Genetically Modified Crops: A Danger or an Agricultural Right?

Germany is the latest country to object to genetically modified crops. There’s a small but powerful European group battling against the planting of commonly-grown pest- resistant staple foods, and the latest mutiny by the German Agriculture Ministry has resulted in the banning of MON 810 – sold under the trade-name YieldGard, a genetically modified corn variety.

The Agriculture Minister, Ilse Aigner, declared that the Ministry had concluded that sufficient evidence existed to support arguments that MON 810 posed a danger to the wider environment. The crop is grown in less that 0.2% of Germany’s cornfields, but even so, the ban is based on the claim that the genetic modification is harmful to aquatic wildlife.

The decision is important because it is in opposition to a European Commission decision that lifted EC wide bans on MON 810 that had been instituted, now while MON 810 is legal across the EC, it has been banned by the national governments of Austria, France, Greece Hungary and Luxembourg. On the other side of the battle lines are Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden who support the Commission’s claim that a ban was unjust after the crop was declared safe by scientists at the European Food Safety Authority.  Sitting uneasily in the middle is Wales, where the Welsh assembly chose to declare the entire country GM free in 2000 as part of its drive to add value and quality to the country’s vast number of agricultural acres.

MON 810 was allowed to be grown in Germany from 2005 onwards, despite the fact that over two thirds of German consumers think GM crops should be banned in foodstuffs. The polarity of views is interesting. M S Swaminathan, ‘The Father of Economic Ecology’ is on record as saying that GMOs shouldn’t be grown in or marketed to the developed world, where they aren’t necessary, but should be created for the developing world, to meet the food needs of large populations living in poverty and to allow such nations to develop a reliable food surplus that they can sell to the developed world.

Monsanto, which developed MON 810 is considering its options – the crop has a special resistance to the corn borer moth larvae, which tunnel into the corn stem, causing the head to bend and the crop to fail.   MON 810 is commonly grown in the USA, Latin America and China.

There have been regular scientific claims that GMOs are not stable – most recently it was researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biology in Barcelona in 2006 whose research seemed to show that a transgene insert may have moved from its mapped location as supplied by Monsanto on the gene map.  Reliable peer-reviewed results of this apparent ability of the inserted material to travel around the genome is not yet available and it’s impossible to tell whether this is a serious problem or not.  If it does turn out to be true, there will be renewed calls to ban all GMOs until they can be proved safe for the environment and safe for consumption.

Drying corn courtesy of Ogwen at Flickr under a creative commons licence

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