 |
Local governments wouldn't be able to ban planting of certain seeds
By JERRY PERKINS REGISTER FARM EDITOR March 15, 2005
The Iowa House of Representatives approved a bill Monday that pre-empts local governments from banning the planting of certain crops, such as seeds that have been genetically modified.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Sandy Greiner, a Keota Republican, at the request of the Iowa Seed Association. It was approved by a vote of 70-27 and sent to the Senate.
Greiner said the intent of the bill was simple: to give the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship final authority on seed grown in Iowa.
Clarifying that the state is the final authority would prevent local governments - cities, counties or townships - from barring the planting of genetically modified, organic or any other type of seeds, Greiner said.
"I can see where we could have corn planted specifically for use in ethanol production, and one or two people could get it banned in the whole township because they are worried that it would cross-pollinate with their crops," Greiner said.
Greiner said she has been accused of introducing the bill to promote large agribusi- nesses.
"I'm standing up for small farmers," said Greiner, who farms with her husband, Terry, and their three sons. "I want to see small farmers continue to be able to plant traditional crops."
Critics of the bill are misrepresenting it, she said, by saying it would prevent the planting of organic or identity-preserved crops.
Identity-preserved crops are grown for a specific use, such as organic soybeans for food or high-starch corn for ethanol, and need to be sequestered from other plants to keep from losing their special qualities.
"That's a flagrant misrepresenting of the bill," Greiner said.
Identity-preserved crops are being grown now in Iowa without any state protection, she said, and would continue to be.
|
By JIM SUHR
The Associated Press
A trade group overseeing a partnership to unlock corn's genetic code said Monday the effort has gained "critical momentum," with more than 120 researchers already having accessed a searchable Web database created last year to hasten development of biotech crops.
The 8-month-old Web site pools research done on the corn genome by Monsanto Co., DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. and Monsanto research partner Ceres Inc.
By offering up their data to researchers at nonprofit institutions for noncommercial use, the companies hope to develop hybrid and genetically modified plants that are more drought-resistant or can produce more nutritious corn or fibers.
The goal: Sequence the corn genome by 2007, perhaps several years ahead of when it otherwise would be completed without the initiative.
On Monday, the St. Louis-based National Corn Growers Association overseeing the partnership said the effort to map the maize genome "is gaining critical momentum," with researchers from 35 academic sites having accessed the database.
Jo Messing, director of the Waksman Institute and professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University said the database has roughly 1.8 million available sequence reads more than four times what was previously available publicly.
"There are only little pieces of gene sequences available in the public domain, and in the past it's been very difficult to find completed gene sequences. The private collection offers a lot of those missing pieces," Messing said.
Land-grant universities including the University of Illinois, Oregon State University, Kansas State University and the University of Minnesota have accessed the site, as have overseas institutions such as Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences, the Danish Institute of Agriculture Sciences and Germany's University of Hamburg.
Last week, St. Louis-based Monsanto said it has teamed with a biotechnology company and the U.S. government in a bid to unlock the genetic code of soybeans, hoping to supply breeders with technology that makes the crop more resistant to disease and drought.
|
SYDNEY - Consumer opposition in Australia last month forced its three biggest poultry producers to stop using imported, genetically modified feed to fatten the 450 million birds they put on the market each year.
Inghams, Bartter-Steggles and Baiada changed course after thousands of letters, faxes and telephone calls from angry consumers in a campaign spearheaded by Greenpeace. It was a clear win for the anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) campaign.
"It would not have happened without a hell of a lot of people doing a lot of leg work, writing and calling the companies," said Bob Phelps of GeneEthics Network. He is a long-time opponent of genetic engineering.
The Australian government, meanwhile, has sought to convince people to embrace GMO.
"Greenpeace's recent campaign to intimidate Australian poultry producers into excluding GMO soy from feed had no basis in science," Agriculture Minister Warren Truss told Reuters. Australia's poultry industry is relatively small and caters mainly to the domestic market.
But for canola, it is the second biggest exporter, after Canada.
Concern from state governments has blocked Australia from growing its first commercial GMO canola crop, although the federal government approved it for commercial release in December 2003. Most provincial governments have the bans in place until 2006, with some extending the bans until 2009.
State bans are based on concerns that GMO canola would jeopardize Australia's exports of conventionally-produced canola.
Phelps said the decision to stop the use of GMO feed for chickens, which can be fed canola meal, would make it even more difficult for the ban on commercial GMO canola to be lifted.
But federal government officials said the country's farmers would suffer in the longer term because they were falling behind their counterparts in other key farm commodity producing nations.
|
HONG KONG - As early as this year, China could start commercial production of a new breed of genetically engineered rice.
If adopted, it would be the world's first large-scale plantation of a major transgenic food crop and, some scientists say, would provide an environmentally friendly answer to the food problems of the world's poor.
But those who fear that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) present a danger to the natural crop balance say Beijing's haste to develop the rice has more to do with a drive to bring the income levels of its farmers in line with others who have prospered more from China's red-hot economic development.
Scientists in China, the world's top rice producer and consumer, say Beijing is looking to mass produce Xa21 rice, which contains a gene from an African wild rice.
Government officials have remained tight-lipped about plans to introduce any form of GMO rice.
The Xa21 strain, which was developed through publicly funded international research, is resistant to bacterial blight -- one of the most serious crop diseases in Africa and Asia, which can cause devastating yield loss as it spreads in water droplets.
As it derives from a wild rice gene, it has emerged as front-runner in the race to be the first GMO rice crop, ahead of insect-resistant BT rice, which contains a toxic bacterial gene.
The scientists say Beijing hopes Xa21 will help convince skeptics of the safety of genetically modified organisms, while moving China a step forward in its quest to become a global leader in biotechnology.
"Many scientists in China think the Xa21 rice is relatively safe for the environment and health, as its gene comes from a wild rice," Dayuan Xue, professor at Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, told Reuters.
|
Martin Enserink
It could be the result of an embarrassing lab escape or a vaccine study gone awry; it could even be the smoking gun from a secret biowarfare program.
But then, it could be nothing at all.
For 4 months now, a series of strange influenza sequences has been sitting in GenBank, the U.S. National Institutes of Health's DNA database, that seems to suggest that pigs in South Korea have become infected with a flu strain used for research in labs around the world but not known to occur in nature. The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva has dismissed the snippets as the result of a lab error. But the Korean scientist who posted them insists they are real--and troubling--and he is hoping that two renowned flu labs will prove him right.
Meanwhile, speculation about the case has been fueled relentlessly on the Internet by an outsider to the influenza world. Henry Niman, the president of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company called Recombinomics and the operator of a mailing list about flu, believes that the virus, called WSN/33, poses a grave danger to human health. Recently, his views have begun to draw attention--much to the chagrin of those scientists who think the whole story is nonsense.
The bizarre case started on 24 October when Sang Heui Seo, a researcher at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, deposited in GenBank partial RNA sequences from a series of viruses isolated from pigs. Niman, a molecular biologist and former Harvard surgery instructor with an intense interest in virus evolution, discovered them soon after they were made public in late November. He noticed that six of the viruses appeared to be hybrids; in addition to genes from H9N2, an avian flu virus that previously circulated in Korean pigs, they had between three and seven genes with WSN/33-like sequences.
WSN/33 was produced in 1940 by infecting mice with the first human flu virus ever isolated, in London in 1933. It's a mystery how it got into the pigs, says Niman, who proffers scenarios ranging from a lab accident to illicit experiments to create a deadly flu strain for biowarfare--neighboring North Korea comes to mind, he says. Niman believes the spread of the virus should be thoroughly investigated, because WSN/33, which infects mice's brains, is distantly related to the 1918 pandemic virus, and if it infects pigs, it may infect humans as well. That's why he immediately alerted WHO in December.
But WHO is unimpressed. The agency discussed Niman's claims by e-mail with its flu advisers in December, says Klaus Stöhr, WHO's global influenza coordinator. They quickly concluded that the results were lab contamination. Such mix-ups can happen easily when researchers use the polymerase chain reaction to amplify bits of genetic material, says Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, one of Stöhr's advisers. Contamination was likely, says Webster, because Seo had previously received WSN/33 from Webster's own lab. (Seo also worked at Webster's lab between 1999 and 2002, and the two published seven papers together.)
|
The H5N1 bird flu virus might be acquiring a greater ability to spread from human to human, recent cases in Vietnam suggest. But as two elderly relatives of patients killed by the bird flu test positive for the virus and yet have no symptoms, there are also indications that it may not be as lethal as currently thought.
The 2004 outbreak of H5N1 in Vietnam stopped in spring after the country killed millions of infected and exposed poultry. But outbreaks resumed in December, probably because the virus persisted in ducks showing no symptoms, say flu experts. Since December, 22 people have tested positive for H5N1 in Vietnam, of whom 14 have died, including one woman from Cambodia.
Five of the cases occurred in clusters that suggest the virus passed from person to person. In the most recent, a 14-year-old girl fell ill on 14 February, her 21-year-old brother on 21 February, and a 26-year-old male nurse who cared for the brother, on 26 February.
Spread of the virus to health care workers would be worrying, says leading flu expert Robert Webster at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, US. Attending a conference on microbial threats in Lyon, France, last week, he told New Scientist: "That's where we'd expect to see the first cluster if this virus starts spreading among humans."
This is what happened in 2003 with the previously unknown respiratory virus SARS - Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
The Vietnamese cases might have acquired the virus from poultry, especially from raw duck products eaten during the recent Tet New Year's festival. But because they each developed symptoms several days apart, investigators from the World Health Organization suspect human to human transmission.
The investigation has uncovered other surprises. The WHO found antibodies to H5N1 in the 81-year-old grandfather of the brother and sister, meaning he has been infected but survived. And the healthy wife of a 69-year-old man who died from H5N1 on 24 February has also been found to have the antibodies.
|
Co-authored by Paul Driessen and Cyril Boynes, Jr.
Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Ruth Oniango has a dream. A member of Kenya’s parliament, she dreams of the day when the people of her poor country “can feed themselves.”
Congress of Racial Equality national chairman Roy Innis shares that vision. But he also knows the obstacles. “Over 70% of Africans are employed in farming full time,” he points out. “Yet, half of those countries rely on emergency food aid. Within ten years, Africa will be home to three-fourths of the world’s hungry people.”
Many of the continent’s farmers are women who labor sunup to sundown on 3 to 5 acre plats. They rarely have enough crops to feed their own families, much less sell for extra money. Millions live on less than a dollar a day.
Maize (corn) is southern Africa’s most important crop. But because of drought, insects, poor soil, plant diseases and lack of technology, the average yield per acre is the lowest in the world. Other crops suffer similar fates.
“We eat cassava for breakfast and mash it with potatoes and bananas. But the mosaic virus attacks the plants, the leaves fall off, and it’s no good for eating,” Kenya’s Samuel Njeru laments. “We can’t afford to spray. We need a variety that is resistant to the virus.”
Mosaic virus first appeared in Africa in 1894 and now infects every cassava plant. Over 35 million tons of this staple are lost every year – along with tens of millions of tons of other crops.
“I farm a third of a hectare with cotton,” says Alice Wambuii. (A hectare is 2.5 acres.) “I spray five times a season with pesticides, but sometimes the insects still destroy my entire crop. Last year, I got 3,000 Kenyan shillings for my cotton, but I had to spend 5,000 for sprays.”
“Africa needs a new agricultural revolution,” Mr. Innis says flatly. One is finally on the way – a biotechnology revolution. It’s not a magic bullet. But it is a vital weapon in Africa’s thus far losing struggle against malnutrition, poverty, despair and deepening anger.
Participants in day-long conference hosted by CORE at the United Nations in January conveyed that message forcefully. So do Kenyan and South African scientists, farmers and politicians interviewed by Mr. Innis for a video documentary. With this technology, farmers don’t have to learn new skills. They just plant and tend seeds the same way as always – but with amazing results.
|
Transgenic poplars could make China a big player in lumber. But some experts worry about effects on nature.
By Mark Clayton
Scattered across at least seven provinces in China are more than 1 million common poplar trees with an uncommon bite. They can kill the insects that nibble their leaves. Their unusual defensive system is a genetically engineered bomb: Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a naturally occurring toxin inserted into the tree's DNA. Other such transgenic species, such as the larch and walnut, are in the works, Chinese researchers report.
Such moves are shaking up the twin worlds of forestry and environmentalism. Transgenic trees are reaching the threshold of commercialization - a point bioengineered crops reached in the 1980s, observers say. This time, though, it's not the United States leading the charge, it's China.
Though little reported in the West, China's swan dive into large-scale transgenic forestry is essentially the first commercial-scale deployment of genetically engineered (GE) trees in the world, experts say. That could one day mean a potent new competitor to the lumber and paper industries. It also may mean that cutting-edge GE tree research in the US will fall behind, hobbled by regulation and public protest. It also puts decisions about a controversial - and, some say, potentially dangerous - technology into the hands of an authoritarian government, with less oversight and fewer technical controls than in the West.
"What the Chinese have done, planting [genetically engineered] trees across hundreds, maybe thousands, of acres, hasn't been done anywhere else in the world," says Yousry El-Kassaby, a forest geneticist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "It marks a shift in the center of gravity away from the US, where there's a lot of genetic engineering tree research, but much of it is restricted to the labs or very regulated small field trials."
|