More good news, although the big players have already left:

"The Anglo-Swiss agrochemicals company said it would close its laboratories because of the poor business outlook for the technology."

Previously, Friedrich Vogel, head of BASF's crop protection business, warned that GM rops would ome with strict contracts which will dictate production methods and severely limit the farmer's share of any added value the new crops offer to food processors and retailers.
------

BASF chief impatient with Europe's fear of innovation
By David Firn and Bettina Wassener in London
Financial Times, July 12 2004
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373644224

BASF, the world's largest chemical company, may move its genetically modified crop research to the US unless Europe becomes more receptive to new technologies.

Jürgen Hambrecht, chief executive, said the German chemicals giant could not afford to keep investing in research if there was no market for its products.

"If you can no longer push innovation through to the market, the next step will be that R&D will go. You will transfer R&D to a place where you can really push innovation into reality, because we need to earn money, we cannot only spend money," he told the Financial Times.

GM crop research accounts for only a small fraction of BASF's activities. But Mr Hambrecht's warning about the danger of economic stagnation posed by Europe's "zero risk" attitude comes only days after Syngenta decided to end large-scale commercial research into genetically-modified crops in the UK.

The Anglo-Swiss agrochemicals company said it would close its laboratoriesm because of the poor business outlook for the technology.

Mr Hambrecht said moving BASF's GM crop research to the US was not under active discussion, but neither could the company afford to wait 10 years for Europe to accept GM crops - a reference to Germany's long debate about the use of genetic engineering in medical research and drug development.

"If things don't change in the long term, BASF would have to reconsider. But I still hope that things are going to change," Mr Hambrecht said.

He said the European Union's "Lisbon" aim to make Europe the world's most competitive economy by 2010, stood no chance of becoming a reality unless politicians were prepared to accept that the benefits of new technology inevitably carried some risk.

"A society with this approach has no future. There is no innovation without risk," he said. "Zero risk means zero growth, means zero future, means zero fun.

BASF hopes to win public support for GM with a new generation of crops that offer environmental benefits. But Mr Hambrecht said some politicians assumed GM was "guilty until scientifically proved 100 per cent innocent," despite there being no evidence of health or environmental risk.

Mr Hambrecht, who is also president of Germany's VCI chemicals association, is among the most vocal German corporate leaders in calling on Berlin to do more to encourage innovation and safeguard Germany's R&D leadership.