If growers of genetically modified canola wonder why they are losing the public relations war in Europe, they should look no further than a recent front page story in a major Italian newspaper, says a biotechnology advocate.
The translated headline in the
Jan. 3 article that appeared in La Stampa reads, “Bees boycotting GM plants,” with the subhead, “Insects are frightened of genes altered by man and give up on pollination.”
Alex Avery, director of research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues, said the story was planted by anti-GM crop crusaders who are guilty of dusting off outdated research and distorting it to fit their needs.
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“If farmers wonder why the public doesn’t understand what they do, and are often hostile in fact, this is why,” he said.
Avery said the story, which prompted a slew of other newspaper and TV stories in a nation that is in the midst of a national policy debate over whether to allow farmers to grow GM crops, grossly distorts the findings of a 2005 Simon Fraser University study.
He contends the La Stampa article took its cues from the U.S. based Organic Consumers Association, which resurrected the study as a news item on its website on Dec. 26, with the headline “Wild bees reject genetically engineered crop.”
Mark Winston, professor of apiculture and social insects at Simon Fraser University, said both sides of the debate are trying to spin the results of the study.
“This particular controversy is a fabulous example of people taking rumour, innuendo and half truths and exploding it into a non-existent controversy.”
He said the Organic Consumers Association is guilty of attaching a misleading headline to the abstract of his study. La Stampa went further, he added, by distorting his findings and mixing them with unsupported myths about the dangers of GM crops.
“They have woven all those things together into this real scare piece, which bothers me because there are very legitimate and substantive issues about GM crops that need to be addressed.”
Winston said Avery isn’t guilt free either. The professor said the biotech advocate tried to manipulate Winston and his research assistant into aggressively attacking and dismissing the reports appearing in organic circles and the Italian media.
“He wanted to use us and I don’t take kindly to having my voice co-opted by others. I’m quite happy to speak for myself,” said Winston.
Avery contends he was just trying to get the science community to step up and prevent their work from being hijacked and deliberately misrepresented.
Winston is not surprised by the international attention his work has garnered or by the fact it took so long to spark a reaction.
“What does surprise me is that the really interesting parts of the research have been ignored.”
He said the study uncovered fascinating facts about the effects of wild bee populations on canola pollination that have been lost in the din surrounding the GM crop debate.
Winston hypothesized that GM canola had fewer bees because those crops had fewer weeds than their conventional and organic counterparts, not because bees somehow found GM crops repulsive.
Through a scientific method called modelling he was able to show that in places such as northern Alberta, where canola is mainly pollinated by wild bees, farmers would be economically better off replacing 20 percent of their canola crop with unmanaged fields containing weeds that bees like to nest in.
His advice to growers in those areas would be to grow conventional or GM canola crops to cut down on weeds, but set aside a portion of their acreage for bee -friendly habitat. That would be the best way to maximize yields in that area of the Prairies because of the seed-producing power of pollination.
