The U.S. and Brazilian governments are moving into the final stages of weighing approval for the commercialisation of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees, moves that would mark the first such permits anywhere in the world.

The Brazilian government is slated to start taking public comments on such a proposal during the first week of September. Similarly, U.S. regulators have been working on an environmental impact assessment since early last year, a highly anticipated draft of which is expected to be released any day.

Technician Christine Berry checks on futuristic peach and apple “orchards”. Each dish holds tiny experimental trees grown from lab-cultured cells to which researchers have given new genes. Credit: USDA Agricultural Research Service

Despite industry claims to the contrary, critics warn that the use of genetically engineered (GE) trees would increase deforestation. The approvals could also spark off a new era of such products, which wouldn’t be confined solely to these countries.

“If Brazil and the United States get permission to commercialise these trees, there is nothing to say that they wouldn’t just export these products to other countries to grow,” Anne Petermann, the executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) and the coordinator of the Campaign to Stop GE Trees, a network that Wednesday announced a new global initiative, told IPS.

“These GE trees would grow faster and be more economically valuable, so it’s easy to see how current conventional plantations would be converted to GE plantations – in many parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Further, both Europe and the U.S. are currently looking at other genetically engineered trees that bring with them a whole additional range of potential impacts.”

While the United States has thus far approved the use of two genetically modified fruit trees, the eucalyptus is the first GE forest tree to near release. Similar policy discussions are currently taking place in the European Union, Australia and elsewhere, while China has already approved and is using multiple GE trees.

The plantation approach

The eucalyptus is a particularly lucrative tree, currently the most widely planted hardwood in the world and used especially to produce pulp for paper and paper products.

In the United States, the trees would also likely be used to feed growing global demand for biofuels, particularly in the form of wood pellets. In 2012 alone, U.S. exports of wood pellets increased by some 70 percent, and the United States is today the world’s largest such producer.

U.S. regulators are currently looking at two types of eucalyptus that have been genetically engineered to withstand frosts and certain antibiotics, thus allowing for plantations to be planted much farther north. The company requesting the approval, ArborGen, says the introduction of its GE seedlings would quadruple the eucalyptus’s range in the United States alone.

ArborGen has estimated that its sales could see 20-fold growth, to some 500 million dollars a year by 2017, if GE trees receive U.S. approval, according to a comprehensive report published last year by the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. Likewise, Brazilian analysts have suggested that the market for eucalyptus products could expand by some 500 percent over the coming two decades.

Yet the eucalyptus, which has been grown in conventional plantations for years, has been widely shown to be particularly problematic – even dangerous – in monoculture.

The eucalyptus takes unusually high levels of water to grow, for instance, and is notably invasive. The trees are also a notorious fire hazard; during a devastating fire in the U.S. state of California in the 1990s, nearly three-quarters of the blaze’s energy was estimated to come from highly combustible eucalyptus trees.

In addition, many are worried that approval of the GE proposals in the United States and Brazil would, inevitably, act as a significant boost to the monoculture plantation model of production.

“This model has been shown to be very negative for local communities and nature, expelling and restricting the access of people to their territories, depleting and contaminating water sources – especially in the Global South,” Winifridus Overbeek, coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement, a global pressure group, told IPS from Uruguay.

“Many of these plantations in Brazil have hindered much-needed agrarian land reform under which hungry people could finally produce food on their own lands. But under the plantation model, most of the wood produced is destined for export, to attend to the ever-increasing paper demand elsewhere.”

Overbeek says Brazilian peasants complain that “No one can eat eucalyptus.”

More wood, more land

Despite the rise of digital media over the past decade, the global paper industry remains a behemoth, responding to demand for a million tonnes of paper and related products every day. That amounted to some 400 million tonnes of paper used in 2010, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and could increase to 500 million tonnes per year by the end of the decade.

A key argument from ArborGen and others in favour of genetically engineered trees, and the plantation system more generally, is that increased use of “farmed” trees would reduce pressure on native forests. Indeed, ArborGen’s motto is “More Wood. Less Land”.

Yet as the world has increasingly adopted the plantation approach, the impact has been clear. Indonesia, for instance, has allowed for the clear-cutting of more than half of its forests over the past half-century, driven particularly by the growth of palm plantations.

According to U.N. data, plantations worldwide doubled their average wood production during the two decades leading up to 2010.  But the size of those plantations also increased by some 60 percent.

“While it sounds nice and helpful to create faster-growing trees, in reality the opposite is true. As you make these things more valuable, more land gets taken over for them,” GJEP’s Petermann says.

“Especially in Brazil, for instance, because we’ve seen an intensification of wood coming from each hectare of land, more and more land is being converted.”

In June, more than 120 environmental groups from across the globe offered a vision on comprehensive sustainability reforms across the paper sector, traditionally a key driver of deforestation. That document, the Global Paper Vision, encourages users and producers to “refuse fibre from genetically modified organisms”.

“Theoretically, arguments on the benefits of GE trees could be true, motivated by increasing competition for wood resources,” Joshua Martin, the director of the Environmental Paper Network (EPN), a U.S.-based umbrella group that spearheaded the vision document, told IPS.

“But ultimately this is an attempt to find a technological solution – and, we feel, a false solution given the dangers, both known and unknown, around this experimental use. Instead, we advocate for conservation and reducing consumption as logical first steps before manipulating nature and putting natural systems at risk of contamination.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Consumer advocates and environmentalists this week are taking advantage of an industry conference to highlight concerns over the U.S. government’s pending approval of a genetically modified eucalyptus tree.

Technician Christine Berry checks on futuristic peach and apple “orchards”. Each dish holds tiny experimental trees grown from lab-cultured cells to which researchers have given new genes. Credit: USDA Agricultural Research Service

The project proposal is currently being weighed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). If approved, it would constitute the first time that a bioengineered tree has been authorised for commercial production in the United States.

On Tuesday, activists at the International Union of Forest Research Organization (IUFRO) Tree Biotechnology Conference, taking place throughout the week in North Carolina, engaged in what organisers say is the largest protest ever carried out against genetically engineered (GE) trees.

According to demonstrators, the public currently has a potent opportunity to weigh in on the issue.

“Given that this project hasn’t been approved yet for commercial release, we still have a chance to prevent the contamination of our forests,” Tom Llewellyn, a coordinator with REAL Cooperative, a North Carolina-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“This is really important in part because it’s very different from the genetically engineered foods that we’re already subject to here in the U.S. In this situation, we actually have a chance to stop something before it’s too late.”

The proposal, by a company called ArborGen, is for a eucalyptus tree that has been genetically modified to be resistant to colder temperatures. If the government allows for its commercialisation, the plan is for the tree to be grown on plantations in the southeastern United States and subsequently burned for “biomass” electricity production.

The use of GE trees for biomass production is a central focus of this week’s IUFRO conference, aimed at “addressing the growing need for sustainable, renewable sources of biomass, in the face of climate change”, according to the event website. (Further clouding the issue, scientists have pointed out that biomass can be as carbon-intensive as coal-fired electricity production.)

The result, ArborGen says, would be a renewable energy source in line with evolving commitments towards mitigating human-caused climate change. Indeed, such an aim would also be directly in line with a new plan, released by the U.S. government last year, to significantly bolster the U.S. “bioeconomy”, with a central priority placed on genetic engineering.

“It is important to note that this international conference has brought together some of the most prominent scientists in the world to discuss the concerns of an increasing global demand for wood, fuel and fibre,” an ArborGen spokesperson told IPS.

“ArborGen sees great promise in eucalyptus as a hardwood species to mitigate the pressure to harvest our natural forests. As we go through a very stringent federal regulatory process, we are confident that the science has and will show this tree can be a useful tool for landowners to help meet this demand.”

Cross-pollination

ArborGen explains that it chose a Brazilian species of eucalyptus because it is fast growing and yields a relatively massive amount of wood per hectare. The tree is not native to the United States, however, and had been unable to withstand frosts in most of the country.

Critics of the plan have pointed out that eucalyptus trees are known to be invasive, water-intensive and a notorious fire hazard. Beyond this, however, the project has reignited longstanding worries about whether farmers or plantation managers can actually keep genetically engineered products permanently separated from other areas.

“Many people are particularly concerned about the transmutation of our forests, as we’ve already seen this with GE food crops, particularly annual crops like corn and soy,” Llewellyn says. “Now, the idea of doing the same around forests is very concerning.”

While accidental cross-pollination would not be a concern for the U.S. with non-native eucalyptus, Llewellyn says that other GE projects currently under development are seeking to modify native trees, including poplar and pine. These modifications would seek both to make the trees resistant to certain chemical pesticides and to include natural pesticides within the trees.

“What this means is that every cell of that tree would become a pesticide, and that includes the pollen,” he says.

“We estimate that a GE poplar tree could cross-pollinate with other trees 100 miles away, so the potential for contamination would be very high. In turn, this could have a significant impact on insects and on birds eating those insects. While the ultimate effect is not certain, the potential for harm would seem to be very high.”

The difficulties of maintaining control over the “contamination” of natural plants due to cross-pollination with GE products was recently given a surprising boost. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that an Oregon farmer found growing in his field a type of GE wheat that has never been commercially released.

The leak is reportedly still being investigated. But media reports suggest that the wheat’s manufacturer, Monsanto, carried out field tests of the product in Oregon between 1999 and 2001.

“This outbreak … confirms our concerns that GE crops cannot be controlled,” Janet Cotter, a scientist with Greenpeace International, an advocacy group, said Thursday.

“This is the latest in a long line of incidents involving the contamination of our food supply with GE crops not approved for human consumption. The only way to protect our food and environment is to stop the releases of GE crops to the environment – including a ban on field trials.”

99% rejected

Around a quarter-million of ArborGen’s eucalyptus trees have been planted in field tests since 2010, after a lawsuit by a coalition of environmental and public safety groups failed to halt the process. While the USDA has issued multiple assurances on the trees’ safety to both humans and environmental systems, it is now weighing whether to allow the trees to become commercially available.

Though relatively little is known of public opinion on this issue, the USDA’s own certification process has suggested widespread opposition. The USDA received over 37,580 comments to the ArborGen petition by the end of the comment period on Apr. 29. Only four of the comments were supportive of the release of GE eucalyptus trees.

Of course, the public discussion here on genetically modified products has been far more active around food products. According a 2010 poll, just one in five people in the United States feel that genetically modified foods are safe, while a recent public comment period on whether the U.S. government should approve GE salmon garnered some 1.5 million responses.

Meanwhile, the USDA has not yet released a timeframe on when it will decide on ArborGen’s frost-resistant eucalyptus, but observers expect a verdict by the end of the year.