This week findings from the long-awaited and widest ever study in the UK on the impact of GM crops were made known. The focus may well be on whether or not transgenic crops are a risk to wildlife, but have the mixed results raised more questions than they answer?
The field trials, involving 280 fields, began in 1999 when the UK government asked an independent consortium of researchers to investigate the impact of growing herbicide-tolerant GM crops on farmland wildlife compared with growing non-GM varieties of the same crops.
The results of the trials will be used by the UK government, along with other information in the GM Nation? debate, to make a decision on whether or not to allow the engineered plants to be commercialised in the country.
The crops tested were spring-sown oilseed rape, beet and maize with the GM crops genetically modified to make them resistant to specific herbicides.
Undoubtedly there are two major, contrasting, findings released this week. The scientists revealed that while growing conventional beet and spring rape was better for many groups of wildlife than growing GM herbicide-tolerant beet and spring rape, GM herbicide-tolerant maize was actually better for many groups of wildlife than conventional maize.
"There were more weeds in and around the GM herbicide-tolerant maize crops, more butterflies and bees around at certain times of the year, and more weed seeds," reports the research consortium in a statement this week.
In contrast, "some insect groups, such as bees (in beet crops) and butterflies (in beet and spring rape), were recorded more frequently in and around the conventional crops because there were more weeds to provide food and cover," report the researchers.
The consortium also stressed that the differences they found were not a 'result of the way in which the crops have been genetically modified. They arose because these GM crops gave farmers taking part in the trial new options for weed control'.
"The results are clearly important to the debate about the possible commercialisation of GM crops. But, they also give us new insights that will help us conserve biodiversity within productive farming systems," said the head of the research team, Dr Les Firbank.
Environmental group Greenpeace criticised the trials as limited in their scope, dismissing them as a 'political fudge'.
But, said Dr. Doug Parr, science director of Greenpeace UK, the findings did prove that the GM corporations were wrong when they claimed 'their crops would reduce weed killer use and benefit wildlife'.
A decision by UK ministers on whether to commercialise the crops could come later this year, or early in 2004.