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Bank Of America Investment Seeds that are supposed to be free of genetic engineering routinely contain biotechnology traits anyway, a public interest group said yesterday.

//www.organicconsumers. article_13332.cfm GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS CANNOT FEED THE WORLD In a revealing interview with the Guardian UK last week, Martin Taylor, the chairman of one of the world's leading sellers and promoters of seeds for GM crops, Syngenta, admitted that biotech foods cannot feed the world.

Investment Opportunity The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, said it had detected tiny quantities of genetically modified seeds in most of the bags of unmodified corn, soybean and canola seeds it tested.

The GM canola that drifted onto Schmeiser's farm was engineered to withstand spraying of Monsanto's proprietary weedkiller, Roundup. But Schmeiser did not use Roundup on his canola crop. After all, if Schmeiser had sprayed his crop, the chemical would have killed the majority of his canola plants that were not genetically modified to tolerate the weedkiller! Schmeiser didn't take advantage of Monsanto's GM technology, but the court ruling says he's guilty of using the seed without a licensing agreement.

Banc Of America Investment If seeds do contain the traits, the group said, it would be virtually impossible for farmers to grow crops that are completely free of genetic modification. That could mean disruption of crop exports to countries that do not allow genetically engineered foods. It also makes it harder for organic farmers to supply customers who will not accept even tiny degrees of genetic engineering.

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Banking Investment "The door to seed contamination is wide open," said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who added that her group's study was the first to systematically look at the issue. In a conference call with reporters, she said the genetically engineered seeds might have come from a mixing of seeds by farmers or seed companies or from pollination of seed crops by genetically engineered crops.

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Investment Solution Strategic Representatives of the seed and biotechnology industries said the findings were not surprising and did not pose any health risk because the genetically modified seeds detected are approved and widely grown already.

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Investment Banking Services "Low levels of biotech traits present in conventional seed is not new and is something that has been around for eight years or so now," the president of the American Seed Trade Association, Richard Crowder, said.

Bank Investment Mr. Crowder said it was not possible to ensure that a bag of seeds was completely pure. Regulations allow a bag of corn seed to contain, in some cases, up to 5 percent of varieties different from the one on the label. So it is not surprising to find some outside presence of genetically altered seeds in bags meant to contain nonengineered varieties.

Alternative Investment The Union of Concerned Scientists bought six varieties each of corn, soybean and canola seeds and sent samples to two commercial laboratories for testing. One laboratory detected genetically engineered seeds in three of six varieties of the corn and soy samples and some in all six canola varieties. The other laboratory found genetically engineered traits in five of the six varieties of each crop.

Online Investment Services The genetically modified seeds were found in low levels, ranging from 0.05 percent to 1 percent. The traits detected were the ones used in widely grown genetically engineered crops - herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.

Accompany Essential Investment Dr. Mellon said a bigger health risk would occur if genes now being tested to produce pharmaceuticals from crops were to get into seeds for food crops. Her group could not test for such genes because in general their identity is not known. "If the door to the seed supply is open to contamination,'' she added, "it is likely that drug genes will be able to pass through it, right to our breakfast tables."

Investment Company But seed and biotechnology industry representatives said that was unlikely. The crops used to produce pharmaceuticals will be grown on much smaller acreage than herbicide-resistant soybeans, and the regulations for isolating them from other crops will be much stricter, they said.

Investment Management Solution Frederick Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, said in the conference call that organic farmers were having an increasingly difficult time obtaining seeds free of genetic engineering. "If the current rate of seed contamination continues," he said, "then farmers that supply niche markets that do not allow any genetically modified materials will simply lose those markets.''

Investment Management Services By Andrew Pollack
New York Times - 2/24/2004

Topic: Genetic Engineering

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