IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ipt/iptwpa/jrc83397.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

European Coexistence Bureau. Best Practice Documents for coexistence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming. 3. Coexistence of genetically modified maize and honey production

Author

Listed:

Abstract

The Technical Working Group (TWG) for Maize of the European Coexistence Bureau (ECoB) analysed in 2010 the best practices for coexistence between GM maize crop production with non-GM maize . In this document the analysis is extended to the coexistence between GM maize crop production and honey production in the EU. The TWG assessed if any further coexistence measure to those currently recommended in the previous document was required to limit adventitious presence of GM maize pollen in honey avoiding economic loses for producers. The terms of reference for this review are presented in Section 1. An overview of the structure of the honey-producing sector in Europe is given in Section 2. The EcoB TWG maize held two meetings in June and November 2012 and examined state-of-art-knowledge from scientific literature, study reports and empirical evidence provided by numerous finished and ongoing studies looking at the factors determining the presence of pollen in general or maize pollen (even specifically GM maize pollen) in samples of EU produced honey. In addition to biological factors (related to honeybee behaviour and maize pollen characteristics) the TWG also analysed existing mandatory quality standards that impact the eventual presence of pollen in commercial honey. The review of this information (coming from a total of 132 references) is presented in a structured manner in Section 3 of this document. Finally, the TWG reviewed the state of the art and possibilities for the detection and identification of traces of GM maize pollen in honey (Section 4). The analysis of existing information indicates that total pollen presence in honey ranges between 0.003 to 0.1 % in weight. Considering the share of maize pollen in total pollen found in honey, the extrapolated figures for maize pollen in honey would be around an order of magnitude lower. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that studies aiming at the detection/identification of this trace-levels of maize pollen are usually carried out with morphological identification and counting of pollen grains, and that a routine DNA analysis based on validated PCR protocol able to quantify total pollen in honey is unavailable. Once such a method could be found, the maize pollen fraction as well as the GM-pollen fraction of the total pollen could be established. In conclusion, the TWG maize of the ECoB, based on the analysis of the evidence summarised in this document concludes that no changes in the Best practice document on maize coexistence of July 20101 are necessary to ensure that adventitious presence of GM maize pollen in honey is far below legal labelling thresholds and even below 0.1 %.

Suggested Citation

  • Emilio Rodríguez Cerezo & Ivelin Iliev Rizov, 2013. "European Coexistence Bureau. Best Practice Documents for coexistence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming. 3. Coexistence of genetically modified maize and honey product," JRC Research Reports JRC83397, Joint Research Centre.
  • Handle: RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc83397
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC83397
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Harald E. Esch & Shaowu Zhang & Mandyan V. Srinivasan & Juergen Tautz, 2001. "Honeybee dances communicate distances measured by optic flow," Nature, Nature, vol. 411(6837), pages 581-583, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ivelin Iliev Rizov, 2016. "European Coexistence Bureau (ECoB) - Best Practice Document for coexistence of genetically modified cotton with conventional and organic farming," JRC Research Reports JRC101485, Joint Research Centre.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fernando Wario & Benjamin Wild & Raúl Rojas & Tim Landgraf, 2017. "Automatic detection and decoding of honey bee waggle dances," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(12), pages 1-16, December.
    2. Mario Pahl & Hong Zhu & Jürgen Tautz & Shaowu Zhang, 2011. "Large Scale Homing in Honeybees," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(5), pages 1-7, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc83397. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Publication Officer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ipjrces.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.