Yesterday, EU farm ministers voted on whether to approve the use of new GM crops including a variety of potato developed by chemical giant BASF. According to Reuters, they failed to reach a consensus which is good in the sense that the proposed crops weren't approved, but bad because the decision will now be passed back to the European Commission. The EC is heavily pro-GM so it's likely that all five crops under consideration will be approved with a nod and a wink.
BASF's potato - going by the delicate name of Amflora - has been developed to produce high amounts of starch for use in industry, but it also contains an antibiotic resistance marker gene which (as you might have guessed) conveys a certain resistance to antibiotics. If potato crops intended for human consumption become contaminated with this gene, that's bad news and only yesterday, a plant geneticist warned that "It's clear that zero contamination is impossible at present."
Meanwhile, as reported in the Guardian at the weekend, our own government is paving the way for future GM trials in this country by keeping the locations on a need-to-know basis. Or in other words, secret from those who might object. At the moment, any company registering crop trials needs to give precise co-ordinates but as crops keep getting ripped up, it's becoming an expensive business, too expensive to make it worth the investment. "We've been very clear to government," said Julian Little of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council. "We have to find a way of reducing the amount of damage you get when you do a field trial in the UK, that's absolutely imperative."
And yet the economic benefits of GM crops have been greatly exaggerated of late. Remember when outgoing chief scientist Sir David King said that shunning GM technology has cost the UK £4 billion? Well, the Ecologist (via GM Watch) reports that the government has been unable to back up those figures. After his extremely misleading claims that GM crops can feed the world (I feel dirty linking to the Daily Mail, but here it is), it's just one more fib to add to the list.
