SEE Mail

August 22, 2003

EU to Modify Attitude Towards Genetically Modified Foods

Newly Found Gene Resistant To Economically Crippling Wheat Disease

EU to Modify Attitude Towards Genetically Modified Foods

Roger Wilkison

Brussels

21 Aug 2003

Citizens of the 15-nation European Union enjoy a generally healthy lifestyle, but obesity is on the rise, and 20 percent of the EU's inhabitants continue to smoke. Still, the health issue that most alarms Europeans is the prospect of eating genetically modified foods, despite the absence of any proof that they are actually unsafe.

Since 1998, there has been a moratorium in the European Union on the sale of new biotech foods, in response to fears about the possible health risks. But now, in an effort to avoid a trade battle with the United States, which maintains that those fears are unfounded, the EU is preparing to lift the moratorium, and replace it with tougher labeling requirements for genetically altered products.

Under the new rules, all products, including animal feed, vegetable oils, seeds and byproducts containing more than 0.9 percent genetically altered material will have to be clearly identified as having been produced from genetically modified organisms.

EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom says the new measures will give consumers an informed choice.

"This is a matter of building confidence," she said. "And we are trying to build confidence for individual consumers and for farmers in Europe. And we do that by ensuring that we have a regulatory framework, which looks at both the potential benefits and risks of GM products."

The United States says the labeling requirement is unfair to producers of GM foods, most of whom are American. But public sentiment in Europe, successfully stoked by environmental groups, is fiercely opposed to genetically altered food. GM products are rarely seen on grocery shelves, and that is how most consumers want it.

In contrast to Americans, Europeans regard tinkering with the genetic makeup of crops to make them faster growing and more resilient as heretical. In such countries as France and Italy, revulsion at the mere idea of eating genetically modified food runs especially deep.

Newly Found Gene Resistant To Economically Crippling Wheat Disease

Science Daily News

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Bread wheat plants carrying a newly discovered gene that is resistant to economically devastating leaf blotch can reduce the amount of grain lost to the pathogen, according to Purdue University researchers.

The scientists used bread wheat species to find the gene and the markers, or bits of DNA, that indicate presence of the naturally occurring gene. The fungus causes wheat crop damage worldwide with yield losses of 50 percent or more in some places. In the United States the disease is widespread in the Pacific Northwest, the northern Great Plains and the eastern Midwest soft wheat region, and experts estimate annual losses at $275 million.

Results of the Purdue study on resistance to the fungus that causes Septoria tritici leaf blotch are published in the September issue of Phytopathology and appear on the journal's Web site at http://www.apsnet.org/phyto/.

"The goal of our work is to find additional resistance genes to the fungus Mycosphaerella graminicola so we can use the lines carrying these genes in our wheat to avoid the breakdown of resistance in the plants," said Stephen Goodwin, associate professor of botany and plant pathology and U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) scientist. "Having the markers greatly speeds up the breeding process for resistant plants."

Banana lab opens in Uganda

Genetic modification of clonal crop could soon follow.

Nature Science Update

A laboratory devoted to improving bananas through biotechnology will open today in Kampala, Uganda.

The facility should help to safeguard Uganda's staple crop, which is increasingly threatened by pests and disease. It will also put the nation on the road to genetic modification - a technique that has largely been focussed on cash crops in wealthier nations.

"Ugandans will be able to decide for themselves what they apply this technology to, according to their own research priorities," says banana expert Emile Frison, director of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome, Italy.

Ugandans consume more bananas than anyone else - each year they grow and eat 11 million tonnes of East African highland bananas, a savoury version of the yellow fruit that is such big business in the West. Farmed solely for local consumption, the crop is a cornerstone of most meals and is used for brewing beer.

"Uganda doesn't endure famine - to a great extent that is because of bananas," says Joseph Mukiibi, former director of Uganda's National Agricultural Research Organization, (NARO), where the new lab is based. East African varieties probably represent around of 10% of global banana diversity.

Because edible bananas do not produce seeds, new groves are planted from cuttings of existing stock. This spreads diseases and pests such as the black sigatoka fungus, root- munching worms, and weevils.

The new lab's cell-culture facilities will allow existing strains to be reared in a disease-free environment. This should yield clean planting stock, says banana breeder Michael Pillay of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Kampala, who will work in the new lab.

But the institute's main purpose is to genetically modify bananas. The fruit's sterility hampers breeding to fight off pests and diseases. Crossing disease-resistant varieties with popular crops is usually possible only through gene insertion.

Civets Back on China's Menu

Science

The masked palm civet, the obscure south Asian animal suspected of helping spread the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), is returning to Chinese markets. The lifting of a 4-month ban on it and 53 other species of wild animals delighted gourmets in Guangdong Province, where the local cuisine relies on a variety of wild animals. But it came as a surprise to the World Health Organization, which has a team of experts working with its Chinese counterparts investigating a possible animal reservoir of SARS.

The joint Chinese-WHO team "is trying to get hard evidence so one could do a risk analysis of which animals could harbor the virus" and transfer it to humans, says Alan Schnur, WHO's team leader for communicable disease control in Beijing. But any decision on setting or lifting marketing bans "is an internal matter [for China]," he says, "and WHO would not normally be involved in such a decision." Civets have been identified as a potential link in the chain of infection.

China's State Administration of Forestry and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce banned sales of 54 species of wild animals in late April after researchers at Hong Kong University reported finding evidence of the SARS virus in several civets collected from a market in Guangdong Province, which borders Hong Kong. Although the researchers never advocated this action, officials decided to order a sales ban at the height of the SARS crisis as a precautionary measure. It dealt a devastating economic blow to thousands of families who raise the wild animals, and the families lobbied hard to have the ban reconsidered.

In early June, the forestry administration invited experts representing the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Health, the National SARS Control and Prevention Command, and academic researchers to a symposium to assess the risks of allowing wild animals back into the markets. Guo Zhiwei, an official at the Ministry of Science and Technology, says the government "did not find any evidence of a connection to SARS among those [54] species."