You don't want GM foods? Too bad

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GMW: You don't want GM foods? Too bad

" GM WATCH " <info

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:08:47 +0100

 

 

 

 

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Michael Meacher MP was Tony Blair's environment minister from 1997 to

2003.

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You don't want GM foods? Too bad

By Michael Meacher

The Sunday Telegraph, 30 July 2006

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/07/30/do3005.xml\

& sSheet=/opinion/2006/07/30/ixopinion.html

 

So, according to the Government, we are to have GM crops commercially

grown in Britain from 2009, and if you don't like your food being GM

contaminated, too bad. That's the clear message of [the Department for

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs's] Defra's latest consultation paper

proposing absurdly small separation distances between GM and other

crops, a voluntary system of compensation for ruined non-GM farmers, and

permission for GM crops to be grown at secret locations (rejecting a

public register of sites as sanctioned by EU law).

 

All of this begs the question: is genetic modification of food safe?

The question remains unanswered, but a pile of new scientific evidence

has produced some worrying results. Within the last few months a Russian

scientist, found that an astonishing 55 per cent of the offspring of

rats fed on GM soya died within three weeks of birth compared with only 9

per cent in the control group.

 

Then an Italian researcher found that mice fed on GM soya experienced a

slowdown in cellular metabolism and modifications in liver and

pancreas. A third study, in Australia, showed that genes from a bean

introduced

into a pea created a protein that caused such serious inflammation of

lung tissue in mice that the research was halted.

 

Enough, you might think, for the Government (or the EU, for the

Commission is now in charge of GM policy) to stop the import of GM

processed

foods until exhaustive tests had been carried out. Not a bit of it. The

EU, under pressure from the US, has pushed through the approval of

seven GM foods over the past two years, despite a lack of support from

member states, and has commercialised 31 varieties of Monsanto's maize

for

cultivation in the EU.

 

Yet we now know from leaked documents what the EU really believes. On

human safety it says that " there is no unique, absolute, scientific

cut-off threshold available to decide whether a GM product is safe or

not " .

And, it goes on, " it is a reasonable and lawful position " that

insect-resistant crops (the GM crops being grown in the EU) should not be

planted till all the effects on the soil are known.

 

Despite its own misgivings, the Commission has previously required

member states to vote twice on proposals to lift national bans on GM

products in five countries, and when it was defeated in both votes, it

used

its powers to force through the lifting of the bans anyway.

 

It is a scandal that an unelected body is empowered to determine what a

nation may or may not eat, and that it did this because it was leaned

on by the Bush administration in support of US agrochemical interests

such as Monsanto. The US was able to exert this pressure because the WTO

allows trade interests to override domestic food policies.

 

Nor does the UK Government come out of this much better. Despite

knowing how hostile public opinion was to GM, ministers voted to give

approval to six of the seven GM foods when other countries voted

against. And

despite a public consultation on GM cultivation that showed 85 per cent

of the population against, they went ahead until, unexpectedly,

environmental trials blocked this option.

 

The strong pro-GM bias of the Government is manifest in another area

too. It does not sit easily with Lord Sainsbury's position as science

minister that his companies promoting GM foods have been awarded more

than

GBP12 million by his own Department of Trade and Industry.

 

The key question remains for GM: should the public interest prevail, or

that of some of the biggest US companies?

 

Michael Meacher MP is a former environment minister

 

 

 

 

 

 

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