Scottish ban on GM crops: A short-sighted move?

Scotland is set to ban the growing of genetically modified crops. The Scottish Government say this is an attempt to protect the country’s “clean, green status” but, says Professor Huw Jones, this is a short-sighted and hollow gesture

From a scientific perspective, the decision taken by the Scottish parliament to place a blanket ban on the cultivation of crop varieties developed by modern biotechnology is short-sighted.It may serve to satisfy immediate political motives but it risks the longer-term future of Scottish food and farming sectors. Ironically, the very thing it claims to preserve.

Regardless of the motivation, it is anyway a hollow gesture because the only GM crop currently authorised for cultivation in the EU is a maize variety called Mon810 that is unsuitable for Scottish agriculture. Maize is a minor crop in Scotland and the insects to which Mon810 provides resistance; the European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis) and the pink stem borer (Sesamia nonagrioides) are currently not pests on UK farms. This crop has been available to all UK growers since it received EU-wide approval in 1998; however it is actually cultivated only in regions of Czech Republic, Portugal, and Spain where the pests pose a significant threat to production.

Unlike maize, potato is a major Scottish crop, although in recent years it has been losing ground to oil seed rape and cereals in terms of area cultivated¹. Late blight disease remains a significant problem for potato growers, as do other diseases such as potato cyst nematodes and the emerging food safety issue of high acrylamide in processed food. If the Scottish parliament opts out of all GM cultivation, they turn their back on potentially ground-breaking biotechnology solutions that would support Scottish seed and ware potato growers.

For instance the Simplot Company have already received approval in USA to commercialise a new potato variety called “Innate” that is genetically engineered to reduce bruising and to produce less acrylamide during cooking by lowering the levels of asparagine and reducing-sugars. Acrylamide is a carcinogenic chemical that can form in some foods during high-temperature cooking. In 2014, the EFSA Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain published a comprehensive Scientific Opinion on acrylamide in food and found that ‘acrylamide was found at the highest levels in solid coffee substitutes and coffee, and in potato fried products’².

This year, Simplot have announced they will seek regulatory approval from USDA for a second generation Innate potato that adds late blight resistance and produces even less acrylamide after frying. If the risk assessment goes to plan, they expect cultivation to begin in 2017. In addition, the Simplot Company are currently collaborating with the UK potato biotechnology company BioPotatoes UK Ltd and researchers from the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich and Leeds University to further improve late blight resistance and add yet another aid to farmers, resistance to potato cyst nematode. If the project is successful, ’both companies will invest in taking the potato through the process of regulatory approval and to market in the US and Europe’  ³. Thus we could see new varieties of potato with highly desirable traits for both grower and consumer approved for cultivation in the EU but withheld from the very people that could benefit most; Scottish farmers and consumers.

The direction of modern plant breeding Genetic modification of crops and DNA profiling for forensic and medical science are some of the obvious manifestations of a largely hidden revolution in genetics and genomics that has taken place over the few last decades. During that time the cost of DNA sequencing has plummeted from $10,000 per megabase in the 1970s to a few cents today. In the early years of this millennium the publication of each new crop genome was rightly hailed as a major breakthrough. Now, re-sequencing of many different varieties of the same species is revealing allelic variation underpinning the genetic control of key agricultural features such as plant architecture, flowering time, ability to tolerate biotic and abiotic stresses etc.

We have seen a stark example of the power of re-sequencing in the study of rice genomics; the staple food of over half the world's population. After many years work the first rice genome sequence was published in 2002. Yet, only a little over 10 years later, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) published the genomic sequence of 3000 different rice varieties⁴. This explosion of sequence data is already revolutionising our understanding of human and plant genetics and will find applications in human health as well as crop and animal breeding⁵. This is timely because there are genuine concerns over the ability of the global farm to feed the growing population in the face of significant pressures from biotic and abiotic stressors such emerging pest and diseases, long-term trends in heat, cold, drought and flooding as well as shorter-term extreme weather events. This all must be done sustainably without further degrading our soils or wilderness environments and using only existing land and water resources.

These are huge challenges and, as in the first green revolution of the 1950-60s, plant breeding will surely form part of the solution. This second green revolution will be based on genomics and biotechnology but the EU seems to be sleep-walking into a future of at best, uncompetitive farming and at worse, an insecure food supply. Biotechnology is becoming an integral part of the plant breeding process in many areas of the world. We are already seeing products of an exciting new biotechnology called ‘genome editing’, reach the marketplace elsewhere in the world⁶ but in the EU we are undecided and negative. There are some member states who consistently vote against adoption of new GMOs regardless of the positive risk assessment published by EFSA eg. Austria, Denmark, Greece, Lithuania and Luxemburg ⁶. The recent Scottish announcement reflects the voting patterns in these member states and sends a message to the rest of the world that the EU is anti-science. Despite this, the livestock industries of Scotland and many other EU member staes rely heavily on imported GM feed cultivated by foreign farmers.

To be consistent, if Scotland is to ban GM cultivation, should she not stop importing GM feed too? Of course I propose neither but it makes for a good ethical debate over a dram of single malt.

References:

1. Scottish Government (2014) Statistical Publication, Agricultural Series. RESULTS FROM THE JUNE 2014 SCOTTISH AGRICULTURAL CENSUS. http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0046/00462146.pdf 2. EFSA CONTAM Panel (2015) (EFSA Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain), 2015. Scientific Opinion on acrylamide in food. EFSA Journal 2015; 13(6):4104, 321 pp. doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2015.4104 3. TSL press Release 2015. Funding approved to develop new potato at The Sainsbury Laboratory http://www.tsl.ac.uk/news/new-potato-at-the-sainsbury-laboratory/ 4. Alexandrov N, Tai S, Wang W, Mansueto L, Palis K, Fuentes RR, Ulat VJ, Chebotarov D, Zhang G, Li Z, Mauleon R, Hamilton RS, McNally KL (2015) SNP-Seek database of SNPs derived from 3000 rice genomes. Nucleic Acids Res 43 (Database issue):D1023-1027. doi:10.1093/nar/gku1039 5. Jones, H.D. (2015a) Challenging regulations: Managing risks in crop biotechnology. Food and Energy Security 4, pp. 87-91. 6. Jones, H.D. (2015b) Regulatory uncertainty over genome editing. Nature Plants 1, pp. 14011.

The author: 

Huw Jones, Professor of Molecular Genetics