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| Topic: Thanks Again, Monsanto ... | |
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Edited by
Kings_Knight
on
Fri 08/13/10 07:27 AM
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I'm not excessively pro- OR anti-genetically modified foods ... it's gonna happen whether we like it or not. Monsanto, however, is an excessively prickish company. They developed the 'Terminator' gene to keep farmers from stocking seed corn at season's end - the seed would 'self-destruct' because of genetic coding they inserted. That means the farmers have to BUY more seed from ... Monsanto. Neat, huh ... ?
The most prickish thing they've done so far is to BILL farmers whose NON-GM crops were ACCIDENTALLY pollinated by pollen blown on the wind from farmers using the Monsanto GM seeds. Now, one of Monsanto's Frankenfood experiments has escaped into the wild ... CANOLA. Right. The same stuff used to make the oil you cook with. It is now a genetically-modified roadside weed. Question: How long before OTHER GM crops become weeds with properties that we probably don't want ... ? Thanks, Monsanto ... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/10canola.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper Canola, Pushed by Genetics, Moves Into Uncharted Territories By ANDREW POLLACK | Published: August 9, 2010 Genetically engineered versions of the canola plant are flourishing in the form of roadside weeds in North Dakota, scientists say, in one of the first instances of a genetically modified crop establishing itself in the wild. How much of a problem this might be is subject to debate. But critics of biotech crops have long warned that it is hard to keep genes — in this case, genes conferring resistance to common herbicides — from spreading with unwanted consequences. “If there’s a problem in North Dakota, it’s that these crop plants are becoming weeds,” said Cynthia L. Sagers, a biology professor at the University of Arkansas, who led the study. Results were presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Canola, whose seeds are pressed to make the popular cooking oil, is a type of oilseed rape developed by breeders in Canada. In the United States, it is grown mainly in North Dakota and Minnesota, though cultivation is spreading. The roadside plants apparently start growing when seeds blow from fields or fall out of trucks carrying the crops to market. In the plains of Canada, where canola is widely grown, roadside biotech plants resistant to the herbicide Roundup have become a problem, said Alexis Knispel, who has just completed a doctoral dissertation on the subject at the University of Manitoba. Some farmers, she said, have had to return to plowing their fields to control weeds — a practice that contributes to soil erosion — because they can no longer use Roundup to control the stray canola plants. She also said the proliferation of roadside canola would make it difficult to keep organic canola free of genetically engineered material. Monsanto, the developer of Roundup Ready canola, one of the modified plants, said the new findings were neither surprising nor worrisome. Even before biotech crops were developed, canola grew on roadsides, it said; now that 90 percent of the canola planted by farmers is engineered, it would be reasonable to expect a similar percentage in roadside samples. For the North Dakota study, Meredith G. Schafer, a graduate student at Arkansas, and colleagues traversed 3,000 miles of roads, stopping every five miles and taking a sample of one canola plant if there were any growing. Of the 604 plants collected, 80 percent were genetically engineered, Dr. Sagers said. Some were Roundup Ready, with a gene conferring resistance to Roundup, also known as glyphosate. Others were Liberty Link crops, with a gene conferring resistance to glufosinate. Two plants were found to have genes conferring resistance to both herbicides, suggesting that the crops resistant to each herbicide had mated. The biotech canola has also been found growing in Japan, which does not even grow the crop, only imports it. |
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This is what you get when you genetically alter corn too much! |
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