GM Blight Resistant Potatoes
The first trial plantings of GM blight resistant potatoes will begin this year in Norfolk, UK. The approval of this was one of the first actions of the new Environment Secretary, who is part of the UK’s new coalition government.
For years the food industry has been lying to us by saying GM potatoes were needed to combat Late Blight, when the truth is these potatoes can be developed using conventional breeding techniques instead.
Update: For some comments from Tom, have a look at his discussion forum here:
http://tatermater.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=252
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2 Responses to “GM Blight Resistant Potatoes”
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On the whole I’ve been supportive of the new coalition government (I’m a Liberal Democrat) but I could see this coming when they appointed Caroline Spelman as Environment Secretary. She has a long track record as director of a biotechnology lobbying firm. In my opinion it’s positively scandalous that this woman should be placed in a position where she can force her commercial vested interests on the British public who remain, in general, deeply opposed to GM crops.
My hope still rests with the hostility of the British public who are currently making GM crops untenable in this country, trials or no trials. It’s almost impossible to grow a GM crop here without activists ripping it up. Protecting such trials necessitates an 8ft fence and a 24-hour guard, which makes the trials uneconomical to say the least.
You are right that blight resistance can be bred perfectly well by conventional means, and the industry has seized upon blight as an excuse to give GM a new imperative. Meaningful blight resistance needs to involve several genes because blight mutates and adapts so quickly. That’s where conventional breeding has an advantage. GM seems less likely to produce long-lasting multi-gene blight resistance because it only uses very small pieces of DNA. Not that the aggro-business will be bothered – they can market new varieties as and when their existing product becomes useless.
As deeply and wholeheartedly opposed to GM as I am, I think the risk of contamination from a potato trial is less of a worry than it would be for maize/sweetcorn or oilseed rape. While potato pollen can travel some distance, mostly it doesn’t. Even if GM pollen does fertilise a non-GM flower, it won’t affect the tubers either in that generation or subsequent ones. Only the berries will be contaminated. The risk of anyone taking them home to sow the seeds is small, as is the chance of them self-seeding. So I’m not hugely worried about the trial … but if this junk was cultivated commercially I would be a lot more concerned.
As Tom points out in the discussion forum, why choose to genetically engineer Desiree, which is a prolific producer of berries and fertile pollen? There is a vast range of sterile-pollen varieties they could have used which would have kept the contamination risk close to nil.
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