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transgenic wheat born to pollute



March 6, 2003
Prof. Joe Cummins
e-mail: jcummins@uwo.ca
Transgenic Wheat; Born to Pollute
The transgenic crops on the market include maize, soy beans, cotton,
canola and potato. Other major food crops being promoted for spread to
the world market include wheat and rice. Because of its huge traditional
world market wheat has been a target of interest for genetic engineers.
There have been a large number of field tests of transgenic wheat in
Canada and the United States, most of these have been done by Monsanto
Corporation , who tested herbicide tolerant varieties. The presumption
has been that the tests and the final commercial releases will be well
evaluated to prevent the kind of transgene spread to wheat that are not
genetically modified and to weeds that has been observed with canola and
maize. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency(CFIA) ,a minor sub-department
of Agriculture Canada, set a minimum isolation distance (the maximal
separation to prevent transgenic pollen flow to a nearby unmodified
wheat crop) 30 meters while (1) the Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service (APHIS), the regulatory arm of the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) set the isolation distance from any contaminating
source wheat as 33 feet for non-hybrid wheat and 660 feet for hybrid
wheat (2). A recent review by Waines and Hedge (3) shows that contrary
to the accepted view that wheat is purely inbred there is evidence
showing that factors of reproductive biology and environmental effects
can lead to pollen flow up to a kilometer from the transgenic planting.
Even more distressing is the observations that most of the published
studies on pollen flow predate the introduction of genetic engineering
in the early 1970s. There has been little or no published studies on
wheat pollen flow using transgenic markers. Nevertheless, there is clear
evidence using traditional genetic markers that gene flow has taken
place repeatedly and in a variety of locations.
The evaluation of  acceptable  transgene contamination has focused at a
figure around 1% pollution as being acceptable to regulators and the
bureaucratic apparatus. An  acceptable  limit around 1% transgene
pollution is biologically unacceptable. Each wheat plant usually
produces 450,000 grains of pollen (3). If you plant 100 pounds of wheat
seeds per acre and there are 7000 wheat grains per pound and each grain
gives rise to a plant then the 1% transgene plants would produce over
three billion pollen grains to be disbursed over a wide area. Not only
large farms but small plots can serve to spread polluting transgenes
over neighboring fields of wheat. Soon the situation will begin to
resemble the canola crop in western Canada, where transgene free canola
cannot be grown because s transgenic pollen is .spread every where.
Pollen dispersal and its environmental consequences has been discussed
by Smyth, Khatchatourians and Phillips (4) and by Ho and Cummins (5) and
the predictable transgenic pollution and its economic impact are made
clear. In spite of the clear and present evidence that pollen spread is
disastrous ( while seed spread by browsing animals and attachment to
trucks and cars has been essentially ignored) government regulators
cling to unrealistic estimates of pollens spread that are based on old
semi-scientific studies that pre-dated modern genetic technology. Both
corporations and government regulators have had access to lavish funds
to support the needed fundamental research on transgene pollution that
should have preceded both field testing and commercialization of the
transgenic crops. However, such research has not been published and the
regulatory agencies cling to the use of pollens spread data are just
embarrassing. Not only are those data used for food crops but they are
also used for biopharmaceutical crops whose products impact both nearby
food crops and wildlife.
It is perplexing that government regulators have allowed (if not
promoted) huge plantings of transgenic crops and have employed faulty
evidence on the spread and pollution of transgenes from those crops
without having required realistic studies on the transgenic crops
themselves. In a sane world transgenic wheat would neither be field
tested nor released until the limits of transgene pollution were
established. However, if the agencies like the CFIA and APHIS are
conspiring with corporations to pollute the entire wheat crop to
facilitate rapid employment of the transgenic varieties their action is
not so much insane as it is evil. I do not believe that it will be
possible to reform the two government agencies , both of which are ham
strung with conflicts of interest with the biotechnology industry. Truly
independent agencies free of commercial ties and managed by independent
scientists protected from reprisal are the only viable remedy to this
bureaucratic pathology.
References
1. Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)  APPENDIX 2: MINIMUM ISOLATION
DISTANCES AND PERIODS OF POST-HARVEST LAND USE RESTRICTION  2000
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/pbo/dir/dir0007appe.shtml#APPENDIX%202
2. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)  Table 1.
Isolation Distances in Feet from Any Contaminating Source Adapted from
Table 5, 7 CFR part 201.76  2000
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/biotech/isolate.html Agricultural
Biotechnology
3. Waines,J and Hedge,S.  Intraspecific gene flow in bread wheat as
affected by reproductive biology and pollination ecology of wheat
flowers  2003 Crop Sci. 43,451-63
4. Smyth,S.,Khachatourians,G. and Phillips,P.  Liabilities and economics of
transgenic crops   2002 Nature biotech. 20,537-41
5. Ho,M. and Cummins,J.   Chronicle of An Ecological Disaster Foretold  2003
ISIS report - 20/02/03 http://www.i-sis.org.uk