It’s all about the br… potato

As I was spending time being worried about the approval of BT Brinjal during my stay in India, something similar was happening a bit closer to home.

It’s never a matter of weeks or months but rather a matter of years when the big seed companies are lobbying the authorities to change the legislation. A few years, however, is not enough to establish the safety of a new crop.

I am talking about the genetically modified potato, soon in a field near you. The Amflora potato was earlier this year approved by the European Commision. Behind this crop is the German chemical company BASF. They own Plant Science Sweden, who in fact started this research before BASF entered the field (pardon the pun).

So what’s the deal with Amflora?

It’s not a potato you’ll soon see in the supermarket in between King Edward and Bintje. It’s grown for starch, mainly for the paper industry (but also that of yarn and even glue for example).

Starch for paper has been used and derived from plants ever since the Chinese started making it from rice, but the point with this potato is of course that it’s faster harder better stronger. Or, to be more precise: a “normal” potato produces two types of starch, at the ratio of 80:20. Only one of these is required by the industry (the 80% one), meaning that at the moment the two are separated after growth. What the scientists have done here, though, is that by extracting a gene from the potato, modifying it and then inserting it back in the potato, the production of the unwanted starch is inhibited.

When you’re working on molecular levels it’s important that you know that what you’re doing is on the right track. If you’re not there are, after all, about as many other tracks as there are genes in the DNA string. So, a certain indicator is needed. In the case of the Amflora potato the extracted gene is also given antibiotic properties. If the gene then survives an exposure requiring antibiotics- Eureka!

I don’t think I need to start arguing why, at the end of the day, why levels of antibiotics in a crop could easily get out of hand.

So how does the company behind the Amflora defend this? Easy. How could a potato spread involuntarily, when potato multiplies through the potato itself and not through seeds? Cross contamination with other potatoes is also very unlikely. The potato plant does produce seeds, but these are rarely or never utilized. As for wild siblings, the potato is related to plants like tomato and aubergine. Again, not a great risk of genetic mayhem in the forests and fields close to us. In other words, the antibiotic resilience is kept within the Amflora potato.

There is another side of the chip though.

While the starch is the desired product of the potato there is undeniably a lot of pulp left after its’ extraction. What to do with this pulp? While the EU have strict laws around what can be fed to you and me this pulp can now end up in animal feed.

Today, in the EU, you don’t have to label your product as GM if it contains less than 0.9% of GM crops. There are practical reasons behind this legislation but it’s being abused and misused.

And, food stuffs aside, there is no need to label paper containing Amflora starch. In other words it will not be possible to, as a consumer, boycott it. I also fear that these non food GM crops are there to root (pardon the pun again) the concept of GM in our minds, making us more susceptible to future food crops.

There has, as far as I know, been no proven advantage of GM crops with the exception of picture perfect fields under ideal conditions (in other words, GM crops requires both industrial sized agriculturalists and optimal weather conditions to deliver). About 1% of today’s crops are GM, which accounts for that my skepticism is shared. Thus far.

I fear that this desire to industrialize nature is going to backfire.

What do you think?

Read what BASF writes about the Amflora here(I recommend downloading their leaflet on the subject).

Here’s some more information about GMO in English.

Here’s some more GMO material in Swedish.

And here’s what you can do.

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