Dear Sir/Ms:

The annual industry report on Genetically Manipulated (GM) crops is now online. * The figures show that GM crops stalled and are going backwards globally.

In 2017, fewer farmers grew GM soy, corn, cotton and canola, down to 17 million growers from the 18 million who grew it for the past few years. This is fewer than 3% of all the world’s farmers who number over 500 million!

The area of GM crops did grow slightly but in fewer countries. Only 24 countries grew any commercial GM crops at all last year, down from a peak of 28 in 2015.

91% of the global GM area of 189.8 million ha was in just five countries – USA 40%, Brazil 26%, Argentina 12%, Canada 7%, and India 6%. Australia ran 12th in the GM stakes with only 0.5% of the total harvest.

Monsanto launched GM soy, corn, cotton and canola in 1996, containing the Roundup tolerance and Bt insect toxin traits. Yet in 2017, 99% of the GM varieties grown world-wide were these same four crops with two traits. Monsanto ran out of products and the game was up, so sold out to Bayer in June 2018. Even the name Monsanto will soon disappear.

Transgenic GM crops that were the engine of the 20th century genetic revolution are now superceded by new GM techniques generally known as CRISPR. They make the same empty promises that the old GM techniques failed to deliver – ‘feeding the world’, ‘fixing nitrogen in grains’, ‘drought and salt tolerant wheat’, ‘improved nutrition’, and much more.

But CRISPR has similar safety and credibility problems as its predecessor. For instance, peer-reviewed research published this week in Nature Biotechnology ** finds the procedure often chops DNA instead of a single clean cut and can unpredictably disrupt the genetic material near where a cut-and-paste is made. Solving such thorny problems will not be easy. ***

Farmers and shoppers can trust fresh GM-free fruits, veges and grains that will feed us, our kids and grandchildren very well.

Yours sincerely,

Bob Phelps

* International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)
http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/53/
** CRISPR disrupts genomes:
https://www.nature.com/articles/Nbt.4192
*** The latest findings discussed here:
https://theconversation.com/crispr-cas9-gene-editing-scissors-are-less-accurate-than-we-thought-but-there-are-fixes-100007
Bob Phelps Executive Director Gene Ethics