by Julie Sohier (POLLINIS)
Bees connect landscapes. Every day they move between fields, gardens and protected areas, carrying pollen and microbes from flower to flower and linking plants with pollinator communities. That is precisely what makes a new generation of biotechnologies so troubling.
Researchers and companies are developing genetically engineered gut bacteria to turn honey bees into living pesticide factories. Inside the bee, these modified bacteria would continuously produce RNA-based molecules designed to kill Varroa mites, by silencing essential genes when the parasites feed on them. The bee’s own genome stays the same, but its biology is changed through its microbiome.
Engineered microorganisms are alive. They can reproduce, evolve and ignore borders. Bees share flowers with thousands of wild pollinator species and flowers are hubs of microbial exchange. A strain released into one apiary is unlikely to stay there. Wild pollinators, already in decline, would be exposed without anyone asking whether they can cope.
This is exactly the kind of case the Cartagena Protocol was designed for. An engineered bacterium is a living modified organism (LMO). The Protocol exists to make sure that LMOs crossing borders, deliberately or not, have no adverse effects on biodiversity. But its risk assessment framework was built largely with modified crops in mind. Microorganisms that multiply, swap genes and travel inside a mobile host raise questions it was never designed to answer.
This puts a clear choice before every delegation at COP17 and COP-MOP12. Will international governance anticipate environmental risks or will it let industrial deployment outpace the science needed to assess them?
Unintentional transboundary movement deserves particular attention. For an engineered microbe carried by bees, crossing a border is not an accident. It is the expected outcome. Article 17 of the Cartagena Protocol obligations to notify and respond assume that a release can be detected and traced. Parties should ask whether that holds for organisms that are invisible, self-replica-ting and spread by pollinators.
Risk assessment must also look beyond the modified organism itself. The bacterium is the LMO, but the risks show up in the bee, in the wild pollinators it meets and in the ecosystems they sustain with a persistence scientists can hardly foresee now. An assessment that stops at the microbe’s genetic construct misses the point. What matters is the effect on target and non-target species, on biodiversity and on soil, water and air.
Until risk assessment can answer these questions, there should be no releases of LMOs intended to alter wild populations through their genomes, epigenomes or microbiomes. This is not hostility to innovation. It is what Target 17 of the Global Biodiversity Framework already commits Parties to: biosafety measures and the capacity to implement them, in place before releases, not after.
POLLINIS has gathered citizens to support these demands. The petition has gathered 50.000 signatures within days. We believe this shows how, when properly informed, people and communities around the world chose proper assessment and regulation over acceleration.
Bees are not suffering from a shortage of engineered bacteria. They are suffering from habitat loss and pesticides. Any claim that engineering pollinators is conservation should be weighed against measures we know work and have yet to fully implement.
Patents and business plans should not decide which ecological risks everyone else must bear.
Nature is not a laboratory. No to modified bees!
Please follow this link to sign or relay the petition. https://mobilisation.pollinis.org/stop-abeillesmodifiees-en
The petition is for individuals to sign. Signatures are anonymous. Only the total number will be displayed publicly.