Roundup Ready sugar beet: application for approval as food and feed

Heavy weed pressure on sugar beet in North America

Sugar beets are slow to emerge and start growing, with the result that weeds and weed grasses can develop well between the young plants. Consequently, the sugar beets and weed flora compete directly for water, light and nutrients – with the weed flora sometimes even outgrowing the sugar beet, resulting in loss of yield. This is a very substantial problem, above all in the U.S.

 

Development of the Roundup Ready sugar beet

That is why Monsanto and KWS have collaborated to develop the Roundup Ready sugar beet. This sugar beet is genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides containing the active substance glyphosate. That means that if a herbicide with glyphosate is applied to areas where sugar beet is cultivated, only the weeds and weed grasses are killed – without impairing the growth of the sugar beet plants.

 

In this joint project Monsanto provided the herbicide resistance gene and KWS carried out transformation by transferring it to the sugar beet genome.

 

Approval for cultivation of Roundup Ready sugar beets has already been issued in the U.S. and Canada. They will be grown there on a large scale for the first time in 2007. Apart from KWS, Syngenta and SESVanderHave will also market Roundup Ready sugar beet in North America.

 

Advantages of the Roundup Ready sugar beet

Studies and cultivation trials have shown that significant economic and ecological advantages can be expected from Roundup Ready sugar beet:

a) Increase in yield and greater certainty regarding the yield thanks to better weed control

b) Reduction in production costs as a result of

• Low amounts of herbicide applied

• Fewer applications

• Lower fuel consumption

c) Ecological advantages as a result of

• Lower CO2 emission

• Lower soil compaction

• Improvement in water quality as a result of reduced quantities of herbicides

 

Only approval as food and feed applied for in the EU

The EU is one of the major export countries of the U.S. and Canada for sugar products (sugar, molasses and sugar beet pulp). To maintain this trade, KWS and Monsanto submitted an application to the EU in November 2004 for products made from Roundup Ready sugar beet to be approved as food and feed. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published its statement on this application on December 20, 2006, in its overall opinion: “Products produced from sugar beet H7-1 are unlikely to have any adverse effect on human and animal health or the environment in the context of its intended uses.” This established that products made from Roundup Ready sugar beet are safe for use in food and feed: Sugar from Roundup Ready sugar beet is completely identical to the sugar from conventionally bred sugar beet.