May 20 2000 / N.Y. Times / DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
PARIS -- Not since Jack and the Beanstalk has a handful of seeds, according to this story, produced such a loud fe, fi, fo and fumbling.
Nervousness spread across Europe today with the news that a tiny amount of one variety of one seed company's rapeseed inadvertently contained a trait common in American crops but feared in Europe because it is produced by genetic modification.
Sweden is widely believed to have 1,200 acres planted with the seeds, of which less than 1 percent contain the genetic trait.
But the national Board of Agriculture proposed destroying all those crops.
The board conceded that the plants posed no risks, but said government permission should have been sought before the seeds were planted.
The company that imported the seeds, Advanta of the Netherlands, said it did not know until mid-April that some seeds that it imported from Canada in 1998 had been accidentally cross-pollinated by plants with the genetic trait.
In France, which has 1,500 acres with the crop, the environment minister disagreed with the agriculture minister and demanded that the French crop be destroyed. The Consumer Affairs Ministry ordered an inquiry on how the seeds entered the country.
In Britain, with 12,000 acres of crop, the government said it had no plans to destroy plants.
But it was becoming apparent that the 600 farmers estimated to have bought the seeds were in no rush to volunteer to have their fields burned.
The national farmers' union said that none of its members had come forward and that it was considering its legal position.
Private and government scientists said the fears were greatly exaggerated.
Rapeseed is used for canola, an oil used in margarine and baked goods.
Processed oil does not contain DNA and is indistinguishable from oil from nonmodified plants, the scientists said. The pressed seeds are used as animal feed. Digestion breaks down DNA, and the trait in the plant--herbicide resistance--could hardly be transferred to animals.
Rapeseed is related to wild radish and wild turnip. But the chances of the herbicide resistance entering one of those plants, surviving for generations in the wild and converting the lowly turnip into an unkillable superweed poised to devastate British agriculture are extremely remote, scientists said.
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