GM cooking oils in the County

Before Christmas I wrote several emails and made a number of calls after hearing about GM cooking oils being used by many catering establishments. This is illegal unless it is labelled as such for the consumer. Pembrokeshire County launched a campaign to make people aware in their district, I was keen to have assurances that our County would also look at this issue.

I've now had those assurances - and sent out a news release welcoming the move and encouraging consumers to also check. Sadly it seems there are increasingly cases like this - poor labelling and also cases of contamination - like US rice contaminated this summer. All this, whether intentionally or not, wears the consumer down - I've heard it said "Well there is now so much of this GM in the food chain we can't stop it and it must be OK?" Indeed the Government plan to relax GM laws further - see my report re GM from 3 months ago.

Infact although we've seen the billioneth acre of GM planted huge problems are coming to light across the world (see 'best of 2006' here) - and many farmers are rejecting the technology. We urgently need tougher rules to prevent GM contamination of our food, farming and environment. The irreversibility of this technology means that once the GM genie is out of the bottle, it will be impossible to put it back in. I notice a new book looking at this subject is out - not sure if it is any good - but the write up about it raised some interesting issues about how the biotech industry works and the dangers.

Anyway enough of this for now - I've got a whole bundle of Development Control papers to read for next week so it's time for a coffee - and a couple of Mum's mince pie - yes still a fair few left - but they are good - Mum makes especially good pastry - and they are GM free....well I thought I ought to link in someway to the Blog subject matter...