Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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 Published on Saturday, February 16, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
UK GM Crop Trial Locations May Be Hidden From Public
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/16/7099/

Genetically modified crops may be grown in hidden locations in Britain amid
fears that anti-GM campaigners are winning the battle over the
controversial technology, the Guardian has learned.0216 01

Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
confirmed they are looking at a range of options to clamp down on vandalism
to GM crop trials, after intense lobbying by big crop biotech companies.
The firms 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.

This week, a report from the GM industry claimed that worldwide
agricultural use of genetically modified crops had increased 70-fold in the
last 10 years to 114m hectares in 2007.

But fears of vandalism have forced many companies to shift their crop
trials abroad. Last year, only one trial went ahead in Britain, a
blight-resistant GM potato developed by the German company BASF. Two
activists were arrested for damage to the trial site, which was later
almost completely destroyed in a night raid.

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.

A group representing the major biotech companies has asked the government
to oversee specific changes to the GM trial process that would make fields
of crops harder for activists to locate. Under existing laws, full details
of every GM crop trial must be disclosed in advance on a government
website, with a six-figure grid reference identifying the precise location
of the field.

The group has asked Defra to keep details of locations on a register, which
would only be shared with people who apply and who can prove they have good
reason to know. Another option is to release only a four-figure reference
for the trial site.

“These trials are legal, so why give carte blanche to anyone who wants to
destroy them? In most countries, there is nothing like the sort of specific
information that has to be given in Britain,” said Julian Little of the
industry group, the Agricultural Biotechnology Council. The need to give
the location of a GM crop is contained in a European directive, but it is
interpreted differently across member states.

The GM companies are also keen to see stiffer penalties for activists
caught damaging crop trials.

“We have to sort out the framework under which we’re allowed to do
trials. If Britain is to benefit from GM technology, we have to have crop
trials in Britain. There’s no use second-guessing how a crop will fare
here from what has been done elsewhere,” Little said. “We have to start
looking at how to produce a large amount of food on a small amount of land
with a minimal environmental footprint and for that you need new
technology.”

Some GM companies fear future crop trials are in greater danger because of
what they claim is a “broadening out” of anti-GM activists to include
anti-globalisation and possibly animal rights campaigners. British anti-GM
activists have also developed links with European groups that hold training
camps to share tactics, such as crossing police lines and gaining access to
fields. In France and Germany, crop trashings have increased substantially
as farmers have taken to growing GM crops.

Defra officials said making it harder to identify trial sites was not a
straightforward process.

Only one GM crop is approved for cultivation in Europe, an insect-resistant
maize, which is grown on about 110,000 hectares in member states. It is not
grown in Britain because the corn pest it protects against is not found in
this country. A second crop, a potato, is in the final stages of approval
in Brussels, but it would only be used to produce starch for the paper
industry and would probably be grown in Germany and the Czech Republic.