Hi everyone, I am not a botanist but was drawn to your group by my curiosity about the many plants and trees I see on my trips. I thought I could learn from your postings.
This is not a posting to identify any particular species, but a link to a news-item that I thought you may find useful in the context of the debate on GM Crops in India, in the last few months. Here is a news-item from the US (a country that incidentally is said to have in place a great deal of controls to check contamination/ uncontrolled spread of GM plants) on the spread of established populations of GM Canola in the wild. I guess this is not the first article and people have written about this menace, earlier. I have copied the text here and also provided the link to the article. I hope you will find this useful to take the right stand against the lies and mis-information that the GM lobby uses in their quest to bring this to India and other third-world countries. My apologies if this post is out-of-place for this Group, but thought all of you maybe interested. Regards, Sharad ------------------------- First Established Populations of Genetically Modified Plants Found in the Wild By Rebecca Boyle Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-08/genetically-modified-canola-plants-grow-and-thrive-wild-study-says Franken-canola has been found growing along roadsides in North Dakota, in one of the first known cases of genetically modified crops taking hold in the wild. The finding shows that genetically modified canola plants can survive and thrive in the wild perhaps for decades, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Meredith G. Schafer, a graduate student from the University of Arkansas, and colleagues traveled along 3,000 miles of interstate, state and county roads in North Dakota and stopped every five miles to take a sample of a canola plant. Of the 406 plants collected, 80 percent of them had at least one transgene. And in at least two plants, the herbicide-resistant strains had cross-pollinated, resulting in canola resistant to both Roundup and LibertyLink (known chemically as glyphosate and glufosinate). It's not that surprising, because most canola plants grown in North Dakota have been genetically modified to resist herbicides, especially Roundup, made by Monsanto, and LibertyLink, made by Bayer. Genetically engineered seeds en route to farmers' fields might blow off a truck and into roadside fields, where the plants take root. In some spots, the plants were as tightly packed as they would be on farms. What was surprising was the plants' prevalence, however -- they were found along busy roadsides but also in the middle of nowhere, researcher Cindy Sagers told BBC News.
