The Government is to change the law to speed up the commercial development of genetically modified (GM) crops. Friends of the Earth attacked this move as paving the way for “creeping commercialisation”.
The move follows a Government climb-down in March, when Friends of the Earth and MPs from all three major Parties sued the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) over an attempt to extend a non-statutory seed certification scheme to cover GM crops. The scheme would have cut about two years off the timescale for bringing GM crops to the marketplace.
Advised by their lawyers that the Government would lose the case, MAFF promised not to pursue that scheme. But it now plans to change various seed regulations to create a new scheme with exactly the same result. FOE Food Campaigner Pete Riley said, “We will be studying these new plans minutely to see if they are as unlawful as the previous arrangements.”
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