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Keeping Seeds Safe
March 1, 2004
When an American farmer gets ready to plant a crop like
corn or soybeans, he has two basic choices. Traditional
seeds are the kind farmers have planted throughout history,
developed by crossing parents with desirable traits to get
a superior variety. Genetically modified seeds, first
widely planted in 1996, contain trangenes from other
organisms that convey specific advantages to mature plants
- the ability to resist herbicides, for instance. The
acreage planted with genetically modified crops has
exploded: a third of this country's corn by 2002 and
three-quarters of its soybeans. Whatever you make of this
trend - and there are strong arguments on both sides - one
question it raises is whether genes from modified plants
might somehow drift into unmodified ones. The answer is
yes.
In a pioneering study released last week, the Union of
Concerned Scientists asked two independent labs to examine
samples of traditional corn, soybean and canola seeds. The
labs found contamination in half the corn, half the soybean
and more than 80 percent of the canola varieties. The study
draws no conclusions about when the mingling took place. It
could have happened during field tests, after modified
crops were widely planted or during shipping and storage.
But the genetic purity of at least some traditional seed
varieties has been compromised.
This is a serious finding. Though the acreage planted with
modified crops is enormous, the number of varieties is
still very small. But many more modified varieties - many
of them for industrial and pharmaceutical crops - are being
tested. The risk posed to the food supply by contamination
from pharmaceutical crops will almost certainly be much
greater than it is from genes that have migrated from, say,
Roundup Ready corn. But there is a broader point. To
contaminate traditional varieties of crops is to
contaminate the genetic reservoir of plants on which
humanity has depended for most of its history. In 2001, for
instance, scientists discovered modified genes in
traditional varieties of corn in Mexico, the ancestral home
of the crop and the site of its greatest diversity.
The need now is for more extensive study, best undertaken
by the Department of Agriculture. It's also time to subject
genetically modified crops to more rigorous and more
coherent testing. The scale of the experiment this country
is engaged in - and its potential effect on the
environment, the food supply and the purity of traditional
seed stocks - demands vigilance on the same scale.
http://www.nytimes.c
om/2004/03/01/opinion/01MON4.html?ex=1079182290&ei=1&en=bbc312be5dc8aa51
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