CropGen

GM Mix-Up Offers An Opportunity Not To Be Missed

Quite inadvertently, it seems that some tens of thousands of acres in the UK were planted with oilseed rape, less than one per cent of it genetically modified for herbicide tolerance. Oil from this GM crop was approved for food use in the UK in 1996 and has been grown and widely eaten in North America since then. Rather than panic, we should take maximum advantage of this episode to find out whatever we can about any effects of this crop may have had on the British countryside.

The immediate response on the part of the anti GM campaigners has been to call for a halt to GM crop testing. "This is the worst of all possible 'head in the sand' approaches," said Professor Howard Slater, a member of the CropGen panel. "The fact is that GM technology is being, and will continue, to be used extensively throughout the world (in this case Canada) because people in other countries recognise its value and absence of known environmental risk. Indeed, this year more than four per cent of all the world's arable farmland will be planted with GM crops - and next year there will be more yet."

It is inevitable in this context that, even if we called an immediate halt to authorised planting of GM crops in this country, we would have no guarantee that GM varieties might not find their way to the United Kingdom. The sensible thing to do is to find what the consequences of that would be, exactly the purpose of the current farmscale trial programme. There could be no greater absurdity than to stop evaluating GM crops. What we need is more, not less testing and evaluation.

As CropGen would have expected, none of the doomsday scenarios predicted by anti-GM campaigners has occurred. The seeds were also grown in Sweden, France and Germany. Together with the UK, those countries can benefit from an evaluation of possible environmental effects of GM oilseed rape in their own local contexts.