The need to prevent damage to the environment

The vast majority of all commercialised GM crops either produce their own pesticide or resist a particular herbicide. While each of these types of GM may have appeared successful in the first few seasons, each is now demonstrating significant, growing problems like insect resistance, secondary pest invasion and weed resistance.

To date the Government has not questioned the need for GM food and crops or assessed the role of GM against alternatives such as Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) or agroecology. Tet we continue to pay for GM research while other options are sidelined.

Potential environmental effects

• The herbicides used with GM crops are designed to kill all other plants, so they have dramatic negative impacts on all wild plants in and around arable fields. Decline of wild plants deprives insects and birds of food.
• The large-scale Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs) in the UK between 2000 and 2003 showed that GM sugar beet and oilseed rape crops tolerant to broad spectrum herbicides left fewer weeds and weed seeds in arable fields for wildlife to feed on and shelter under.
• This threat to wildlife led English Nature, the Government's official wildlife advisor, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to call for a moratorium on planting GM crops commercially.
• More widely problems like weed resistance are causing serious problems for GM farmers in countries like the US, where cotton farmers now have to hand weed whole crops to control plants resistant to multiple herbicides.
• GM crops sometimes cross-pollinate with wild plants that are closely related to them. in 2005 research showed that Charlock (a wild relative of oilseed rape (a weed in UK arable fields) has already acquired GM herbicide tolerant genes - something previously believed impossible.

Shortcomings of existing research and regulations

• Ongoing research reveals how little we really know about the possible impacts of commercialising GM crops, as with the Charlock example above. Far more research is needed before GM can be considered safe. Viable oilseed rape seeds have recently been shown to persist in the soil much longer than previously thought, up to 10-15 years, so non-GM crops planted on or near land that previously held GM could be contaminated. For some GM crops the only safe answer may be to ban them.
• All GM crop trials should be conducted in enclosed facilities and the companies conducting them should be held strictly liable for any harm they cause. Non-GM control varieties should be used to study gene transfer and cross-pollination. In 2011 US courts were still holding Bayer to account for the 2006 contamination of US long-grain rice supplies with their experimental variety that cause the collapse of US rice exports. Rice growers and processors should not have had to resort to court action to get compensation for the millions of dollars in losses, nor should they have waiting so long for justice.
• No commercial GM crops should be grown until legislation is in place that prevents the contamination of neighbouring crops or the environment and laws passed making biotechnology companies strictly liable for any harm their crops cause.

Summary

To protect the environmental and prevent potentally serious environmental damage there must be:

• No commercial release of GM crops until it is clear they will not cause genetic pollution.
• Independent assessment of environmental impacts of GM crops avoiding risky open-air trials as far as possible.
• Coexistence regulations with a goal of no detectable GM contamination of neighbouring crops and strict liability on biotech companies for any harm arising from the release of their products (including economic harm).