Australia cotton seen fully GM soon - scientists
Date: 15-Aug-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Byrnes
It was likely that more than half Australia's cotton would be GM in 2002, T.J. Higgins, of the government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) plant industry division, said in a paper distributed at the conference.
This would be up from around 30 percent in recent years.
"It is likely that over half of the area planted will be GM in 2002 and move rapidly towards full adoption in a short number of years thereafter," Higgins said in a paper co-authored with Danny Llewellyn, also of the CSIRO.
This was because of the cost effectiveness of producing GM crops and the proven success of the technology since its introduction in Australia in 1996.
Higgins and Llewellyn said biotechnology was reshaping global agriculture, with over 16 million hectares planted annually to GM soybeans, corn and cotton, mainly in the United States but increasingly in Australia, Asia and South America.
The launch of GM crops has sparked protests by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, and many consumers remain suspicious of them, worried about their health or damage to the Earth's ecology.
However, Higgins and Llewellyn said that while Europe was still reluctant to accept GM crops, genetically modified or transgenic cotton was partially buffered from concern. because cotton lint was not a food product.
And cotton oil, used for human consumption, was highly processed.
GM cotton was now being widely grown in many cotton producing countries, the scientists said.
Ingard cotton, the first GM cotton crop introduced to Australia in 1996, had reduced pesticide spraying by 40-60 percent, they said.
CHINA PUSHING AHEAD
The CSIRO scientists said China was putting an enormous effort into biotechnology and molecular biology in all of its major crops, including cotton.
It was not constrained by the International Patent system that restricted research in the West, and had been repeating and extending almost every cotton biotech application, including clones of many of the Monsanto insect control technologies, they said.
One Chinese application involved introducing the rabbit fur keratin gene into cotton fibres, they said.
Four hundred plants were reported to have been grown in the field at Taican in Jiangsu Province, they said, adding that hard information on China's GM activities was scarce.
This reportedly produced cotton which was whiter, more lustrous and longer than the corresponding conventional varieties. Plans were in place for significantly larger plantings next season, they said.
Llewellyn and Higgins also said lack of understanding of biotechnology by the general public had allowed fears to grow out of all proportion to any risks posed by the technology.
Failure by multinationals to allay public fears had slowed the biotechnology industry with regulatory and public acceptance barriers that may take years to dispel, they said.
Australia produces around 700,000 tonnes of cotton lint a year, exporting almost all of it as the world's third largest international cotton trader.