British Gov't Halts Maize Trials
.c The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) - Following a week of protests by environmental groups, the government on Monday canceled trials of genetically modified maize. Protesters had feared that pollen from the site would be carried by the wind or transported by birds and insects into neighboring fields and contaminate a nearby organic research center, the Henry Doubleday Research Association Ryton Organic Garden, near Coventry. The research group growing the crops, the Supply Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops, "responded positively to public concerns," when it halted the trials, said Environment Minister Michael Meacher.

Campaigners welcomed the decision to withdraw the trials of herbicide-tolerant maize at Wolston. "We are delighted. This is a great victory for common sense over contamination," said Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, which promotes organic farming. Genetically modified, or GM, crops are plants whose genes are manipulated in order to produce desirable characteristics, such as resistance to pests.

The United States has already approved 50 varieties of genetically modified crops, but their introduction to parts of Europe has proved more controversial. Britain, which has yet to approve any genetically modified crops, is overseeing test growing in 100 small-scale and five full-scale fields across the country to gather information about their safety.

Friends of the Earth welcomed the abandoning of the trial site. "We are delighted that the biotech industry has finally seen sense and agreed to abandon the GM trial site," said Peter Riley, the organization's campaigner on genetically modified crops.

Meacher said Monday he was pleased the issue had been resolved, but he said he continued to support evaluation of genetically modified crops. "I remain strongly committed to the completion of this program because Britain urgently needs an independent test on the impact of GM technology on the environment," he said.

AP-NY-05-21-01 2327EDT

Farm Journal: Pollen In The Air Greg D. Horstmeier

-From the pages of the May/June 2001 edition of Farm Journal magazine.

Imagine it's late July in the U.S. Corn Belt. Somewhere, a 100-acre field of corn is pollinating, casting to the winds some 13 trillion pollen grains. To that vision add that farmers will plant some 18.4 million acres of genetically modified (GM) hybrids this year. Add in the tens of thousands of acres of such things as GM inbreds, parent lines and experimental plots. Welcome to the land of milk and "adventitious presence." That's the latest buzzword for what happens when pollen ends up where it's not supposed to be. It was called outcrossing by seed companies back when their biggest concern was farmer complaints that a field was not consistent in plant height or color.

In the seed. In these post-StarLink days, unintended pollen shed can mean the bag of seed corn you planted has more traits than you may have paid for or wanted. There is growing concern that farmers may plant seed that already has genetic traits that may hurt their ability to sell the harvest.

At a recent seed industry workshop on adventitious presence, Tom O'Connor, head of technical services for the National Grain and Feed Association, called for labeling seed corn bags with the amount of GM or other adventitious contamination present. "If you're buying an unapproved [trait], you should know that if you plan to market corn in an area where that event can't be sold," O'Connor says.

Seed companies fear labeling bags could be misleading and, until tolerances and testing standards are set, meaningless. "The seed industry has always been concerned with outcrossing," says Tim Gutormson, president of Mid-West Seed Services, Inc. His company tests seeds for companies and foundation seed developers, looking for everything from simple germination information to genetically modified content.

In the past two years, Gutormson's company has seen increased demand for genetic purity testing. "Now that we've gone through the Cry9c [StarLink] situation, it's definitely raised the bar in the amount of genetic purity testing seed companies are doing," he says. That should be good for farmers, he says. For example, federal law stipulates that a bag of seed corn be 95% hybrid seed. While most companies strive for only 1% or 2% impurity, or outcrossing of a hybrid, the StarLink situation has everyone learning just how good a job they were doing, and what areas to improve to meet zero tolerances. "Historically, there has been a fair amount of work on pollination and pollen travel," says Mike Lauer, a research coordinator at Pioneer Hi-Bred International. "But there are a lot of things about it that we may never fully understand." Tracking the wind. Since 1998, Lauer and others in the seed industry have sampled 155 seed production fields for the amount of foreign pollen that has entered the field. Only fields with a high likelihood of outcrossing were tested, Lauer reports.

Most seed production fields have 8 to 16 all-male border rows--an attempt to minimize outcrossing from a nearby field by overloading field edges with "correct" pollen. For the adventitious presence study, researchers started at the innermost border row and sampled grain produced at intervals of 6.8', 31', 68', 118' and 660' into the field. The percentage of outcrossed seed was averaged over all fields. Wind conditions year to year were critical, Lauer reports. "How one year's wind patterns varied from another's, and the influence on pollen movement, is tremendous."

In 1998, average adventitious contamination was 0.9%. In 1999, contamination was 1.7%. Data from 2000 hasn't been fully examined.

"Increasing the distance [from other corn] tends to decrease outcrossing," Lauer says. As predicted, samples from far inside the field had lower amounts of contamination than did rows near the outside.But the drop in contamination across any field was not linear, with hot and cool spots at various distances. Those peaks and valleys of contamination varied greatly from field to field.

"One thing we don't fully understand is how much influence wind turbulence above the field has on mixing pollen from that field and nearby fields," Lauer says. "You may think a wind break would be a good thing, slowing wind and decreasing how far pollen goes. That may not be true."

Pollen worries don't stop with crops that cross-pollinate. "The cotton seed market in Greece, a premium-priced market, isn't driven by science," says Chip Sundstrom, executive director of Parsons Seed Certification Center at the University of California, Davis. To keep the high-value Greek market, California seed producers must guarantee zero GM content.

Cotton, like soybeans, is a self-pollinating crop. Yet Roundup Ready and BXN cotton are popular in the same areas where premium cotton seed is produced. "We've learned that cotton pollen is the top source of honey in California," Sundstrom says.

Role of bees. In 2000, Sundstrom and colleagues from Parsons sampled seed fields at distances from 80' to nearly a mile from adventitious-pollen producing fields. "We found outcrossing from 0.2% up to 1%," Sundstrom says. "We found cases where outcrossing was 0.1% up to a mile from other cotton. And these are fields that get a lot of insecticides. I was out in those fields and there were basically no bees, no insects of any kind." The center will conduct more rounds of pollen tests this year to get a better feel for common flow levels. Sundstrom also plans to test nearby bee hives to see how much GM pollen bees may be carrying and if they are actually the culprits.

What seed production changes seed companies may have to make also depends on what tolerance levels are allowed. "StarLink taught us that zero tolerance won't work," says Gutormson. "Before companies can really say they're doing an adequate job of isolation, we have to know what tolerances they have to meet."

Seed companies prefer more standardized tolerances for new traits. "It's going to be very difficult to establish a threshold for all unapproved varieties," says Michael Schechtman, USDA's biotechnology coordinator."You can't pass judgment on the safety of [modified] organisms that have not even been evaluated yet."

Sidebar: Don't Volunteer Trouble
Never has so much attention been paid to volunteer corn. Those ugly reminders of what slipped through the combine's grasp have special relevance this season. Some volunteer plants may contain the outlawed StarLink trait.

Greatest concern is around fields that in 2000 grew hybrids containing StarLink. Pollen from volunteers there could cross-pollinate with neighboring corn, continuing the chance of the Cry9c gene showing up in human foods. Officials with Aventis CropScience, the company that created StarLink, say representatives from Aventis and from seed companies that sold StarLink hybrids are contacting producers who grew the hybrids in 2000 to make sure they control volunteer plants. Fields that adjoined StarLink hybrids are also suspect. If plants in those fields received StarLink pollen, 2001-season volunteers may also carry the trait.

Post-emergence grass herbicides for soybeans--Fusilade, Select, Poast or Roundup in Roundup Ready soybeans-will control volunteer corn. In continuous corn, the treatment is more complicated. Planting Clearfield hybrids and using imidazolinone-based herbicides may not work if the 2000 hybrid had stacked Clearfield-StarLink traits. Same goes for using Liberty Link hybrids--all StarLink hybrids contained the Liberty Link trait. Volunteers will tolerate Liberty herbicide. Roundup or other glyphosate herbicides will control volunteers in Roundup Ready corn. However, the National Corn Growers Association and others warn against planting Roundup Ready corn in areas where grain may be exported. Roundup Ready corn has not been cleared for export to Europe.

Concern about Roundup Ready pollen flowing into conventional cornfields is also stirring controversy. Researchers at the University of Missouri decided not to allow Roundup Ready corn in statewide corn trials, fearing the pollen could blow into other fields near test plots. Similar concerns were cited by agronomists with Farmers Independent Research of Seed Technologies. That group also will not include Roundup Ready hybrids in trials this year. Aventis officials are still lobbying for a temporary tolerance for the Cry9c gene, which produces the StarLink trait. With the current zero tolerance for Cry9c, Aventis officials contend, the issue will remain for four or more years.