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Wheat at forefront of biotech battle
(Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004 -- CropChoice news) -- Associated Press, 02/25/04: WICHITA, Kan. -- More than 10,000 years after nomadic hunters first
harvested stands of wild wheat, researchers are working on genetically
engineering mankind's oldest crop in what may become the last stand in the
battle over biotech foods. With a genome five times the size of the human genome, wheat is so complex that it is one of the last major crops to undergo genetic manipulation. The
food staple has become the center of the fight over genetically modified
organisms.
Genetically modified wheat won't be released to farmers until it is
approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug
Administration and the U.S. Agriculture Department.
``For the non-GM people this is their last fight on a major crop,'' said
Harold Trick, a wheat researcher and assistant professor at Kansas State
University. ``If this fails, it will be hard for them to come back from that.''
Consumers in Europe and parts of Asia worry that genetically modified foods
are unsafe and could harm the environment.
The battle lines on biotech wheat are being drawn in North Dakota, where
opponents are proposing a ballot measure that would give the state
agriculture commissioner power to decide whether farmers may plant the crop.
What worries growers most is whether they will be able export genetically
modified wheat.
More than half of the spring wheat grown in the United States is exported,
and about 47 percent of those exports are now going to countries that have
said they won't accept genetically modified wheat, according to the Center
for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies at North Dakota State University.
But the furor over transgenic wheat has yet to flare up in Kansas, the
nation's biggest wheat grower.
Kansas grows winter wheat varieties. The introduction of biotech wheat will
begin with spring wheat -- which is grown primarily in North Dakota,
Montana, South Dakota and Minnesota.
St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. says it is developing a genetically modified
spring wheat that, within six years, would enable farmers to spray weed
killer without killing the wheat.
Such a trait is of far less interest to winter wheat growers, who plant
their crops in the fall and harvest them in early summer before most weeds
have a chance to take hold, said David Frey, administrator of the Kansas
Wheat Commission.
The Kansas Wheat Commission -- a grower-funded advocacy group whose mission
is global wheat marketing -- is funding much of the genetic research at
Kansas State University.
The group helped buy a gene sequencer for university researchers, and this
year budgeted $96,737 for transgenic wheat research. The work may one day
help develop transgenic varieties resistant to drought and disease.
Two months ago, Kansas State University researchers cloned a leaf rust
resistance gene, encouraging for wheat growers in a state where $100
million was lost last year to leaf or stem rust disease.
Bikram Gill, one of the researchers, said the work so far hasn't been
extended to wheat breeding because of the uncertainy about genetically
modified wheat.
But researchers hope the knowledge they gain through such research can also
be applied in the field for developing new varieties through natural
breeding processes, Trick said.
For example, their success in cloning the rust-resistant gene has now given
them a ``genetic tag'' to identify plants naturally resistant to rust.
Perhaps the most ambitious project now under way is an international effort
by scientists to map the wheat genome. Researchers say the wheat genome is
likely to be the largest genome ever sequenced.
A group of international scientists plan to get together this summer to lay
out the plan for a wheat genome sequencing project targeted for completion
in 2010. | |
