Date published: 2005/09/28
The BBC says:
A follow-up to the UK's major trial of genetically modified crops, the Farm Scale Evaluations, finds that impacts on wildlife can persist for two years.
The original trial found that spring GM rape and sugar beet were harsher than their conventional equivalents in the short term, while GM maize was better.
The new study shows the same pattern at two years for rape and maize.
The British government has welcomed the findings, which it says "provide important information" on GM crops.
The new information relates to three of the four crops studied in the Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs): spring oilseed rape, sugar beet and maize.
Initial results on these crops were published in October 2003; data on the fourth crop, winter oilseed rape, was published separately in March 2005.
"The new study confirms our impression of what would happen when we released the initial results," said Les Firbank, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, the FSE project co-ordinator.
"We did expect the differences to persist, and I don't think it will affect any decision on approving GM crops," he told the BBC News website.
This follow-up, published in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, did not look at insects and birds as the initial study had done.
Instead, it confined itself to monitoring the weed seedbank - the number and diversity of weed seeds left in the soil, which will be food for insects and birds.
It found that the result seen at one year for maize, with the GM crop leaving a greater seedbank than conventional varieties, persisted through the second season after planting.
The converse result for spring rape - GM cultivation worse than conventional - also persisted.
Nothing unexpected. But the idea that this one measure (some measure of "diversity") should determine whether or not some specific crops should be allowed is ridiculous. And of course the people (the comfortable middle class) who object to GM crops do so on religious grounds, so the results are politically irrelevant in any case.
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