Why Monsanto thinks its GM wheat is the next best thing for sliced bread

As genetically modified bread heads for American shelves,
trade negotiators in Europe prepare for a battle over labelling

Steve Connor / London Independent 15jan01

It could be the next best thing for sliced bread. Or it could become the consumer's worst nightmare. The attempt to sell American-grown GM wheat in Britain is likely to light the blue touchpaper in a simmering trade row between the United States and Europe over gene technology.

Monsanto, the world's leading agricultural biotechnology company, has begun field trials of a genetically modified breed of wheat, which it hopes to start marketing – initially in America – in 2003. It would herald the dawn of the GM loaf. If the wheat becomes widely grown by North American farmers, as Monsanto expects, GM might inevitably end up in British bread, whether consumers like it or not.

Field trials of GM spring wheat have begun on experimental farms in the American prairies, where the crop is being tested for yield, herbicide resistance and other important characteristics that could affect mass production.

The company says it is also looking at potential environmental impacts of the new strain of wheat, a genetically complex plant that is the result of cross-breeding experiments by Neolithic farmers many thousands of years ago.

Monsanto conducts much of the research on wheat in room 4161 at its state-of-the-art life sciences centre in St Louis, Missouri, where the difficulties of manipulating wheat genes were tackled.

One problem is that the gene-carrying chromosomes of wheat are a collection of genomes from three different species of wild grass, from which the cereal was bred by the first farmers.

Monsanto has to ensure that the herbicide-resistance genes it inserts into the wheat are only incorporated into the genome that the crop does not share with a common wild relative, the jointed goat grass.

"Wheat is pretty much self- fertilised but on the rare occasions when it does outcross, it will not transfer the trait," said Mark Buckingham, a British-born spokesman for Monsanto working at its headquarters in St Louis.

"Wheat is an old combination of three different species of grass. This is one of the reasons why it has been slow to be developed by biotechnology because it is very complex and very difficult to work on," Mr Buckingham said.

"You've got to make sure that the insertion occurs in the genome of wheat that does not occur in jointed goat grassso then they won't be crossfertilised in respect of this inserted trait," he said

Initially the wheat is being modified to include theherbicide-resistance gene for glyphosate, the active ingredient of Monsanto's all-purpose weedkiller, Roundup. Like other herbicide-resistance crops, the wheat will survive being sprayed with glyphosate, which destroys all weeds in a field.

Environmentalists have questioned whether it is possible to ensure that herbicideresistance genes can be made to stay in the intended crop and not be transferred to nearby weeds, making them resistant "super pests".

Another concern is whether such GM crops are safe to eat. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already conducted extensive assessments on food-safety testsperformed on other herbicide-resistant crops and have so far given them a clean bill of health.

One of the tests includes a measurement of a product's allergenicity – whether the genetic modification makes a food more likely to cause an allergic reaction in sensitive consumers. This is especially important with wheat because a substantial minority of people suffer from coeliac disease, an intolerance to the gluten protein present in wheat.

However, James Astwood, director of product safety at Monsanto, said that future genetic modification of wheat might focus on how to make gluten safer by identifying and reducing, or even eliminating, the allergic component. Simply getting rid of gluten completely would not work because it was an important ingredient that imparted texture to bread.

Attempts at genetically modifying the gluten content of bread were being made at Monsanto's British research facility in Cambridge, Dr Astwood said.

Another research idea was to incorporate a substance called thyrodoxin into wheat, to make the bread proteins more digestible. Early experiments by American researchers suggested that wheat could be made 100 times less allergenic by such genetic modification.

However, these visions of the GM loaf of the future will rest on whether American trade negotiators can convince the EU to amend its insistance on the mandatory labelling of GM products.

American government officials, and the biotechnology industry, are nervous that consumers will shy away from products clearly labelled as containing GM ingredients. One senior American trade negotiator likened the labelling to saying that a cereals product was "rat faeces-free", which at the moment was impossible to guarantee because all cereals contained minute traces of rodent droppings, he said.

The FDA's view is that labelling is only necessary if a product is materially different from a non-GM equivalent. It is the argument of "substantial equivalence" that European greens have rejected in favour of the "precautionary principle", which Americans see as a way of restricting trade under the guise of scientific safety.

The European Union – and Britain's Food Standards Agency – takes the view that consumers should have the choice and be allowed to make up their own minds about GM. It is an attitude that evolved out of the BSE crisis, which has hardly had an impact in America where one in three consumers is to this day totally unaware he or she has been eating GM food for years.

Mr Buckingham of Monsanto said the impasse with Europe over mandatory labelling was having a serious impact on the other side of the Atlantic.

"It is a huge issue for Monsanto that the regulatory system is completely stalled. It impacts farmers' perception of the market for their products. US farmers value the European market for all their products," he said.

"But we are not going to not launch a new product because of lack of European approval... because that would mean that European politicians have a veto on what technology we should make available to north American farmers."

The crunch could come over GM wheat.

source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Science/2001-01/bread150101.shtml 28jan01