Genetically engineered plant crops: potential for disaster.

• Author: Kennell, David
• Position: Biodevastation

Transgenic crops will greatly accelerate the decline of biodiversity in the plant world. Reason: Seed corporations demand farmers buy seed from them each year--replacing the millennial practice of farmers selecting seeds best suited for their specific environments. By coercing governments of developing countries to plant genetically modified (GM) crops, much of the native crops are replaced by a monoculture of the GM crop for export to meet the country's debt.

The country then has to import food to replace their native crops. Once GM plants are introduced, farmers may be unable to grow non-GM crops. The Percy Schmeiser case in Saskatchewan, Canada has dramatized what is occurring on farms all over the world. The unintended spread of glyphosate-resistant pollen from Round-up Ready (RR) canola plants (possibly by wind, birds, trucks, etc.) contaminated Schmeiser's non-GM canola fields. Even though the court agreed that he never planted or wanted Monsanto's GM seeds, it ruled that he had to pay a huge patent fee to Monsanto.

This experience was not unique. The University of Manitoba found that 32 of the 33 commercially available seed lots of native canola have been contaminated with RR seeds. The canola of the Great Plains is rapidly becoming a monoculture variety, which carries the potential for disaster. The RR plants have even invaded other crop species--becoming a "super-weed."

Why is biodiversity important? The great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled the world collecting and categorizing plants and seeds. He proposed that there are eight centers of origin of the major species of food plants, all in Third World countries, e.g., corn, Mexico; rice, India; Andes mountains, potatoes, tomatoes; China, soybeans. There have been dozens of major crop disasters in our world in the last 150 years following the great potato blight famine in Ireland in the 1840s. A few examples:

* 1870s: coffee rust in Ceylon, India, East Asia, Africa (the reason England is a nation of tea drinkers).

* 1890s: cotton epidemic.

* 1904: 1916, 1954, stem rust in US wheat (75% of wheat lost in 1954).

* 1940s: brown spot disease of Indian rice (Bengal famine).

* 1940s and again in 1950s: 80% of US oat crop.

* 1940s: USSR wheat crop; led to huge Russian grain deal.

* 1970s: corn blight (Bipolaris) in US destroyed 15% of corn crop.

* 1980: French grapes; aphid powdery mildew (France turned to the US for resistant germplasm).

* 1990s: Russet Burbank potato...