1.Scientists launch GM potato trial - BBC
2.GM crop trials are a waste of taxpayers' money - FoE
3.Blight-resistant GM potatoes field trial begins - BBC
4.Prof Jonathan Jones - SpinProfiles

QUOTE: "It's not a very people-friendly technology but it is a very profit-friendly technology" - Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth food campaigner on GM crops The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 8 June 2010 (item 2)

EXTRACTS: Prof Jonathan Jones... is [also] on the advisory board of Mendel Biotechnology, in which Monsanto is an investor and collaborator.

Jones has adopted an often highly aggressive tone in public meetings and in some of the material he has written for publication.

He attacks critics of GM crops at public meetings as 'self-serving' fundamentalists, calling them 'the green mujihadeen'. On the JIC website he posted material complaining of 'George Monbiot's periodic eruptions of green bile on the subject of GM crops' and of 'George Monbiot and his bigoted, myopic, mystical, anti-scientific, organic farming business interest friends'.

Jones has also attacked GM critics for 'quite literally leading everyone up the garden path.' But he has himself faced criticism for making baseless claims in support of GM crops. (item 4)
---
---
1.Scientists launch GM potato trial
BBC, Radio 4, Today programme
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8727000/8727561.stm

Hundreds of genetically modified potato plants are to be introduced to a field in Norfolk today.

Science reporter Tom Feilden talks to Professor Jonathan Jones of Sainsbury Laboratory about the importance of the new type of potatoes. Kirtana Chandrasekaran, from Friends of the Earth, outlines what she sees as the dangers of GM food trials.
---
---
2.GM crop trials are a waste of taxpayers' money
Friends of the Earth, 8 June 2010
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/gm_crop_trials_08062010.html

Commenting on the GM potato crop trials in Norfolk, Friends of the Earth's Food Campaigner Kirtana Chandrasekaran said:

"The Government is wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by forging ahead with unnecessary and unpopular GM crop trials, which threaten local farmers with contamination.

"The largest scientific farming study every conducted saw no clear role for GM crops in feeding the world - and their roll-out in other countries reveals that they benefit big business, not local farmers or hungry people.

"In South America, vast GM soy plantations are wiping out rainforests and devastating farming communities to provide animal feed for factory farms in the UK.

"We can feed a growing global population without trashing the planet or resorting to factory farms and GM crops - the Government must help farmers shift to planet-friendly farming."

ENDS

Notes to Editors

1. 2008's IAASTD Agricultural Assessment showed no clear role for GM crops.
http://www.agassessment.org/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads_Global%20Summary%20for%20Decision%20Makers%20%28English%29.pdf

2. Friends of the Earth has tabled a Sustainable Livestock Bill and will be working with MPs in the new Parliament to make it law www.fixthefoodchain.co.uk

If you are a journalist seeking press information please contact the Friends of the Earth media team on 020 7566 1649.
---
---
3.Blight-resistant GM potatoes field trial begins
Mark Kinver
BBC News, 8 June 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10254905.stm

A field trial of a genetically modified (GM) variety of potato resistant to "late blight" - a major threat to the crop - has begun in eastern England.

The global annual cost of crops lost to the disease is estimated to be GBP3.5bn.

The trial, carried out by scientists from The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL), will last three years.

Anti-GM campaigners criticised the trials, saying it was possible to grow blight-resistant potatoes using conventional methods.

The project's research team said it was necessary to carry out the field trial in order to test the plants' resistance to naturally occuring pathogen Phytophthora infestans - the fungus-like organism that causes late blight in potatoes.

"What we don't know is if we have got a GM potato, which is resistant to laboratory strains of the late blight pathogen, (whether) that will be resistant to the whole spectrum of races that circulate out there in the field," said Jonathan Jones, TSL's senior scientist.

The experiment will be conducted on a 1,000-square-metre plot in Norfolk. Each year of the trial, approximately 200 sq m, containing about 400 plants, will be sown with GM potatoes.

Professor Jones said that the team started screening wild gene-banks for sources of resistance to late blight.

"We screened about 100 different species of Sollanum, the genus to which potatoes belong, and identified a few that were resistant," he told BBC News.

"We have isolated genes from two different wild potato species that confer blight resistance."

The genes, taken from inedible wild plants that grow in South America, were used to to produce a genetically modified Desiree variety.

The genes give the Desiree plants the ability to recognise strains of the blight pathogen that it would not otherwise recognise, Professor Jones explained.

"A new race showed up about four or five years ago, but is now about 70% of all (cases) you see in the field. It has overcome previously resistant varieties of potato.

"So you use the pathogen's attack as your defence. The resistance genes allow the plant to discern a pathogen attack as a cue to activate the host's defences."

About 130,000 hectares of land in the UK is used to grow potatoes, yielding in the region of 6m tonnes of potatoes each year.

However, in a typical growing season, farmers can spray fungicides on their crops up 15 times at a cost of about £500/hectare, Professor Jones said.

Therefore a late blight resistance GM potato would reduce a number of environmental impacts, including reducing the amount of chemicals being sprayed on farmland, as well as cutting emissions from using tractors to spray fungicides and from the production of the agrichemicals.

Biosecurity concerns

Dr Helen Wallace, director of campaign group GeneWatch, called the trial a "waste of public money".

"It is possible to breed blight-resistant potatoes using conventional methods, so there is no need to use GM technology," she told BBC News.

GM Freeze, another group opposed to genetically modified food crops, voiced a number of objections to the trial, which has been approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

"The application from the Sainsbury Laboratory states that potatoes are mainly self-pollinating and that dissemination of pollen 'is usually less than 10 metres' and the role of the wind is 'very limited'," it said in its objections.

"Pollination is also by insects, including bumble bees, pollinated hoverflies and pollen beetles. Long distant cross-pollination events have been found to occur.

"Distances for potato-to-potato cross pollination events of up to 1km have been recorded in which pollen beetles were believed to be the vectors."

They added: "Thus, the justification for very limited separation distances and safeguards against pollen escape are open to question."

Professor Jones said that the trial was well within the biosecurity parameters required in order for permission to be granted.

"The rules are that the field trial has to be at least 20 metres from adjacent conventional potato fields," he said.

"Very hypothetically, if a few pollen grains make it from our GM potatoes to some cultivated potatoes, given that we do not eat the fruit but the tubers, there is absolutely no way that the DNA we use can enter the human food chain."

"There are also no wild relatives of potato in Europe that it could cross (breed) with."
Food for thought

Helen Farrier, the National Union of Farmers' chief science and regulatory affairs adviser, welcomed the start of the field trial.

"We are encouraged that there is research into tackling this problem and it is progressing into field trials, as blight is a major issue for the potato sector," she told BBC News.

However, she added that there would not be any commercial cultivation of GM potatoes in the UK unless there was a market for it.

"At the moment, it is a bit of a leap of imagination for farmers to think that they will be growing this crop.

"But they are always looking for ways to produce more sustainably, so in the future if there is a market, then some farmers will go for it."

Professor Jones said that if there was no public controversy about using technology, then the first GM potatoes could be available to commercial growers within five years.

"However, the wild card is the public mood," he added.

"What will be required in order for this technology to move forward is for supermarkets to say that they are not scared to tell customers that food produced this way will reduce the environmental impact of agriculture and will be better value.

"But we are not at that stage yet."

As a member of the Royal Society panel that produced a report last year examining the role of science in delivering a sustainable global food system, Professor Jones said that GM technology offered a possible solution to delivering food security.

"We do face a 'perfect storm' of needing to produce at least 50% more food by 2030 with no more land, less water, climate change and rising costs of energy and fertilisers.

"This is not a trivial challenge at all, and this technology - I believe - is one of the essential (items) in the toolkit to meet that challenge."

Professor Jones and his team hope to publish initial results of the field trial, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), in a scientific journal by the end of the year.
---
---
4.Prof Jonathan Jones - SpinProfile
http://spinprofiles.org/index.php/Jonathan_Jones

Prof Jonathan Jones is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Head of the Sainsbury Laboratory of the John Innes Centre (JIC) . He has also undertaken research at UC Berkeley. He is on the advisory board of Mendel Biotechnology[1], in which Monsanto is an investor and collaborator.[2]

Since the late 1980s he has headed a lab within the Sainsbury Laboratory, using molecular biology and genetics to better understand plant disease resistance with a view to engineering disease resistance genes into crop plants. In 1998 Jones wrote, 'I've worked with transgenic plants for 15 years, in the US and the UK. The more I do it, the less I worry about it.'

It was environmental concerns which, according to Prof Jones, led him into a career in plant biology as a source of hightech solutions. He has written, 'It simply is appalling how rainforests are cut down, fisheries fished out and water resources are overutilized and polluted. But the solutions require more science, not less.'

Unusually for a biotechnologist, Jones has at times been willing to criticise the biotech industry, outside of the area of GM crops. He wrote to The Guardian to support George Monbiot's concern about Monsanto's genetically engineered cattle drug BST, 'George Monbiot and the Guardian have got wrong much of their coverage on GM foods and GM crops. But he is certainly right to highlight concern... about milk from cows treated with bovine somatotropin (BST). It appears suspect both on animal welfare and human health grounds'.

However, his keenness to communicate the benefits of GM crops, has led him to adopt a less tolerant attitude towards environmental critics of GM crops like George Monbiot. In fact, while the JIC's [former] Director, Prof. Chris Lamb, has publicly expressed his concern at the 'polarisation of discussion about agriculture', and declared it part of the JIC's vision to seek to foster balanced debate, Jones has adopted an often highly aggressive tone in public meetings and in some of the material he has written for publication.

He attacks critics of GM crops at public meetings as 'self-serving' fundamentalists, calling them 'the green mujihadeen'. On the JIC website he posted material complaining of 'George Monbiot's periodic eruptions of green bile on the subject of GM crops' and of 'George Monbiot and his bigoted, myopic, mystical, anti-scientific, organic farming business interest friends'.

During the Pusztai crisis in February 1999 Jones penned an article at the request of Number 10 on the benefits of GM crops. The government's spin-doctors then tried to place the article in a national newspaper. The material turned up 'partially summarized' in a Sunday Times editorial on 14th of February. The following day the Daily Telegraph reported how the piece had been hawked around the press by Number 10. The fact that Jones worked for a laboratory founded and funded by Labour's Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, who is a leading advocate of GM crops, attracted critical comment.

In the article Jones wrote, 'Grandstanding does not resolve scientific questions', and he concluded, without any apparent sense of self-contradiction, 'The future benefits (for consumers and the environment) will be enormous [from GM] and the best is yet to come. In the meantime, let's have more information and less rhetoric.'

Jones has also attacked GM critics for 'quite literally leading everyone up the garden path.' But he has himself faced criticism for making baseless claims in support of GM crops.

At public talks, Jones has repeatedly claimed that GM crops have made aerial spraying of pesticides unnecessary in the US, resulting in 'crop dusters' going 'out of business because plants are so [pest] resistant, there's no business for applying insecticides indiscriminately from aeroplanes'. However, according to a leading US agronomist, Dr Charles Benbrook, insecticide use in the US has actually been on the increase. While crop dusters are indeed going out of business, says Benbrook, this is because 'fewer and fewer pesticides may be applied aerial, because of drift. Virtually all the new chemistry is incompatible with aerial application.' Dr Benbrook's conclusion on Jones' much repeated claim that crop dusters are going out of business because of GM crops: 'This fellow does not know what he is talking about.' So where did Jones get his data? He told us he read it in a newspaper - The Christian Science Monitor.

Ironically, in his article about the media storm over Pusztai's research, Jones wrote, 'As a scientist myself I can only say "show me the data". Grandstanding does not resolve scientific questions.'

Notes

1. "Scientific Advisory Board", Mendel Biotechnology, accessed February 2009.
http://www.mendelbio.com/aboutus/advisoryboard.php#3
2. "Monsanto, Mendel Biotechnology sign deal", St. Louis Business Journal, April 28 2008, accessed September 2009.
http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2008/04/28/daily2.html