Effect of the structural variables of landscapes on the risks of spatial dissemination between GM and non-GM maize

How to manage the coexistence between genetically modified and conventional crops in grain and oilseed collection areas? Elaboration of scenarios using role playing games

“…Preliminary simulation results (see section "General framework for coexistence") indicate that we can distinguish three levels of risk of admixture at the silo level, depending on the required threshold, the percentage of GM crop in the landscape and the characteristics of the landscape itself (Le Bail et al, 2010): -A very high risk level, for which simulations showed that no spatial crop arrangement could guarantee compliance with the required threshold. This risk level was not tested in the roleplaying games: we did not see the relevance of placing players in a situation with maximum structural constraints in which they were sure to fail.…”

“…Simulations were carried out for sites from contrasting European regions (OSR: Beauce (France), Fife (UK) and Schleswig Holstein (Germany); Maize: Alsace (France) and Aragon (Spain)). We were able to rank situations by region, GM/conventional area ratio and required threshold in non-GM material (Le Bail et al, 2010;Sausse et al, 2012).…”

“…In Beauce, in the first round, the adviser transmitted information about the use of a 200 m isolation distance for "security". Before the second round, he convened an information meeting, at which an expert from CETIOM (the role was played by a member of the research team belonging to this institute specialized in oilseed crops), was invited and spoke on possible management measures: mostly field measures, such as to what extent buffer and discard zones are sufficient to reduce risks, according to recent scientific results, which were drawn form the project's SIGMEA WP7 simulation results (Le Bail et al, 2010;Sausse et al, 2012).…”

Soybean in the European Union, Status and Perspective

“…This dichotomy needs to be addressed. Finally, the landscape is highly structured by downstream supply chains (Coléno, 2008;Hannachi et al, 2009;Le Bail et al, 2010;Petit, 2009). Due to the several requests of EU-MS to take into consideration socio-economic aspects into GMO approval, the 2010 updated EC recommendation considers more favorably the possibility of GMO-free areas.…”

Does flax have the answer to the GM mix-up?

“…Nevertheless, the statistical approach could help address the central difficulty concerning the often inadequate sampling at longer distances of large field studies, where divergent decay functions (usually exponential or power law-based) yield ostensibly similar declines at proximal distances, but differ over larger distances where sampling is often underpowered. Clearly, the skewing of sample sizes to enable threshold limits to be maintained at increasing distances allows for far more meaningful fits to empirical data, and so provides a more resilient basis for the growing number of landscape-scale modelling efforts (for example, Shaw et al, 2006;Coleno et al, 2009;Le Bail et al, 2010).…”