London (3.12.06) – The UK and Burkina Faso have both taken significant strides on the road leading to the benefits of transgenic agriculture and its products.

In August this year, BASF Plant Science announced that they were to asking for permission from DEFRA to run trials of blight-resistant GM-Potatoes In Cambridgeshire and Derbyshire (see http://www.cropgen.org/article_95.html).

Today DEFRA agreed that they might do so (1) subject to certain conditions (2) which the company has accepted.

Meanwhile, some 2,700 miles due south, Burkina Faso is about to commercialise GM cotton (3). The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, in collaboration with the Institute for the Environment and Agricultural Research of Burkina Faso and l’Institut Du Sahel, recently organised a travel tour to visit two Bt cotton field trials in the country. The workshop’s main objective was to provide an opportunity to farmers and journalists to see for themselves the performance of Bt cotton genetically engineered to protect the plants against the damage by bollworms. The event was attended by farmers and journalists from Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin, Senegal and Togo (4).

The testing has been done and farmers in Burkina Faso are ready to commercialise the crop. As people have found elsewhere, farmers there can see that Bt cotton gives higher yields and greatly reduces the need for pesticide spraying. Their main concern is whether they can actually get enough seed.

It is good to see Britain taking steps to join the burgeoning world of agricultural biotechnology – and salutary that a developing country with a per capita GNP a mere fraction of that in the UK is likely to get there first.

Sources:

1. Defra approves GM potato research trials. DEFRA (1.12.06)
http://www.gnn.gov.uk/Content/Detail.asp?ReleaseID=247156&NewsAreaID=2

2. Advice on an application for deliberate release of a GMO for research and development purposes. Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment
(13.11.06) (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/acre/advice/pdf/acre_advice75.pdf)

3. Boureima Hama. Impoverished Burkina Faso turns to GMO cotton to boost output, quality. Agence France Presse (3.12.06)

4. Farmers visit Bt cotton field trials in Burkina Faso. Crop Biotech Update (1.12.06) (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=4726422&s=48158544)

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