This story continues to be widely covered in the UK press.

EXTRACT: "I remember being reassured on this issue when I was minister. Now we discover that charlock, a distant relative of GM oil seed rape, has acquired resistance to herbicide," he said.

"It means we just cannot afford to take the risk that GM crops will not cross-contaminate wild plants in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways.
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Weed discovery brings calls for GM ban
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
The Guardian, July 26, 2005
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1536021,00.html

Britain cannot afford to take the risk of spreading genetically modified genes to wild plants and should ban GM crops that have wild relatives in the countryside, the former environment minister Michael Meacher said yesterday.

Mr Meacher, who was the minister responsible for introducing the farm-scale trials of GM crops in Britain to test their effect on the environment, said he was shocked yesterday at research results revealed for the first time in the Guardian.

The results showed that a related weed had picked up herbicide resistance as a result of cross-fertilisation with GM oil seed rape, something that scientists had said would not happen in the countryside.

The discovery raises fears that herbicide-resistant superweeds could develop in the British countryside if GM crops were grown commercially.

"I remember being reassured on this issue when I was minister. Now we discover that charlock, a distant relative of GM oil seed rape, has acquired resistance to herbicide," he said.

"It means we just cannot afford to take the risk that GM crops will not cross-contaminate wild plants in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways.

"If weeds are able to tolerate broad spectrum herbicides as a result of cross-pollination it means we get into uncharted territory."

He said he had been to Canada to see the plight of farmers who had encountered superweeds. They had been forced to spray them with heavy duty chemicals.

"In a small island like Britain where we have many comparatively small fields and many related species of plants, it is unrealistic to think we could have adequate separation distances between GM crops and conventional crops or their wild relatives."

It was impossible to see how organic and conventional farmers could be safeguarded from cross-contamination, or how GM crops would not gradually contaminate everything else.

Mr Meacher said French research, also highlighted by the Guardian yesterday, which showed that one herbicide resistant weed introduced into a crop had multiplied to 103,000 plants in four years, was "frightening".

"The safe option is to say simply that the risk of these GM crops is too great and we will not grow them," he said.

Brian Johnson, an ecological geneticist, head of the biotechnology group at English Nature, emphasised yesterday that the charlock was not a superweed and did not appear to be fertile, but it was possible the GM genes could be carried to other plants in the pollen.

The research did not analyse the pollen so "we could not be sure that the trait was there".

Government researchers from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who had been surprised by their own findings of the transfer of a GM trait to charlock, said follow-up research was needed.

In Canada plants had evolved from GM crops which were resistant to three types of herbicide, which was why they had been called superweeds. The charlock that was found in the UK was only resistant to one.

Pete Riley, the director of Five Year Freeze, an organisation dedicated to preventing the commercial growing of GM crops for five years, said: "The news that a GM herbicide-tolerant gene has moved from oilseed rape to charlock is very surprising - previously we were told that this was impossible under field conditions.

"What a good job that there has been a moratorium to allow such unexpected events to be discovered. Who knows what the next shock finding will be?

"In our view it is high time that GM oilseed rape was quietly put to sleep. After these findings and the other field-scale trial results we will be looking for the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, and ministers, to take a strong approach and ban it."