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"Soil ecological and economic evaluation of genetically modified crops" 2002-2006.
DG Research Quality of Life Programme contract no. QLRT-2001-01666
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Project summaryThe possible use of GM plants in future agriculture needs in-depth investigations of ecological and economical consequences. Following state-of-the-art ecological risk assessment we combine simple labtests, multi-species model ecosystems and field studies to acquire mechanistic and realistic knowledge. Hitherto this has not been done for soil. The investigation will give an important input to the administrators of Directive 90/220/EEC, who needs specifications of how to do the GM risk assessment, and to farmers and the public who are on the alert to the possible ecological implications. Economic aspects need to be clarified to enable an assessment of trade-offs in relation to ecological effects. The accumulated experience in the ECOGEN project will then be taken one step beyond a simple comparison of GM based farming systems and conventional systems, by combining soil ecological studies with an economic evaluation at the farm level in a rule based model as a decision support tool. |