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The Dominion (Wellington, NZ)
February 17, 2001

Greenpeace wants ban on freeing altered organisms

by Alan Samson

GREENPEACE called for a ban on the freeing of all genetically modified organisms into the environment yesterday -- but opened the door to acceptance of a "new generation" of genetics research.

Giving evidence also for Friends of the Earth and Environment and Conservation, Terje Traavik, department of medicine professor at Norway's University of Tromso, identified the "most important risk" as being lack of knowledge and unpredictability. "There are simply no experts in the field we're talking about today," he said. "There's a total lack of knowledge, research and conclusive evidence."

Referring to the impossibility of confining a gene to a particular site, he said modification was inherently unpredictable. "These things might be the basis for a real ecological and health catastrophe. That's a fact."

He described genetics research as "first generation" and in its infancy, saying he foresaw a future where the research need not involve the insertion of foreign dna into a species. This could be done by changing sequences in an organism or by working with genes in products such as a banana, a fruit that had similar genes to humans, but which were not expressed. "These ways we would get round some of the worst risks," he said, "namely the whole set of problems to do with (dna) degradation."

Professor Traavik also questioned the nature of research, saying scientists worldwide were overwhelmingly funded by producers or private companies, which might have their own agendas. The starting questions of research shaped the answers, he said.

For Greenpeace, farmer Bill Christison, of Chillicothe, Missouri, who is a conventional and organic grower of soy bean, wheat and corn, said it was impossible to segregate genetically modified products from conventional ones at the silo. "You can have 1000 bushels of clean soy and a load of GM dumped on top."

Mr Christison said he was confident his crops were safe from contamination from neighbouring GM properties, but that had to do with personal crop choice and geography. The risk of cross-contamination was enormous elsewhere.

Greenpeace International science adviser Doreen Stabinsky spoke of her organisation's concern about field testing of modified organisms. "They're not contained, and adequate data cannot be provided for a commercial release.

"Some things, because of their intrinsic properties, just should not be released into the environment, whether or not you have evidence they cause harm."

In video interviews, United States Institute for Food and Development Policy co-director Anuradha Mittal strongly rejected claims that biotechnology provided the only hope of feeding a burgeoning population.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology biology professor Jonathon King argued that patents were inappropriate for biodiversity and living things.

Copyright 2001 Wellington Newspapers Limited