Shock admission that GM crops are already growing in the UK17 May 2000
GM crops have been growing in fields throughout the UK for more than a year. The Government confirmed that Canadian exporter Advanta Seeds sent genetically modified (GM) oilseed rape seeds to the UK, Sweden, Germany and France by accident. Both Sweden and France have ordered the farmers to destroy the crops and now the UK's Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, has stated that farmers in this country will not be legally permitted to sell their crops in the EU.
In Britain around 9,000 ha was sown unwittingly by hundreds of farmers with GM seed during 1999 and another 4,700 in spring 2000.
However the Government, which has known about this fiasco for more than a month, only released details after the story broke first in Sweden. It has claimed that only one per cent of Advanta Seeds' imports contained GM oil rape seed, but has failed to give any details of total tonnage or where it is located.
"The Government is now making the outrageous claim that GM crops have been imported, sown and presumably harvested and sold commercially in the UK, but that this poses 'no risk to human health and the environment'," said Friends of the Earth Real Food Campaigner Adrian Bebb. "How can this claim be made, when finding the extent of any risk was supposed to be the whole point of the Government's farm scale trials programme?"
"Instead of coming clean the Government has sat on the truth for a month. Genetically modified food is a gigantic experiment with human health and the environment. The Government has lost control of the experiment altogether. Worse, it seems to have decided the results of the experiment before it has even been conducted. Yet again, the interests of the biotech companies have been put before the safety of the environment and the public."
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