More specious scares

I see over on BBC news that BASF, the “chemical” company, wants to plant a trial of potatoes engineered to resist late blight. Leave aside the question of whether, as BASF says, engineering is “the only way” to get resistance genes (found in wild potatoes) into domesticated varieties. Leave aside, too, the equally interesting question of whether people will actually eat the things, no matter how much fungicide they may save. Focus on the objections of one Claire Oxborough from Friends of the Earth. She told BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today that quite apart from consumers shunning GM food, if trials went ahead, crops in future years could be contaminated.

How?

Last time I checked true potato seed was not the source of rogues or volunteers in fields. Unharvested potatoes were. I can’t imagine potato farmers following a GM crop immediately with a non-GM crop. Nor can I imagine an “organic” potato being grown on land that had GM potatoes on it a season before.

So how exactly are future crops going to be contaminated? And why didn’t Farming Today ask?

The Guardian has a slightly more nuanced report.