Cultivation of GM crops in the EU, farmland biodiversity and bees

INGRID H WILLIAMS

In two earlier articles on GMOs, I examined the regulatory framework that controls the releases and marketing of GM crops and GM foods in the EU with particular reference to risk assessment in relation to bees and bee products. In this article, I focus on the new GM cultivars of oilseed rape and maize, which are already commercially available in the EU or are being grown in large-scale field trials prior to commercialization. I consider the likely impacts of these crops on bees and bee products and describe the farm-scale evaluations being undertaken to investigate how crop management affects farmland biodiversity, including that of bees.