New report raises concerns as regenerative agriculture gains ground for climate mitigation
WASHINGTON D.C. — As biotech and agrichemical companies push to commercialize genetically engineered (GE) soil microbes for agriculture, a new report from Friends of the Earth reveals potential risks and recommends policy action. Corporations including Bayer [OTCMKTS: BAYRY], BASF [OTCMKTS: BASFY] and Pivot Bio have developed commercially available products. At least two GE microbes are currently being used across millions of acres of U.S. farmland.
The first-of-its-kind report provides context for this novel technology, poised to be applied to bacteria and other microbes that make up the earth’s living soils. The report offers insight into future trends, a summary of potential health, environmental, and socioeconomic risks, and policy recommendations that would ensure robust assessment and oversight as GE microbes increasingly move from experimental laboratories to the soil that is the backbone of America’s agriculture.
“Genetically engineered soil microbes are fundamentally different from GE crops,” said Dana Perls, food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth. “Microbes can share genetic material with each other far more readily than crops and can travel great distances on the wind, so the genetic modifications released inside GE microbes may move across species and geographic boundaries in unpredictable ways. The scale of release is also far larger, and the odds of containment far smaller, than for GE crops. An application of GE bacteria could release approximately 3 trillion genetically modified organisms every half an acre — that’s about how many GE corn plants there are in the entire U.S.”
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