Monsanto GM soya plants have hardiness defect

Farmers lose out again with the latest GM side
effect from this so-called 'science'.

The following item from New Scientist is also reported in the London Times
today.

So much for this technology being fully tested.

GM crop losses of up to 40 per cent is not a recipe for feeding the world
particlarly when many of the world's hungry live in hot climates.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

New Scientist, 20 November 1999


NEWS 20/11/99

Monsanto's modified soya beans are cracking up in the heat

Splitting headache

IT SEEMS barely a week goes by without another piece of bad news for the
agribiotech giant Monsanto. Now researchers in the US have found that
hot climates don't agree with Monsanto's herbicide-resistant soya beans,
causing stems to split open and crop losses of up to 40 per cent.

This could be a serious blow to the St Louis-based company, which sees
Brazil and other Latin American countries as major markets for its soya
beans. "It has the potential to be quite a problem," says Bill Vencill
of the University of Georgia in Athens.

Vencill examined the effects of heat on the engineered soya beans after
farmers in the southern state alerted him to unexpected crop losses. He
realised that most severe losses occurred during Georgia's two hottest
springs since the beans were launched in 1996. "In the years we saw the
problems, the soils were reaching 40 to 50 °C," says Vencill.

His team replicated these conditions in laboratory growth chambers,
comparing the hardiness of the Monsanto plants with that of conventional

strains of soya bean. In soils that reached only 25 °C during the day,
the genetically modified Monsanto beans grew just as well as conventional
beans. But in warmer soils, the Monsanto plants appeared stunted. And in
soils reaching 45 °C, the differences were marked (see Figure). Vencill
described the findings at a meeting of the British Crop Protection
Council in Brighton this week.


"We saw lower heights, yields and weights in the Monsanto beans," says
Vencill. Worse still, stems of virtually all the Monsanto beans split
open
as the first leaves began to emerge compared with between 50 and 70 per
cent of the other test plants. This same phenomenon had occurred on
farms, but had been blamed on fungal disease. "Instead, we think the stem
splits, and it exposes the plant to secondary infection," says Vencill.

Vencill suspects that the phenomenon is the result of changes in plant
physiology caused by the addition of genes making the beans resistant to
glyphosate, the herbicide marketed as Roundup by Monsanto. Plants
carrying these genetic alterations have been shown to produce up to 20 per
cent
more lignin, the tough, woody form of cellulose. "We think it might make the
plants more brittle," says Vencill.

Intriguingly, he found that plants resistant to a different herbicide,
gluphosinate, were not affected by the heat, so he concludes the problem
must be peculiar to glyphosate resistance. "It's not genetic
modification per se that's causing the effects," he says.

Vencill says that the bacterial enzyme that imparts resistance to
glyphosate affects a major metabolic pathway in the plant, and has the
side effect of sending lignin production "into overdrive". Gluphosinate
resistance, by contrast, is achieved using a gene that simply enables
plants to break down the herbicide.

Monsanto says it can't comment in detail on Vencill's results "until
we've
seen a published and peer-reviewed article". But a spokesman suggests
that
farmers might avoid the problem by choosing a variety of engineered soya
bean that is better suited to hot conditions.

Andy Coghlan