Fwd: More GE News for Thursday, October 9, 2003

[Guest guest]

" More GE News from The Campaign "

More GE News for Thursday, October 9, 2003

Thu, 9 Oct 2003 04:19:39 -0500

 

More GE News From The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

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More GE News for Thursday, October 9, 2003

 

1) Government accused of fixing GM maize trials

2) Force-fed a diet of hype

3) Uganda a Dump With Museveni in Power

4) 'Killer Tomatoes' Protest Agriculture Secretary

5) Food companies want to move with caution dealing with transgenic

animals

6) Activists hang from cranes to protest GM food exports

7) Expert View: Plant new seeds in the GM debate

8) GM crops flunk the test

9) Second GM food crop gets okay

 

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1) Government accused of fixing GM maize trials

 

Oct 7 2003

Steve Dube, The Western Mail (Wales)

 

THE Government has been accused of fixing the field trials of

genetically modified maize in Britain.

 

The claim, from the watchdog GM Free Cymru, came on the eve of a major

debate on the issue in the National Assembly today, and 10 days before

the Government plans to publish the trial results.

 

GM Free Cymru spokesman Brian John said the farm trials of GM maize,

which have been running for the past three years, have involved

deliberate scientific fraud on the part of the Government.

 

They involved the use of a highly toxic chemical on the non-GM crop,

while the GM crop was treated just once with another chemical, so

allowing weeds and insects to thrive.

 

" The Government are either corrupt or incompetent and probably both, and

the maize trials are worthless, " said environmental scientist Dr John.

 

" The trials are a fraud and the results will not be worth the paper they

are written on. "

 

Dr John said research by members of GM Free Cymru has revealed the

trials were fixed to minimise the environmental effects.

 

He said the group discovered evidence that questions the Government's

real intentions in planning its Field Sites Evaluation programme, and

comes at an embarrassing time - 10 days before the results are published

by the Royal Society on October 16.

 

The results of the field trials, where GM and non-GM crops are grown

alongside each other for comparison, have been widely leaked.

 

They are said to show that growing GM crops of both oil seed rape and

sugar beet damage insect and plant life.

 

But the plots of land growing GM maize harboured more wildlife than

adjacent plots growing conventional maize.

 

Dr John said this was hardly surprising because the conventional maize

plots were sprayed with Atrazine, a dangerous herbicide which is highly

toxic to insects.

 

The chemical has already been banned in France and other European

countries and is only used in Britain with strict controls because Defra

argued there is no substitute.

 

On the other hand, the GM maize plots were sprayed with the herbicide

Liberty - glufosinate ammonium - just once between planting and harvest.

 

Dr John said the GM firm Bayer, which has developed the maize variety,

effectively conducted the trials itself.

 

It stopped farmers from spraying more than once with the result that

weeds - and insects - proliferated in the GM crop, with the result that

in some cases it yielded as much as half the tonnage of the non-GM

maize.

 

" The trials should replicate what is going to happen if these crops are

grown commercially and that was not allowed to happen, " he said.

 

" We suspect that the trials were effectively fixed in order to maximise

weed growth and insect populations on the GM plots and minimise the

effect on the environment. "

 

Ian Panton, one of GM Free Cymru's experts on farm chemicals and their

effects, said the trials were useless.

 

" They give no guidance whatsoever as to the likely effects of growing GM

maize commercially in the UK. "

 

Mr Panton said the Government also knew in advance of the trials that

the manufacturer's recommended herbicide for GM maize, used by some 75%

of growers, is Liberty ATZ, in which the proportion of atrazine is 32%.

 

Prof Mike Owen of Iowa University found the actual percentage of

atrazine used by GM farmers is closer to 90%.

 

" If this herbicide mix was ever licensed for use in the UK it would have

a much more dramatic effect on wildlife than the FSE programme

suggests, " he said.

 

" The field trial results have been manipulated. They are utterly

worthless. "

 

A Defra spokesman declined to comment on the group's allegations.

 

" Once the results are published, we will consider very carefully what

they show and their implications, " he said.

 

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2) Force-fed a diet of hype

 

The verdict of the market means nothing to the GM industry and its

government friends

 

George Monbiot

Tuesday October 7, 2003

The Guardian (UK)

 

It is curious that this government, which goes to such lengths to show

that it responds to market forces, appears to believe, when it comes to

genetic modification, that the customer is always wrong. Tony Blair may

have spent six years rolling back the nanny state, but he instructs us

to shut up and eat what we're given. The public has comprehensively

rejected the technology; the chief scientist has warned that pollen

contamination may be impossible to prevent; the field trials suggest

that GM threatens our remaining wildlife. Yet the government seems

determined to force us to accept it.

The best way of gauging its intentions is to examine the research it is

funding, as this reveals its long-term strategy for both farming and

science. It seems that the strategy is to destroy them both.

 

The principal funding body for the life sciences in Britain is the

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It is

currently funding 255 food and farming research projects; 26 are

concerned with growing GM crops, just one with organic production.

 

We're not talking about blue-sky science here, but research with likely

commercial applications. We should expect it to respond to what the

market wants. The demand for organic food in Britain has been growing by

30% a year. We import 70% of it, partly because organic yields in

Britain are low and research is desperately needed to find ways of

raising them. Genetically modified food, by contrast, is about as

popular with consumers as BSE or salmonella.

 

This misallocation of funds should surprise us only until we see who

sits on the committees that control the BBSRC. They are stuffed with

executives from Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals,

Merck Sharp & Dohme, Pfizer, Genetix plc, Millennium Pharmaceuticals,

Celltech and Unilever. Even the council's new " advisory group on public

concerns " contains a representative of United Biscuits but no one from a

consumer or environmental group. What " the market " (which means you and

I) wants is very different from what those who seek to control the

market want.

 

All the major government funding bodies appear to follow the same line.

The Homegrown Cereals Authority spends £10m of our money every year to

" improve the production, wholesomeness and marketing of UK cereals and

oilseeds so as to increase their competitiveness " . It lists 67 wholesome

research projects on its website. Only one is designed to increase the

competitiveness of organic farming. The Meat and Livestock Commission

funds no organic projects at all, but it is paying for an investigation

into the potential of the gene whose absence causes " double muscling " in

cattle. Deletion of the gene leaves the animal looking like Arnold

Schwarzenegger, though with rather more brains. When pictures of a

double-muscled bullock were published recently, the public responded

with outrage, especially when the welfare implications were explained.

It is not easy to see how the results of this research could or should

ever be commercialised. But the commission regards the possibility of

engineering cattle with a defective muscling gene as " an exciting

development " .

 

These distortions are as bad for the scientific community as they are

for farmers and taxpayers. As consumers continue to insist that there is

no future for these crops in Britain, the heads of the research

institutes are now warning that British scientists will be forced to

leave the country to find work.

 

Michael Wilson, the chief executive of the government-funded body

Horticulture Research International, recently told the Guardian that

" Britain is lining itself up to become an intellectual and technological

backwater " . If so, it will be partly as a result of his efforts. Wilson,

who describes himself as " evangelical " about GM, has spent the past

three years switching his institute's research away from conventional

breeding. He can hardly complain about the brain drain when he has tied

the careers of his scientists to a technology nobody wants.

 

" The way things are going, " according to Christopher Leaver, the head of

plant science at Oxford University, " plant biotechnology is going to be

stillborn here. " Well, the way things are going is very much a result of

the way he has directed them. Until this summer, he sat on the BBSRC's

governing council. At the university, he has engineered a brain drain of

his own by closing the Oxford Forestry Institute (perhaps the best of

its kind in the world) and shifting the focus of his department from

whole organisms and ecosystems to molecular biology and genetic

engineering. Undergraduates want to study whole systems, so the few

remaining lecturers with this expertise are massively overworked, while

the jobs of the rest are threatened by the lack of demand for the

technology he favours.

 

The shift is not entirely the fault of men such as Wilson and Leaver.

The government's research assessment exercise, which determines how much

money academic departments receive, grades them according to the numbers

of papers they produce and the profile of the journals in which they are

published. You can spend 30 years studying the ecology of coconut pests

in the Trobriand Islands, only to discover that you can't publish the

results anywhere more prestigious than the Journal of Trobriand Island

Coconut Science. But a good genetic engineering team can publish a paper

in Nature or Science every few months, simply by repeating a stereotyped

series of tests.

 

Because they cannot persuade us to eat what we are given, many of

Britain's genetic engineers are turning their attention to countries in

which people have less choice about what or even when they eat. The

biotech companies and their tame scientists are using other people's

poverty to engineer their own enrichment. The government is listening.

Under Clare Short, Britain's department for international development

gave £13m to researchers developing genetically engineered crops for the

poor nations, on the grounds that this will feed the world.

 

Earlier this year, Aaron deGrassi, a researcher at the Institute of

Development Studies at Sussex University, published an analysis of the

GM crops - cotton, maize and sweet potato - the biotech companies are

developing in Africa. He discovered that conventional breeding and

better ecological management produce far greater improvements in yields

at a fraction of the cost. " The sweet potato project, " he reported, " is

now nearing its 12th year, and involves over 19 scientists ... and an

estimated $6m. In contrast, conventional sweet potato breeding in Uganda

was able in just a few years to develop with a small budget a well-liked

virus-resistant variety with yield gains of nearly 100%. " The best

improvement the GM sweet potato can produce - even if we believe the

biotech companies' hype - is 18%. But conventional techniques are of no

interest to corporations, as they cannot be monopolised. If the

corporations aren't interested, nor is the government.

 

Those of us who oppose the commercialisation of GM crops have often been

accused of being anti-science, just as opponents of George Bush are

labelled anti-American, and critics of Ariel Sharon anti-semitic. But

nothing threatens science more than the government departments that

distort the research agenda in order to develop something that we have

already rejected.

 

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3) Uganda a Dump With Museveni in Power

 

The Monitor (Kampala)

OPINION

allAfrica.com

October 6, 2003

 

By Morris Komakech

Kampala

 

Recently, the government of Uganda gave a green light for the so-called

Genetically Modified Foods (GMF) to gain access into the Ugandan market.

This move by President Yoweri Museveni is consistent with the global

agenda of his masters in Washington, the World Bank and International

Monetary Fund - popularly referred to as Bretton Woods Institutions in

economic circles.

 

Although " biotechnology " and " genetic modification " are used

interchangeably, GM is a special set of technologies that alters the

genetic makeup of such living organisms as animals, plants, or bacteria.

Biotechnology, a more general term, refers to using living organisms or

their components, such as enzymes, to make products that include wine,

cheese, beer, and yoghurt.

 

Combining genes from different organisms is known as recombinant DNA

technology, and the resulting organism is said to be " genetically

modified, " " genetically engineered, " or " transgenic. " GM products

(current or in the pipeline) include medicines and vaccines, foods and

food ingredients, feeds, and fibres

 

This kind of technology is much too advanced for our bleeding nation

which is yet failing to find its feet on the concept of good, objective

leadership, that would raise the moral high ground for such expeditions

in science and other relevant fields of research.

 

The world over, America, from where the technology was first used,

remains the largest grower of the genetically modified foods. In 2000,

countries that grew 99% of the global transgenic crops were the United

States (68%), Argentina (23%), Canada (7%), and China (1%). Although

growth is expected in industrialised countries, it is increasing in

developing countries.

 

The next decade will see exponential progress in GM product development

as researchers gain increasing and unprecedented access to genomic

resources that are applicable to organisms beyond the scope of

individual projects.

 

However, the progress of GMF as a concept has raised lots of alarm the

world over. Its critics say that pollen from GM crops can potentially

harm insects like the monarch butterfly and many other varieties which

are very crucial in the pollination cycle of plants.

 

GM crops have herbicide resistant genes migrating into nearby weeds,

possibly resulting in a new strain of poison proof super weed.

 

However, the trouble with the GMF is that many of the companies that are

responsible for this technology insert terminator genes in the crops.

These genes cause the plant to commit suicide just before it reproduces

seed for the next season.

 

It then leaves farmers with no option but to pay these companies for

seeds every time they want to plant, usually huge pharmaceutical

conglomerates like the famous Pioneer Hi-bred; Monsanto (a.k.a Pharmacia

& Upjohn) and Cagene (in that order) all of which are American

companies.

 

GMF are not popular in Europe and Japan; as a matter of fact, the

Western world is striving so much to try to find a taste for natural

foods - that is where many people are increasingly investing.

 

The European Union has halted any approval of GMF; while in Britain it

is mandatory that stores notify their customers about GM foods on the

shelves.

 

Japan has resorted to supplying non GM foods to its domestic food

manufacturers.

 

In Uganda, while the country is busy adjusting and (or) adapting to

mechanized commercial farming (if at all anyway), allowing the GMF into

its almost non-existent market may mean crippling any attempts by

indigenous farmers at modernizing agriculture because of state-sponsored

unfair competition for the tiny home market..

 

In Cancun, one of the reasons for the collapse of the negotiations was

the poor countries' (with the exception of Uganda of course) demand that

wealthy nations eliminate their agricultural subsidies.

 

It was not simply to gain access to the world's most affluent markets,

where food imports now look artificially expensive. They wanted to give

farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America a fighting chance in their own

domestic markets.

 

Ugandan farmers, who have no chance of getting substantial subsidies

from its government, cannot therefore compete with the farmers from the

rich nations.

 

Current trade agreements prevent developing nations from favouring their

own farmers and homegrown produce. Worse, the same agreements allow

First World governments to subsidize their own farmers - to the tune of

$300 billion a year.

 

These subsidies allow wealthy nations to sell farm commodities on world

markets at well below the cost of production. (In a nutshell, if it

costs a farmer $3 to grow a kilogram of groundnuts, but the market is

paying $2 a kilogram, the government pays the farmer an extra buck,

allowing the farmer to sell the crop for less than he otherwise could.)

This is called dumping, and it is illegal under international trade

rules.

 

Both the United States and the European Union are notorious for dumping

agricultural products.

 

So where do they dump it? Uganda with its money obsessed President-

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni! Indeed, Uganda shall remain a dumping ground as

long as Mr Museveni is still at the helm of leadership.

 

The writer is an international lobbyist and advocate with " Make Trade

Fair Oxfam " group, and a member of UPC Youth International Bureau based

in North America.

 

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4) 'Killer Tomatoes' Protest Agriculture Secretary

 

The Daily Californian

Monday, October 6, 2003

 

About 20 activists dressed as giant tomatoes and oversized fish

protested the appearance of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman

outside the Berkeley City Club Friday night.

 

The demonstrators were members of the Killer Tomatoes, a group of Bay

Area activists against genetic engineering. They spoke out against

Veneman, who was being honored as UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public

Policy Alumna of the Year.

 

Since her appointment in 2001, Veneman has pushed for the development of

biotechnology, including genetically engineered crops.

 

" It's absolutely beyond hypocritical that she should get a public policy

award, " said Mary Bull, a Killer Tomato from San Francisco. " She

represents corporate interests, not those of the general good. "

 

The activists greeted over 100 attendees by singing slogans against

genetically modified food and handing out " Killer Bloody Mary's, "

cocktails made with genetically modified tomatoes.

 

Veneman gave her keynote address thanking the school at the conclusion

of the alumni dinner and cocktail party.

 

In an interview with The Daily Californian, Veneman defended her

policies from criticism that they only aided big business.

 

" We have spent a lot of time helping small industries, " she said. " We

have housing and outreach programs for minority and small farmers.

Frankly, I'm amazed that people say we only cater to a certain type of

farmer. "

 

Veneman said it is up to the U.S. Congress to decide whether genetically

modified foods should be labeled, adding that there are stringent

regulations on the foods and people shouldn't be fearful of eating them.

 

" There have been tremendous environmental benefits (from genetically

engineered food), " Veneman said. " It creates less runoff. "

 

— Catherine Ho

 

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5) Food companies want to move with caution dealing with transgenic

animals

 

Sunday, October 05, 2003

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The food industry has waited a long time for biotech

products aimed at giving consumers better health and a cleaner

environment. Genetically engineered animals, however, are not what the

industry has in mind.

 

So far, the biotech products in the marketplace resist pests and

tolerate chemicals, clearly offering benefits to farmers, not consumers.

 

Still, consumers have come to accept food from genetically engineered

plants. They buy tacos, nacho chips and tofu without thinking twice that

many of them are produced with genetically modified corn and soybeans.

Farmers now devote three-fourths of the nation's soybean acreage and 40

percent of their corn plantings to biotech varieties.

 

But gene-altered animals? Well, that's a different animal.

 

While researchers look to combining genes from varied species with the

aim of improving flavor or increasing nutrients, or producing less

waste, industry leaders fear consumers will reject them.

 

" Animals are a different issue, " said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman

for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. " Consumers want to know what

the benefits are. "

 

Polls show that the public is much more skittish about tinkering with

the genes of livestock than crops.

 

Nonetheless, transgenic salmon could hit the market within five years.

The fish, developed by Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc. of Waltham, Mass.,

are designed to grow bigger and faster, and produce less waste than

their wild cousins.

 

Aqua Bounty is the only company to have applied so far to the Food and

Drug Administration to market a transgenic animal. It has submitted test

results it says demonstrate its bioengineered Atlantic salmon are safe.

 

Elliot Entis, the company's chief executive, said the bioengineered

salmon would not be sold directly to food companies nor to restaurants.

" We're like a seed supplier. We're only going to be selling fish eggs, "

he said.

 

Fish farms using the eggs would be selling fish to be turned into canned

salmon or fillets at restaurants. Entis said Aqua Bounty supports

labeling the salmon as bioengineered to differentiate it from

conventional fish.

 

Aqua Bounty's fish is spliced with a Chinook salmon growth gene and an

antifreeze gene from an ocean pout.

 

Environmental groups argue that transgenic animals and fish are

ecologically risky because the animals could escape into the wild and

take over food supplies and habitats of their conventional counterparts.

The groups also fear the animals would breed with conventional ones,

passing on their mutant genes, which would phase out whole species.

 

Thomas Hoban, a sociology and food science professor at North Carolina

State University, said many companies are just beginning to balance the

benefits and higher yields from biotech animals with the risk of losing

customers who worry about the welfare of animals and the environment.

 

Some food processors worry that biotech animals could cause a food scare

that could cost them millions of dollars in losses, Hoban said.

 

" They're not seeing cost-savings, " Hoban said of processors. " They're

just seeing headaches. "

 

In February, the FDA discovered that some pigs that were supposed to

have been destroyed after a biotech study may have entered the food

supply after being sold to a livestock dealer. The pigs, developed at

the University of Illinois, were offspring of genetically engineered

pigs. The university said the piglets did not carry the altered genes,

and the FDA determined there was no health risk.

 

Hoban, who has done several surveys to evaluate consumer opinion about

biotech, cited some biotech experiments that involved transplanting

genes from humans into pigs. If those animals were to get into the food

supply, it would be difficult for the food industry to recover, he said.

 

FDA officials maintain the approval process is stringent enough to

protect the public. The biotech industry agrees, saying it is taking

appropriate measures to prevent the worst from happening, designing

animals that cannot reproduce and that would be raised in confinement.

 

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6) Activists hang from cranes to protest GM food exports

 

John Colebourn

The Province (Vancouver, BC)

Friday, October 03, 2003

 

Three Greenpeacers evaded security and suspended themselves from the

cranes of a ship loading genetically engineered canola in Vancouver

yesterday.

 

They vowed to stay there, perched almost 40 metres above the decks of

the Glory Island at the United Grain Growers' terminal, until at least

tonight.

 

The protesters' goal was to prevent the loading of the genetically

engineered canola bound for Japan.

 

Loading stopped when the trio, holding signs saying " Biohazard: GE

Export, " suspended themselves in climbing apparatus from three cranes on

the boat at noon.

 

Police in a harbour patrol boat said they would monitor the protesters.

There had been no arrests by last night.

 

United Grain Growers refused comment.

 

" The export of genetically engineered crops is a threat to the global

environment, " said Greenpeace's Patrick Venditti.

 

" Canada's flawed agricultural biotechnology regulatory system is not up

to the task of protecting the environment of either Canada or importing

countries such as Japan and China. "

 

Venditti said Canada is one of a few countries exporting genetically

engineered products.

 

" The rest of the world is rejecting genetically engineered crops and

food, while Canada is exporting it around the world unlabelled. "

 

Labelling of GM food products is not mandatory. Upwards of 70 per cent

of the products on grocery shelves contain genetically engineered foods.

 

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7) Expert View: Plant new seeds in the GM debate

By Ragnar Lofstedt

05 October 2003

 

Last month the Government released its " GM Nation " report, which

summarised the findings of 675 public meetings, 36,557 feedback forms, a

series of focus groups and public emails. And according to the report,

we are overwhelmingly opposed to the whole GM concept.

 

Should we be surprised by these findings? Certainly not. As I have

argued previously on these pages, the GM debate is no longer a

scientific but a political one. The primary reasons why 54 per cent

never want GM crops grown in Britain, or 84 per cent believe they will

cause unacceptable interference with nature, are that the survey

participants trust neither the messages put forward by those policy

makers nor the agro-businesses that are trying to introduce GM crops to

the UK, and aren't convinced there will be any benefits in using them.

 

So what now? Should we go on with more public consultation exercises on

this topic? No, the outcome will be the same. What is needed is for the

regulators to re-establish trust with the public. This is not easily

done, as the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that promote anti-GM

messages have much more credibility with the public than the regulators

supporting the concept.

 

For example, in his book In the Chamber of Risk, Professor William Leiss

of Queen's University, Ontario, shows how quickly opinion on genetically

modified organisms can swing once NGOs become involved. Before

Greenpeace launched its global campaign against GMOs in Canada in the

autumn of 1999, only one third of Canadians polled had any concerns

about them. By December that same year, almost two thirds were

expressing fears about having GM products on their shelves, with the

public no longer believing the messages of the regulators or the

scientists that GM foods were safe.

 

Of course, faced with such a dramatic swing in such a short time, it is

very hard for regulators to recapture the initiative, which is exactly

what we are seeing in the UK today. And they will continue to lose

ground until they put time and resources into communicating risks

properly.

 

The regulators can do this in two ways. First, they can try to emulate

the sort of culture established by the US Environ- mental Protection

Agency, which developed an in-house research programme on risk

communication in the 1980s to ensure that the research conducted on a

topic met its specific needs.

 

Over many years, in addition, the agency has paid for members of its

staff to attend outside courses (such as the annual programme run by the

Harvard Centre for Risk Analysis).

 

By taking into account the theories and concepts of risk communication,

the agency has been largely able to rebuild its trust base with the

American public.

 

Second, regulators need to engage with the public to uncover exactly

what concerns it has. For example, Baruch Fischhoff and his colleagues

at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have shown that by carrying

out carefully constructed face-to-face surveys with people lasting up to

two hours or more - and then, based on the results of these surveys,

developing " mental models " showing the public's actual knowledge of the

issue at hand - regulators were able to construct risk communication

guides that were much more attuned to common concerns.

 

In sum, UK regulatory bodies such as the Department for Environment,

Food and Rural Affairs have a lot of work to do. But rather than pouring

money into consultation exercises, let's ensure they first pay attention

to the importance of risk communication.

 

Professor Ragnar Lofstedt is director, King's Centre for Risk

Management, King's College London.

 

***************************************************************

 

8) GM crops flunk the test

 

Fri 03 October 2003

Greenpeace

UNITED KINGDOM/London

 

The debate on Genetically Modified (GM) crops is often a polarised one

with environmentalists and the majority of sceptical consumers against

the crops and powerful corporate interests attempting to steamroller all

opposition. Now those companies may be in for a serious setback, as

scientific tests devised by the UK Government and GM companies look set

to say that GM crops are environmentally unsafe.

 

Leaked results of field trials involving 3 GM crops have shown them to

be more harmful to the enviornment than conventional varieties. The

trials involved maize, sugar beet and oilseed rape. The crops, developed

by Monsanto and Bayer, are modified to resist herbicide produced by the

same companies. This allows farmers to eradicate all weeds from fields

of GM crops.

 

Compared to the fields treated in the conventional way the GM trial

fields contained much less wildlife because the herbicides kill all

weeds in the fields, leaving no food for farmland insects. While bugs in

crops might not sound so important, they are the basis of the food chain

in agricultural land. So without them it is not long before songbirds

and other larger countryside animals start to disappear.

 

Only GM maize seems to have less effect on wildlife because conventional

maize is treated with herbicides even more powerful than the Bayer

product sprayed on the GM maize. However US farmers have found that they

must spray GM maize with highly toxic herbicides like Atrazine to stop

yields suffering due to weed competition.

 

The results will be formally announced on October 16 but if the leak is

accurate it will be a major setback for the GM lobby. Already the EU

health commissioner, David Byrne, has indicated that a threat to British

wildlife from GM crops would be sufficient grounds for the UK Government

to ban the growing of such crops.

 

The leaked results are also significant because Europe is the centre of

genetic diversity for both oilseed rape and sugar beet. If GM versions

of these crops were planted commercially throughout the EU there would

be inevitable and irreversible contamination of natural biodiversity.

 

Now the ball is firmly in the court of governments like the UK and the

EU. Will they choose for the interests of the public and the environment

or for profits of big business and US Government bullying?

 

***************************************************************

 

9) Second GM food crop gets okay

 

AAP (Australia)

Fri 3 Oct 2003

 

Australia's gene technology regulator has given in-principle support to

the release of the nation's second genetically altered food crop.

 

The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) said it had found a

genetically altered canola developed by the company Monsanto to be as

safe as regular canola.

 

The canola, to be marketed as Roundup Ready canola, has been modified to

make it resistant to the broadleaf herbicide glyphosate.

 

In a statement, the OGTR said it had developed a risk management plan

for the new canola.

 

" The plan suggests that Roundup Ready canola is as safe to human health

and safety as non-GM canola, " it said in a statement.

 

" The development of herbicide resistance has been identified as a

potential risk.

 

" However, this issue has been thoroughly assessed and will be managed by

registration conditions imposed on glyphosate use by the Australian

Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. "

 

Earlier this year, the OGTR approved for commercial release a GM canola

produced by the Aventis CropScience group which has also been altered to

make it resistant to a type of herbicide.

 

The move provoked outrage from anti-GM groups which claim the move will

hurt Australian export markets and domestic producers who want to grow

non-GM crops.

 

The OGTR's plan has been released for public comment until November 28,

after which a final ruling on the GM canola will be made.

 

 

 

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