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Real Threats To Countryside Ignored In GM Furore, Ecologists Warn

October 15, 2003

*PLEASE NOTE THIS IS EMBARGOED UNTIL 16 OCTOBER*

The UK should be cautious in developing GM technology in agriculture, the British Ecological Society (BES) has said. However, scientists, policy makers and environmental campaigners should beware that by focussing solely on GM crops, the real threats to the British countryside are being ignored.

Reacting to the publication of the farm-scale evaluations of GM crops published tomorrow [Thursday], Professor Alastair Fitter of the University of York and President of the BES, said: "GM technology, like any other, has the potential to do both good and harm, and it must be implemented in agriculture with great care to avoid serious adverse consequences. However, intensive agriculture has already inflicted serious damage to the flora and fauna of the countryside and the same precautionary principle could well have been applied to it.

"What is now needed is a debate about the type of agriculture and the type of countryside that we want. We have the technology to produce crops with high or low efficiency, with many weeds or with few, and with large environmental impacts or with small ones; and we know what the consequences of those approaches will be, partly from the mistakes we have made in the past. By focussing on GM, we are at risk of missing the real issues."

The science of ecology can and should inform the GM debate, but so should ethical, practical and even commercial judgements, and a societal response is required, the BES believes. According to Professor Fitter: "The farm-scale studies were designed to answer questions as to whether growing specific, herbicide-resistant GM crops at that scale produced impacts on the environment, especially on populations of insects and soil organisms.

"But the experiments cannot reveal answers about what would happen with different types of genetic modification, with different management regimes, or at an even larger scale: what if many adjacent farms all had GM crops? Animals such as birds and butterflies are very mobile, and impacts on their populations would need to be studied at a larger scale. Similarly, seed might move between farms on vehicles: that too would not be detected at the farm scale.

"However welcome they may be as a genuine scientific contribution to a national debate, even farm-scale studies cannot give unequivocal answers to all the questions that society might reasonably pose about the desirability of GM crops. Many of the issues are not in the realm of scientific enquiry. For example, farmers who wish to have their crops certified as organic by bodies such as the Soil Association must avoid all contact of their crops with GM materials, including pollen. That is not a scientific judgement, and a societal judgement is therefore required.

"Since pollen from GM crops cannot be contained within the planted field, it is inevitable that organic crops will receive GM pollen if the fields are even within a few kilometres of each other. The two positions are therefore incompatible: organic purity, as defined by the producers, requires the banning of GM crops, but science cannot resolve that conflict," Fitter said.

British Ecological Society (BES)