Home | Friday 29th February 2008 | Issue 622

Back to the Full Issue

Into the Valley of DEFRA

Running scared of midnight crop-trashings, the transnational corporations behind GM foods are demanding the right to grow them in secret. DEFRA (govt dept for farming, and er, of the ‘environment’) are looking at new ways of clamping down on direct action. The corporations have warned that trials of GM crops are becoming too expensive to conduct in Britain because of the additional costs of protecting fields from activists. The Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an industry lobby group (slogan: ‘promoting biotechnology in sustainable agriculture’) is pushing for secret locations and stiffer penalties for croptrashers.
Last year only one GM trial went ahead in the UK, of potatoes developed by German company BASF. Two activists were arrested for damage to the trial site, which was later anonymously trashed and the trial abandoned (see SchNEWS 583).

BASF plans to repeat the trial this year, at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridgeshire. Another trial is planned by scientists at Leeds University. Under existing laws, full details of every GM crop trial should be disclosed in advance on a government website, with a six-figure grid reference identifying the precise location of the field.

Last week, Friends of the Earth (FoE), using the Freedom of Information Act, finally obtained - albeit still partial - information which shows that the Government provides at least £50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the £1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, ‘sustainable’ farming.

They also gained disclosure of letters which showed DEFRA (supposedly the watchdogs over the GM crop process) bending over backwards to accommodate BASF’s needs when it came to the potato trials. Another campaigning group, GM Freeze, got hold of letters clearly demonstrating that DEFRA allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the DEFRA conditions for their own trials!

On the 1st of December last year, the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. In one letter to BASF, a DEFRA official asked, “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.”

Well SchNEWS knows who we’ll be rooting for... We won’t stop til the BASFs of this world have had their chips...

* See www.mutatoes.org www.gmfreeze.org and www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/real_food

Subscribe to SchNEWS: Send 1st Class stamps (e.g. 10 for next 9 issues) or donations (payable to Justice?). Or £15 for a year's subscription, or the SchNEWS supporter's rate, £1 a week. Ask for "originals" if you plan to copy and distribute. SchNEWS is post-free to prisoners.

SchNEWS, c/o Community Base, 113 Queens Rd, Brighton, BN1 3XG, England
Phone: +44 (0)1273 685913
email: schnews@brighton.co.uk

@nti copyright - information for action - copy and distribute!