A Silent Forest – The Growing Threat of Genetically Engineered Trees

This isn’t science fiction. There are currently hundreds if not thousands of test plot of GE trees already being grown in the open around the world. My name is David Suzuki. I am by training and profession a geneticist. And for 25 years I had an active career in science, once having the largest genetics lab in Canada. I’m narrating this film because I’m concerned about the unseemly haste with which my colleagues and my peer groups seem to be ready to rush in and begin to apply ideas in this revolutionary area to apply ideas that I think are far too early to expose people either in our drugs, our foods, or out in open fields.

Large paper, agriculture, and timber corporations are pouring vast sums of money into genetically engineering trees because they believe they will be more efficient and profitable. They hope to engineer traits so that trees kill insects; trees resist toxic herbicides. Trees will have reduced lignin, the long fiber that gives rigidity to the tree and makes it difficult to manufacture paper; trees that are sterile producing no seeds, nuts, pollen, nectar, or fruit. The insertion into the cells of trees of the gene of a naturally occurring bacterium, bacillus thuringiensis, that produces BT toxin that kills insects, would cause every leaf, flower, fruit or grain of pollen of the tree to produce the insecticide. Advocates claim that this would decrease the need for applied chemical pesticides, because pests would be exterminated by eating the trees. But geneticists know from experience that using an insecticide in this fashion selects resistant insects putting the industry on a treadmill of requiring an endless string of different, often more toxic pesticide. The pesticide can’t be washed off, because it’s in every cell of the genetically engineered plant or tree. Because of this there is no specific target, and no real limit to what or who can be harmed.
Already crops genetically engineered to produce BT toxin, have unintentionally resulted in the evolution of BT resistant pests. The emergence of these superbugs have resulted in the increased use of even more toxic pesticides to try to control them.

Furthermore BT toxin is being exuded by the root systems of corn and as we will see, trees. And what this means is that that BT toxin is entering the soil system via the roots of the organism containing the toxins. Now the bacteria in the soil system is actually picking up the toxin and transferring it throughout soil bacteria in an entire ecosystem. And this BT toxin is now being expressed or produced and emitted through this bacteria in unprecedented and very unnatural amounts through soil systems. We’re also seeing evidence of this BT toxin moving through soil systems and being emitted into ground water and into surface water as well. And we’re finding in areas where BT toxins and corn are grown in high concentrations, we’re finding abnormally high amounts of BT toxin, some 3, 4, and 5 times the amount that should be in water systems.

We know that the BT toxin is leeched into the root system and we know that it alters the composition of the microbial community in the soil.

Growing evidence suggests that BT crops can induce allergies and respiratory illnesses in human beings. In a recent study, Terje Traavik, Director of the Norwegian Institute for Genecology, found evidence of diseases triggered by immune reaction to BT toxin in Philippino farm workers living in a field of genetically engineered BT producing corn. Because tree pollen can travel for hundreds of miles, genetically engineered trees could have a widespread impact on human health.

The spread of genetic materials has legal implications for land owners and for public land. Recent legal cases suggests that contaminated trees will become the property of the corporations that patented their genetically engineered genes regardless of whether those trees are on public or private land.