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GMO Tomato Project Funded by Gates Foundation and U.S. Taxpayers Hits Roadblock

 

 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research to genetically engineer tomatoes to be able to disrupt the reproductive cycle of the whitefly, a common insect that damages tomato plants, Jon Fleetwood reported on Substack.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — a division of the U.S. Department of Defense — also funded the research as part of its “Insect Allies” project, according to a study on the tomatoes published last month in BMC Plant Biology.

Whiteflies, or Bemisia tabaci, are a common pest that drinks sap from phloem, the food-conducting tissue in tomato plant stems and leaves, sometimes causing the plant to dry up. The insects also excrete a sticky substance called honeydew, which attracts ants.

Whiteflies can decimate crops. The BMC study estimates the pest causes $2 billion in annual losses in cassava production in Africa alone, which can cause food insecurity in regions that rely on the crop.

The researchers aim to develop a genetic modification (GM) technology that could modify plants to produce proteins that target and destroy whitefly eggs. The authors note that targeting egg viability is a “unique strategy” for transgenic plants, setting it apart from most GM insecticidal plants that target adult insects.

Fleetwood raised concerns about the technology’s potential to harm human health and the environment.

“If commercialized, these ‘[t]ransgenic plants’ — genetically engineered to include genes from other species — could introduce reproductive-disrupting insecticidal compounds into the human food chain,” Fleetwood wrote.

He continued:

“Tomatoes engineered with insecticides to disrupt reproduction may sound like a breakthrough, but they raise critical questions about safety, transparency, and the ethics of modifying food crops to attack life at its reproductive core.

“As these technologies develop, consumers have a right to know: Are these the risks we’re willing to take with our food?”

The DARPA Insect Allies program funds “scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures” to natural and engineered threats to the U.S. food supply. The program seeks to provide “targeted therapies” to mature plants within a single growing season.

However, in this case, the researchers encountered major technical problems in their experiments, molecular geneticist Michael Antoniou, Ph.D., told The Defender. That means the product remains far from commercialization, he said…

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (childrenshealthdefense.org)

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