GM Freeze has today emailed the UK Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs Daniel Zeichner urging him to act with caution in relation to new GMOs. Laws have been announced that look set to remove controls over a subset of GMOs that are dubbed "precision bred" by the British government. In a parliamentary briefing, GM Freeze has provided a set of recommendations for how new GMOs can be regulated responsibly. These include labelling, traceability and environmental and health-related risk assessments. The briefing is supported by a range of civil society organisations, including the Civil Society Alliance, Compassion in World Farming, the Landworkers’ Alliance, the Soil Association, and GMWatch. The briefing "Regulating new GMOs responsibly" is available here. The report "Problems with the planned regulatory framework for new GMOs under the Conservative government" is available here. GM Freeze

 

 

This Monday, new food security and rural affairs minister Daniel Zeichner told a packed room at the World Agritech Innovation Summit in London that his government had intentions to push ahead with the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) bill. The bill, introduced by the Tories last year, would enable agritech businesses to use "precision breeding" (new GM) to develop crops that are more nutritious, resistant to pests and disease, resilient to climate change effects and more beneficial to the environment, Zeichner said. The news was largely welcomed at the summit – but not by everyone. “The announcement was welcomed because [Zeichner] wasn’t talking to a room full of farmers,” one senior farming figure at the event argued. “He was talking to a room full of tech companies who just want to sell their stuff to farmers.” And Leonie Nimmo, executive director at GM Freeze, said the ”intense pressure from the pro-biotech lobby [on Labour] seems to have been working, as the fantastic promises the government is making about the benefits of so-called precision-bred crops could have been cut and pasted straight from a biotech brochure”. The Grocer

 

 

The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has warned that trials of GM wheat in South Africa could contaminate the food supply and find its way into neighbouring importing countries. Lobby group ACB has registered objections to plans for GM wheat field trials, which it says could lead to below-threshold contamination of wheat products in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, and Namibia, none of which have approved GM wheat. ACB says the safeguarding measures proposed for the trials to prevent the GM traits from spreading into neighbouring wheat populations are “woefully inadequate”. The application for field trials was submitted by Trigall Genetics in August. Trigall is a subsidiary of the Argentinian biotech company Bioceres, the first to develop a commercial strain of GM wheat. According to ACB, approval for field trials will absolve Trigall (Bioceres) from any liability or redress that may arise from contamination of the food supply from the field trials. South Africa's Freight News

 

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