28/January/22

 

Research into the gene editing of plants in the UK will become much easier with new rules brought forward by the government that will encourage field trials. Campaigners have expressed concern that the government’s moves over the past year, since Brexit made it possible for the UK to ditch some of the EU’s strict rules on GM, may be the prelude to much greater use of gene editing and GM. Pat Thomas, the director of Beyond GM, a pressure group, called the government's latest announcement "a sop to the biotech research establishment that doesn’t really address the most significant hurdles that developers need to face, which are that farmers don’t really want to grow genetically engineered crops and citizens don’t want to eat them". The Guardian

 

 

The case for GMOs in the UK is being made by the Adam Smith Institute and the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) – a group that solicits money from tobacco and other dodgy corporations for product defence campaigns, and that even Monsanto were reluctant to finance because ACSH "have PLENTY of warts". GMWatch on Twitter

 

 

If the Monsanto Papers told us anything, it is that a corporation’s top priority is the bottom line (at all costs, by all means necessary) and not public health, write Rosemary Mason and Colin Todhunter. Corporations must also secure viable year-on-year growth which often means expanding into hitherto untapped markets. While countries like the US are still reporting higher pesticide use, most of this growth is taking place in the Global South. Countercurrents