- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Gene leakage
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- "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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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