GE crops can harm wildlife - British study shows

Yet another nail was hammered into the coffin of the genetically-engineered (GE) food industry in Britain after the final trial of a four-year series of experiments found, once more, that genetically modified crops can be harmful to wildlife.

The world's biggest study to date on the impact of GE crops on wildlife has found birds and bees are more likely to thrive in fields of natural rapeseed than GE seed, scientists say.

They showed the ultra-powerful weedkillers that the crops are engineered to tolerate would bring about further damage to a countryside already devastated by intensive farming.

Results of the farm-scale trial of winter-sown oilseed rape raised further doubts about whether GE crops can ever be grown in Britain without causing further damage to the nation's wildlife.

But scientists behind the British study were keen to stress the differences between the two arose not because the crop was genetically engineered but because of the way pesticides were applied.

"The study demonstrates the important of the effects of herbicide management on wildlife in fields and adjacent areas," researcher David Bohan said.

Only one of the four farm-scale trials, which have gone on for nearly five years, showed that growing GE crops might be less harmful to birds, flowers and insects than the non-GE equivalent - and even that was attacked as flawed, because the weedkiller the particular conventional crop required was so destructive it was about to be banned by the EU.

Even so, a year ago the Government gave a licence for that crop - a maize known as Chardon LL, created by the German chemical group Bayer - to be grown in Britain, thus officially opening the way for the GE era in Britain, to loud protests from environmentalists.

However, only three weeks later Bayer withdrew its application, suggesting the regulatory climate would be too inhibitive. That followed the withdrawal from Europe of the world-leader in GE crops, the American biotech giant Monsanto, which also seemed to have tired of the struggle.

Since then, the GE industry in Britain has withered on the vine, despite the fact that some members of the Government, and Tony Blair in particular, were privately great supporters of it from the outset.

Official policy is portrayed as being neutral and based simply on scientific advice. But the study's results make it even less likely other big agribusiness firms will want to come forward and go through the extensive testing process - and public opposition - that bringing a GE crop to market in Britain would involve.

Last night, the Conservatives spotted a political opportunity from the latest test results and, today, the Shadow Environment Secretary, Tim Yeo, will pledge to prevent any commercial planting of GE crops until science shows it would be safe for people and the environment, and there is a liability regime in place to deal with any cross-contamination.

Observers saw that as yet another Tory attempt to win over Middle England voters.

Although the experiment did not look directly at the catastrophic demise of farmland birds over the past 50 years, ornithologists warned the results suggested that growing GE oilseed rape would almost certainly exacerbate the problem.

David Gibbons, the head of conservation at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said the herbicides used to spray GE rape killed broad-leaved wild flowers such as chickweed and fat hen that are so important to the diet of songbirds such as skylarks, tree sparrows and bullfinches.

"For most farmland birds, broad-leaved weeds are a particularly important part of their diet. There are a few birds that will take grass seeds but, by and large, it would be hard to see how the loss of broad-leaved weeds would be beneficial to them," Dr Gibbons said.

"Broad-leaved weeds are particularly important to farmland birds and the widespread cultivation of this crop, in this way, would damage hopes of reversing their decline," he said.

The trial of winter oilseed rape involved planting conventional and GE forms of the crop in adjacent plots at 65 sites across Britain. Scientists then carefully monitored wild flowers, grasses, seeds, bees, butterflies and other invertebrates.

Over the course of the three-year experiment, the scientists counted a million weeds, two million insects and made 7,000 field trips. Although they found similar overall numbers of weeds in the two types of crop, broad-leaved weeds such as chickweed were far fewer in the GE plots.

The scientists counted fewer bees and butterflies in the GE plots compared to plots of conventional oilseed rape.

Les Firbank, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, who led the study, said that there was about one-third fewer seeds from broad-leaved flowers in the GE plots compared to fields with conventional oilseed rape.

"These differences were still present two years after the crop had been sown ... So we've got a significant biological difference that is carrying on from season to season," he said.

GE oilseed rape is genetically designed to be resistant to a weedkiller that would kill the non-GE crop. It means that farmers are free to use broader-spectrum herbicides.

The three previous farm-scale trials into crops investigated spring-sown oilseed rape, maize and beet.

- Independent and Reuters