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.
