"I am clearly guilty of supporting virtually any technology or farming system that will safely and sustainably raise yields on the world's farms. That's because the peak world population of nearly 9 billion affluent people in 2050 will demand nearly three times as much food as we consume today.
"The world already uses 37 percent of its land area for farming. Without new breakthroughs such as biotechnology, we will probably not be able to produce the additional food without plowing down tens of millions of square miles of wildlife. The risk in the 21st century is not famine, but wildlands destruction on a huge scale."
Dennis T. Avery
Hudson Institute Director of Global Food Issues, June 9, 1999
Will biotech escape to the environment?
One typical concern with biotech crops is that the specialty gene(s) could escape to neighbouring weeds or crops. Gene transfer from one plant to another is known to occur naturally, either through pollen, or viruses which can naturally infect one plant and then move on to another.
But any genetically engineered food to be grown in Canada must first go through experimental trials, including controlled field trials. Evaluators at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency assess the potential environmental impact of traits moving from plant to plant by examining what the novel trait is and does, the ability of the novel plant to successfully outcross to a relative and produce viable offspring, and the significance of that relative in managed and unmanaged ecosystems.
As a result of such trials, Canada has, for example, forbidden the growing of transgenic oats because weedy relatives of oats are so widespread. Similarly, growing genetically-engineered oilseed rape is banned in eastern Canada, because weedy relatives could hybridize with the crop.
Research has shown that in a field containing a mixture of transgenic herbicide-tolerant and non-transgenic plants, where no herbicide was sprayed, the transgene disappeared after five generations. This is probably because the energy devoted to the production of the herbicide-tolerance protein meant the plant had less energy for growth and reproduction. Further studies have shown this is true for tobacco, oilseed rape and rice. It means that if a biotech gene escapes from farmers' fields, it is more likely to create "punyweeds" than "superweeds."
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