Exposed - GM 10 per cent less

A study at the University of Kansas has found Genetically Modified soya to give 10% less yield than conventional.

Can GM solve world hunger? "The simple answer is no." says Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). He’s also the director of the study at the University of Kansas.

So much for the promises of GM and agrichemical giants Monsanto, who profess to have the key to solving food crisis. (They have even used that argument to promote toxic GM cotton).

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research because "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

Reported in the journal Better Crops – the university study was carried out over 3 years, on the US cereal plains. Within the same plot they grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical standard variety. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

Professor Gordon was able to get the GM soybeans to catch up only when he provided extra manganese in the fertilisers, leading to suggestions that the gene manipulation had rendered the crop less able to get this vital mineral from the soil by itself. Even with the extra help, the GM soybeans failed to beat the standard variety.

Monsanto defended the bad results by saying that the soya had not been engineered to increase yields, and that it was now developing one that would. In fact the soybean was genetically engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller - Roundup – to enable farmers to use even more of their pesticide to kill wild plants! However it’s now well documented that Roundup-tolerant crops have thus become problem weeds themselves in following crops, so farmers have to use even worse chemicals to properly clear fields of ‘volunteer’ crops.

More GM stories at The Independent