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RR® seed even worse than feared

Farm News from Cropchoice
An alternative news service for American farmers
http://www.cropchoice.com

11/2/01
RR® seed even worse than feared
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(Nov. 2, 2001 -- CropChoice guest column) -- Ecologist Robert Mann
submitted the following piece as a follow-up to what Colorado farmer
David Dechant had to say yesterday on CropChoice --Saving
conventional, non-GMO seed? Beware!)

Also, on CropChoice today, please see the press release about a new
resource from The Non-GMO Source -- Resource available for those seeking
non-GMO seeds, crops and food ingredients

by Robert Mann

Farmer David Dechant points out that not only the dreaded RoundupReady®
seed but also many other patented seeds, if permitted by the current
court examination, will lay farmers open to severe court actions if seed is
saved. I am afraid the scene is even more menacing than David says.

The important suits by GE-seed creator Monsanto against the former mayor
of Bruno, Saskatchewan, canola breeder & producer Percy Schmeiser, and
against the Nelson family, which grows soybeans, wheat and sugar beets in
North Dakota, reveal major difficulties about what genes end up on whose
land. The pressure to buy the proprietary seed for each planting is
greatly increased by these new threats.

But let us not forget that proprietary 'hybrid' seed has been a huge
trade in the overdeveloped world for half a century. Typical F1 hybrids
are not sterile, but their progeny seeds vary so much that there's very little
point in trying to grow a crop from them. What few farmers have
realised is that the properties of GM-progeny are unpredictable and may
be not only uneconomic but also downright dangerous.

At a recent large international meeting (the world dairy "summit"), I
spoke during a buffet lunch to a high-flyer biochemist who had just
delivered a very impressive talk. When I mentioned 'biolistics', the
gene-jockeys' name for one radically novel method of inserting genes into
plant cells by blasting in tiny metal pellets coated with synthetic DNA
'casettes', this prominent professor vigorously made like a tommy-gunner
spraying bullets around the room, yelling 'weapons grade'. I look
forward to a more formal public statement by this influential scientist;
meanwhile, I note that scores of other scientists were standing around
that luncheon room and had just heard him demonstrating high expertise in
biochemistry, so I take it he wouldn't mind my recounting this memorable
expression of scorn for this principal method of gene-tampering.

The 'gene gun' is favoured for monocots (e.g. maize). The main current
method for dicots (e.g. soya, potato, oilseed rape) uses a less drastic
method which is nevertheless bound to cause mutations of unprecedented,
unforeseeable kinds: synthetic DNA in 'constructs' assembled from a
modified plasmid of Agrobacterium which causes the only known tumour of
the plant kingdom, typically spliced together with modified copies of
viral DNA genes ('promoters') which not only force the desired property
(e.g. Roundup resistance) to be expressed 'irregardless' but also provoke
dozens of 'cassette' copies to be synthesized and inserted at almost any
part of the target plant cell's genome. These blocks of foreign genes
randomly inserted cannot provide predictable behaviour.

Both of these 'technologies' are practically certain to cause a wide
range of unforeseeable mutations. Some novel traits will appear promptly. Of
the minority among the target cells that survive the genes-inserting
violence, most are obvious monsters; and more subtle defects emerge among
those few cells that can be grown into a whole plant, e.g. the 6 percent
lower yield of some resulting RR® soybeans, 30 percent lower in drought
districts. But the mutations will continue to cause misbehaviour over
many generations (if viable seed are set). Generally, GE plants should
be assumed less capable of producing useful seed than the typical F1 hybrids
from which nobody would bother to propagate sexually.

The bizarre 'constructs' inserted can be safely assumed to cause a huge,
florid variety of defects. Novel pathogens of various hosts could emerge
from these genetically unstable GMOs. If any identifiable fragments of
rogue DNA appear on a farmer's land you might think he'd be entitled to
sue for damages; you might even think his government would have protected
him from, rather than promoting, such pollution; instead, the genetic
polluters have the nerve to sue him! Go back to 'Alice Through the
Looking Glass' for a precedent to this inversion of justice.

I, therefore, add to David Dechant's wise warnings my opinion that current
GE-crops are unfit for open planting. I implore farmers to read the
declaration of a card-carrying gene-jockey, Professor Patrick Brown of UC
Davis, who hopes for good GM plants in future but judges current methods
too dangerous: http://news.gefree.org.nz/patrick-brown-jul-2000.html.

Here are a few other links to scientific criticisms of gene-jiggering:

www.ucsusa.org

www.psrast.org/selfshgen.htm

www.i-sis.org/tryptophan.shtml

www.plant.uoguelph.ca/faculty/eclark

Dr Mann, a retired academic, is a consultant ecologist in Auckland,
New Zealand. He has served on New Zealand government advisory boards.

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