Reseña

Páginas: 23 (5646 palabras) Publicado: 16 de junio de 2011
RESEARCH PAPER

New Biotechnology  Volume 27, Number 5  November 2010

Does the use of transgenic plants diminish or promote biodiversity?
Peter H. Raven
Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA

Review

The protection of biodiversity and of ecosystem services ought to be a top priority, taken into consideration in the course of all human activities, because we depend on it fullynow and for the future. In this context, we note that the ecological problems related to the cultivation of GE crops fail to differ in any fundamental way from the ecological problems associated with agriculture in general, except that they usually involve the application of much lower quantities of chemicals and thus tend to leave the environments in and adjacent to where they are grown inbetter condition than do the conventional ones. Higher productivity on cultivated lands, which is one outcome of growing GE crops, protects biodiversity by sparing lands not intensively cultivated, whereas relatively non-productive agriculture practised is highly destructive to biodiversity, since it consumes more land in an often destructive way, even though more biodiversity may be preserved amongthe crops themselves than in industrialized, large fields, especially if hedgerows and woodlands are not encouraged in near proximity. The major preservation of biodiversity, however, does not take place among crops! If weeds are present that are closely related to the crops, they may acquire immunity to the effects from which the crops were protected and be more difficult to control among them. Theproduction of superweeds as a result of hybridization between cultivated crops and their wild relatives is essentially a myth. The definition of ‘organic’ production in the U.S. and elsewhere unjustifiably rules out GE crops, often in such a way as to damage the environment more than would be the case otherwise. Unless the definition of ‘organic’ is a problem, or close relatives to the crops are weedyamong them, there seems to be essentially no ecological risk involved in growing GE crops.
Contents Gene flow to wild or weedy relatives of crops . . Transfer of genes between GE and non-GE crops Production of new weeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Effects on non-target species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Legalities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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530 531 532 532 532 533 533

E-mail address: Peter.Raven@mobot.org.

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www.elsevier.com/locate/nbt

1871-6784/$ - see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.nbt.2010.07.018

New Biotechnology  Volume 27, Number 5  November 2010

REVIEW

For reasons that remain somewhat obscure, several institutions and well-intentioned individuals continue to oppose the use of contemporary genetic techniques to enhance the properties of crops. There is no scientific evidence that the process of transferring genes from one kind of organism to another...
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