Field trials on drought-tolerance and water use efficiency with GM crops hit the news in Australia
GMOPundit
David Tribe
June 13, 2007
Excerpt…
Today the Australian gene technology regulator (OGTR) announced approval of field trials of drought-tolerant GM wheat varieties.
It will a mixed blessing for the trials if we have a very wet winter growing season, but I don't expect farmers will complain if we get lots of rain.
Update Jun 15 2007
The Age Letters June 15, 2007
BOB Phelps asserts that the benefits of GM crops are empty promises (Opinion, 12/6). Before Age readers take his story at face value, they should remember that we live in a drought-prone country.
Australians need to weigh carefully the potential for gene technology to protect crops against drought and provide ways of using water more efficiently. Phelps gives the wrong impression that this is simply a pie-in-the-sky dream.
Drought tolerance from GM crops is a field-trial reality, backed up by more than 300 registered trials of such crops in the US going back over the past eight years or so. The Dow Jones news service recently reported that drought-tolerant maize can give about 9 per cent better cereal yields under water stress conditions in such trials.
Phelps disingenuously claims that no drought-tolerant GM crops have been commercialised or trialled in Australia, but what he doesn't say is that there are field trials for water-efficient cotton, water-efficient sugar cane and drought-tolerant wheat either under way or recently approved by our national gene technology national regulator.
There is an extremely high future cost to slamming the door now on these welcome results of crop innovation. If shut, the door will be shut for years, because breeding and testing new crop varieties to suit local conditions takes years. Meanwhile, with a door shut here, our trade competitors in North and South America would be taking all the advantages. Most likely, Australian farmers will suffer badly for years to come from the vagaries of climate change if we make the wrong decision now.
David Tribe, department of microbiology and immunology, University of Melbourne
To continue after that introduction to the topicality of drought resistance in crops, let's do a stock take of progress in breeding protection against water stress (but not forget that hybrids and conventional traits such as those offered by hybrid maize and and GM hybrid canola also offer more crop resilience).
Bob Phlps and a few others ( eg Tammy Lobato) seem to think that the remedies offered by GM technology are trivial and that these approachs are nowhere near practical realisation. There's actually hundreds of such water use improvement field trials and they go back to the late 90s…
Read full article at GMOPundit.
