More weedkillers needed to help GE crops fight 'superweeds'

By MICHAEL McCARTHY

LONDON - Britain's growing row over genetically-engineered crops will be stepped up today with the news that "superweeds" have evolved which are resistant to the powerful weedkillers for which GE crops were specially designed.

The development, which comes as the sacked former Environment Minister Michael Meacher puts himself at the head of the anti-GE campaign, will be seized on by opponents of GE technology as undermining its whole rationale.

It means that more weedkillers – not less, as the biotechnology companies have claimed – will be needed in GE crop fields, thus further intensifying the intensive agriculture that has wiped out a large portion of Britain's farmland wildlife in the last four decades.

Monsanto, the GE market leader, confirmed to the Independent at the weekend that its solution for dealing with resistant weeds was further applications of different weedkillers.

Coming on top of Mr Meacher's open accusation, in yesterday's Independent on Sunday, that Tony Blair, as a GE supporter, was seeking to bury health warnings about GE produce and "rushing to desired conclusions" [about the worth of GE] that cannot be scientifically supported", the news about superweeds will further intensify the GE debate.

It has been communicated to the Government by an American academic specialist in weed control, who has posted a paper about it on the website of the official GE science review, headed by the Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor David King.

This will report soon, with an overview of GE science, in advance of the long-delayed decision, due this autumn, on whether GE crops should be commercialised in Britain.

The paper, by Professor Bob Hartzler of the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University, reveals that in the last seven years four, and perhaps five, weed species have been found with resistance to the herbicide glyphosate – which is best-known around the world under the Monsanto trade name Roundup

The resistance has come about not through gene transfer from GE herbicide-tolerant crops, as some have feared, but through natural evolution.

Glyphosate is a "broad spectrum" herbicide, meaning that – originally – it killed everything in the fields where it was applied, including crops. GE crops were specifically developed to be tolerant of it, so it could be applied throughout the growing season, keeping the fields weed-free, and two GE crops proposed for commercial growth in Britain, fodder beet and sugar beet, are glyphosate-tolerant. But now weeds have been found in Australia, California, Chile, Malaysia and various parts of the US which it cannot kill.

Dr Greg Elmore, Monsanto's US technical manager for soybeans (one of the largest GE crops) said at the weekend that Monsanto was taking the question of glyphosate resistance very seriously, and tackling it with a series of weed control management practices. With soybeans, he said, resistant weeds were controlled with a pre-planting "burn down" (killing of everything) with another weed killer, 2,4-D.

At least three of the resistant weeds had evolved in situations where glyphosate was being used with non-GE crops, he said, adding that it was far from the only weedkiller for which weeds had evolved resistance – some herbicides had as many as 70 weeds resistant to them.

But Friends of the Earth's GE campaigner Pete Riley took a different view. "Companies like Monsanto have spun GE crops and their weedkillers as having less impact on the environment, but the fact of resistant weeds undoubtedly means more weedkillers, and means the impact on the environment will be greater," he said.

"These discoveries remove a central plank from the whole argument for GE crops in the UK."

The situation would worsen, he said. "As resistance spreads, the complexity and cost of weed control for farmers will both increase. The overuse of Roundup on GE crops provides the ideal conditions for resistance to spread from field to field. Roundup-resistant genes escaping from GE crops via split seeds and cross-pollination will add to these problems."

The intervention of Mr Meacher yesterday, with a TV interview as well as his Independent on Sunday article, is one of the most significant events in the whole five years of argument over GE crops in Britain.

Having left the Government, he is now free to be open with his opposition to GE commercialisation, and it is clear that he will be its most formidable opponent. This is not least – as his article showed – because of his mastery of the technical detail. As the long-time minister in charge, he has closely read and absorbed everything to do with the argument that has been published in recent years. Yesterday he listed a series of reports and findings suggesting that the full impact of GE technology was still dangerously unpredictable, saying that many of the health tests carried out were "scientifically vacuous".

- INDEPENDENT