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The EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas and long-time biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends share some common sentiments. They both are passionate about the environment. They both purport to embrace new plant breeding technologies. And they're both pathologically averse to GM crops.

Earlier this year, at a meeting entitled 'Freedom of Choice Conference on GMO [genetically modified organism] Co-existence' Dimas declared: “GM products raise a whole new series of possible risks to the environment, notably potential longer-term effects that could impact on biodiversity.” At the same conference, he claimed that “terminator technology” is on the market (it is not) and “small farmers are being put out of business by GMOs” (they are not). But he was almost gushing about what he terms “upgraded conventional varieties” created using marker-assisted selection (MAS) technology.

MAS is not rocket science—it is simply the use of genetic markers that segregate with valuable agronomic traits to rapidly identify crossbred seedlings that contain a specific trait of interest. Because you don't have to wait for a seedling to mature until it displays your trait of interest, MAS can cut development times of new commercial crop varieties in half. Coincidentally, in an article published in the Washington Post in July, Rifkin also waxes lyrical about the benefits of MAS, especially as a means of making “gene splicing and transgenic crops obsolete.”

Like Rifkin, Dimas sees conventional “crop varieties upgraded through MAS as an alternative to GM crops.” At the conference, he was particularly keen to promote upgraded crops as such. However, unlike Rifkin, Dimas seems unaware of a fatal flaw in his whole-hearted espousal of MAS.

Rifkin claims that MAS is of value when it is used as part of a broader, agro-ecological approach to farming, “one that integrates introduction of new crops with a proper regard for all the other environmental, economic and social factors that together determine the sustainability of farming.” In other words, Rifkin, the antibiotech gadfly, acknowledges that plants can go bad even when they are not GM.

Commissioner Dimas, on the other hand, in his simple-minded, 'anything-but' approach to GM products, has not understood that a non-GM crop produced via MAS could be just as risky as a GM product; he hasn't grasped that upgraded crops with traits (e.g., herbicide resistance) like those of GM varieties could, by definition, carry the same risks as the GM variety. From an environmental risk assessment perspective, it is the new trait in the plant that is important, not the way in which a gene(s) associated with a trait ended up in the plant.

Unwittingly then, Dimas has disclosed for all to see, the glaring inequity and inadequacy of the current European regulatory framework. Because of its discriminatory and absolute emphasis on anything remotely GM to the exclusion of anything else, European regulation subjects a GM crop containing a trait analogous to that found in a conventional upgraded crop to intense environmental risk scrutiny, but leaves Dimas' upgraded crop with the same trait completely unregulated. The question that the Environment Commissioner should be asking himself is: what if that trait were harmful?