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China's GM trees get lost in bureaucracy
Fred Pearce
New Scientist, 15 September 04
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996402

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

China has planted more than a million genetically modified trees in a bid to halt the spread of deserts and prevent flash floods. But a bureaucratic loophole means that no one knows for sure where all the trees have been planted, or what effect they will have on native forests.

In the past five years, 8000 square kilometres of farmland in China has been converted to plantations. State foresters have focused on the headwaters of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers and Xinjiang province in the arid north-west, where the first field tests for GM trees were carried out in the late 1990s.

These plantations have been plagued by insect pests, so Chinese researchers have experimented by planting varieties of local poplar tree that have been genetically modified to resist the insects. But at a meeting on GM safety in Beijing in July, a number of scientists complained about the absence of proper controls over GM trees within China.

Xue Dayuan of the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science says that the GMO Safety Administration Office of China's Ministry of Agriculture has no control over GM trees because they are not classified as crops. But the State Forestry Bureau, which oversees tree plantations, does not have a licensing system like the one run by the ministry, he told the meeting.

"There is an urgent need for cooperation between the two bodies," Xue told the China Daily online newspaper. Not least because the experiments in Xinjiang have shown that genes from the GM poplars are turning up in natural varieties growing nearby.

Another critic is Wang Huoran, who represents the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. In November 2003 he is reported to have told an FAO panel that GM poplar trees "are so widely planted in northern China that pollen and seed dispersal cannot be prevented".

The absence of a licensing system, coupled with frequent exchanges of varieties between nurseries, made it "very difficult to trace" where the GM trees had been planted, he said.

Wang did not respond to New Scientist's requests for further comment. But Dietrich Ewald of the Institute for Forest Genetics and Forest Tree Breeding in Waldsieversdorf, Germany says information on Chinese field trials with GM trees would be published soon in international journals.

Fred Pearce