastate wheat exports and harm human health.

``This is an inadequately tested experiment that has no place contaminating our farms and food,'' Holly Penfound, a member of Greenpeace Canada, told a news conference.

``Our government should be calling the shots, not the big biotech companies pushing GM wheat into the market,'' said Penfound who is Greenpeace's environmental health coordinator.

The coalition of environmental groups, consumer watchdogs, and grain marketers sent a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chretien, asking him to put the brakes on introducing transgenic wheat until its effects on the environment, consumer health and agricultural trade are addressed.

The groups were reacting to plans by U.S.-based biotech company Monsanto Co. to introduce the world's first genetically modified (GM) wheat, known as ``Roundup Ready,'' a herbicide-tolerant spring wheat variety, between 2003 and 2005.

This past spring, the company seeded several test fields at secret locations across the Canadian Prairies, news of which heightened public suspicion.

Monsanto and other biotech firms working on transgenic wheat argue their genetic engineering -- Monsanto's crops are designed to resist its Roundup Ready weedkiller, allowing farmers to destroy weeds without damaging plants -- will boost production and reduce the need for farm chemicals. But critics say that GM crops could cross-pollinate and pollute non-GM fields.

``This is just really very powerful technology and it's got a lot of potential, but it's misapplied in this case. It's not something farmers want,'' said Bill Toews, a grain farmer in Kane, Manitoba.

At a time when many of Canada's wheat customers in Europe and Asia are demanding GM-free certification, the Canadian grain industry is especially nervous about the ability and cost of segregating GM and non-GM crops.

Canada is one of the largest wheat producers and exporters in the world -- shipping about 12 million tonnes worth between C$3 billion and C$5 billion annually.

``The whole world is looking at this from fresh eyes and I think in Canada we also need to look at our variety registration system or the regulations we have in place right now for approval and think about the fact that it is new technology and we may need to make a change,'' said Patty Rosher, market development program manager with the Canadian Wheat Board.

The board, which controls all of Canada's wheat, durum and barley exports, has already lobbied Ottawa to make market acceptance of GM wheat a criteria for regulatory approval.

Monsanto, which says it will also seeking commercial approval of Roundup Ready wheat in the United States, has recently tried to ease public mistrust and industry unease by consulting with various groups.

``If we don't have a product that is going to provide benefit to farmers, benefit to the industry and it's (not) going to be accepted by consumers, then essentially we don't have a product,'' said Trish Jordan, a spokeswoman with Monsanto Canada, based in Winnipeg.

``They're saying they do not want GM wheat at this time, which is fine because we're not ready to introduce it at this time,'' Jordan said.

($1 equals $1.53 Canadian)

Farm, health, citizen groups call for halt to development of GM wheat

July 31
Canadian Press