Agmates

Australia’s leading GM Crop commentator David Tribe [aka GMO Pundit] writes:

Voters in WA are being offered to make a choice about GM crop technology.

But if Labour still retains power after the election, choice about GM technology will be out of reach for WA farmers…

The current choice for voters is between the WA Labor policy of banning genetic modification of crops, which closes off options for crop innovation, and the Liberal’s policy which allows for farmer choice, and also opens up a future with profitable new cropping possibilities such as insect-protected cotton on the Ord River.

A good example of how Premier Alan Carpenter’s [pictured] GM ban stymies innovation is its entrenchment of WA canola grower dependence on atrazine herbicide.

Atrazine herbicide is currently banned in Europe, and is a marketing disadvantage when selling canola into that market.

The acceptable daily intake of atrazine is sixty-fold lower than that for the safer alternative glyphosate.

Labor’s GM ban prevents replacement of WA’s current widely used atrazine tolerant (TT) canola varieties with environmentally superior and better performing GM varieties that allow glyphosate to replace atrazine..

Labor’s Premier Alan Carpenter’s campaign slogan is Vision, Stability and Leadership.

Stability of sorts — more of the same — but precious little vision when it comes to capturing cost-savings and new market opportunities for farmers.

It’s a strange vision that seeks to promote the state a clean and green by locking farmers into using atrazine if they want to get good canola yields. Its tunnel vision that locks’s out viable cotton growing on the Ord.

To get away with this charade, Carpenter is hoodwinking city voters into thinking he’s protecting them from GM vegetables and fruits appearing in the supermarkets. He’s announced a million dollars of spending to test food products for content of GM components (undermining in the process the existing Food Standards Australia and New Zealand as the national food regulator), and posing for photos while making announcements in front of fields of radish.

There are no GM fresh vegetables being marketed in Australia.

Fortunately both the WAFarmers Federation and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association are standing up to protect farmer’s choice on this matter. And WA Liberal’s Colin Barnett is supporting trials of GM cotton and canola.

The big issue of the current global food crisis, and the part that modern crop science is playing in providing better food security has been getting a good run in the general media lately.

Lets hope that WA voters have been tuning into these serious big picture messages, and also that more voters (especially those in city electorates) realise that farmers deserve the right to make their choices about what they plant and don’t plant.

Decisions about how to make farms more profitable and sustainable have to be taken away from politicians like Carpenter.

.

…………………………………………………………………

.

Have Your Say!

.

Agmates welcomes David Tribe, Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne as our regular GM in Agriculture columnist.

Agmates strives to bring you totally independent news and comment and David is widely acknowledged as Australia’s leading commentator / blogger on Genetically Modified Crops (GM) - Visit Davids blog GMO Pundit - Here

Over to David (pictured below)

Keep the door open to drought tolerant crops

Recent media stories about wheat varieties giving up to 20% better yield performance when hit by drought are just the tip of the iceberg of a vast amount of modern plant science directed at understanding and better managing water stressed plants.

Yes, water stress, and plant responses to it are complicated topics.

And yes too, the idea of using modern genetic tricks to improve on nature as far as drought tolerance is concerned is a really big ask.

So why on earth should growers give any credence to these latest results, announced by Premier John Brumby and plant scientist German Spangenberg in Victoria just this last month?

Well for a start, the GM based insect protection trait Bt-protein already insulate US maize growers from drought damage. This practical experience of many US corn-growers with rootworm protected maize planted in the US for several seasons now is well documented. Root development and drought protection are intimately linked, worm damage to roots means, unsurprisingly, worse corn performance, and Bt stops that damage.

But many other benefits leading to drought protection have been obvious to the plant science community for since at least 1996, which was when Xu and colleagues reported good results from transformation of rice with HVA1 drought tolerance genes from barley.

There’s been a treasure trove of highly exciting plant science on the topic since them. By about 2004, plant scientists (e.g. Chaves and Oliviera) were saying that practical drought protection breakthroughs were almost certain.

It’s just taken about 5 years for scientific progress in the lab and greenhouse — to turn this basic science into field trials which are needed to demonstrate practical effectiveness of greenhouse discoveries in farming practice.

Perhaps the most exciting of these basic science discoveries some ten years back was identification of genetic switches controlling whole sets of genes, for instance genes turned on by water stress having a drought-responsive-element nicknamed by biologists DRE.

These discoveries of switches and water stress signaling system and the genes controlling them have given breeders ways of orchestrating whole sets of genes that are needed for drought protection with a only small number of genetic changes. It this that’s enabled German Spangenberg and his co-workers in Vic-DPI to be successful with wheat in Victoria.

With coordinated orchestration of plant stress management, deliberate breeding for drought tolerance has at last became achievable in practice. That’s exactly why GM-technology detractors in Australia are in full-on denial mode about these breakthroughs.

And now Drought-tolerance genes have been trialed successfully in several crops, including both wheat and corn, they are worth paying serious attention to as a future farmer’s option. If the climate change-doomsayers are right, these events will a Godsend for Ozzie growers.

The whole GM debate up till now has not been simply about getting GM canola varieties on the market. It’s been about keeping the door open to the numerous technological flow-ons that can only occur if there is a clear path to market for seed-company innovators.

If the GM canola bans had continued in the Southern States, Ozzie farmers would have seen drought-tolerant crops years, if not decades, after their competitors in North and South America had been growing them in their paddocks and earning good dollars from them. Now they’ve at least got an even break, provided that the keep their local political reps informed of how they feel about grower freedom to choose the best technology for themselves.

Agmates readers can help each other by working hard to keeping the door open for grower choice. They need to keep on pushing and shoving to preserve farmer choice about which seeds they can sow, and what types of technology they can try out.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Have your say! Leave a comment or ask David a question.