Post-Market Monitoring of Bt Maize

According to EU legislation, post-market monitoring (PMM) is mandated to ensure detection and prevention of adverse environmental effects possibly derived from commercial cultivation of GM crops. Currently, the necessity, extent and design of appropriate PMM plans for Bt maize cultivation are discussed controversially among the different EU regulatory bodies, national authorities and the agricultural biotech industry. Olivier Sanvido and colleagues from Agroscope ART in Zurich, Switzerland, forward two approaches on how PMM of Bt maize could be designed to detect potential effects on butterflies and natural enemies.

In the first publication on butterflies, their analysis showed that a monitoring program, even with a considerable sampling effort, will at best detect large effects on ubiquitous butterflies. They concluded that well-designed risk assessment studies might reveal relevant ecological effects much more accurately than monitoring studies. The second study on natural enemies showed that a faunistic monitoring of specific arthropod groups is not considered an appropriate approach to detect failures in biological control functions. Alternatively, an approach is proposed that consists in indirectly analyzing biological control functions by surveying outbreaks of maize herbivores.

The paper on butterflies published by Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment  is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2009.01.007 The paper on natural enemies published by the Journal of Applied Entomology is available at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121545081/abstract