GM Potato trials and chemicals legislation

Have been meaning to write a letter to press on this since the announcement a couple of weeks ago - see here my letter. It is, as I say in the letter, extraordinary that the Government is still pushing ahead on GM despite such massive opposition - and the evidence of concerns about GM continue to grow despite the fact that worldwide GM is celebrating it's billionth acre of GM crops.

There are numerous examples and research to back up that claim - I wont go into them here otherthan to mention briefly a couple that were in the news - 'superweeds' - a huge problem in some countries now like Canada - and they were even found after the UK trials - the result of GM oilseed rape cross-breeding with a common weed in farm scale trials, making a genetically modified new breed of charlock, previously thought to be safe from mutation. This version of the common weed, found alongside oilseed rape in the UK and mainland Europe, is resistant to the weed killer used in the GM trial and confirmed as containing the gene inserted into the GM oilseed rape.

If GM oilseed rape was grown commercially, herbicide-resistant weeds could become widespread. Farmers would then have to use more and more damaging toxins to get rid of them, with all the associated knock-on effects on the environment. Infact across the world there is growing pest resistance to GM crops like GM cotton in Gujarat reported a week or so ago.

The yields are also not what many had hoped - just last month it was report that a new wave of farmer suicides in Maharashtra is being directly attributed to the huge losses made by farmers lured into growing GM cotton by promises of bumper harvests.

Without the slightest hint of irony, the Minister for Environment said that new potato trials were necessary to establish independent evidence, because otherwise, "we ... leave ourselves open to pressure from commercial companies, for example, and we are not going to bow to that."

Infact yesterday I also wrote a letter about this Government and how they gave into the chemical industry over new EU legislation to protect us from known dangerous chemicals in our environment. See that letter here. It seems that there are all too many examples around. I doubt press will publish them both - perhaps I would have done better to combine the two issues into one letter?

Notable historic quote:

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Playing God in the Garden" New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998.