Eco sounding
John Vidal Wednesday November 24, 2004
http://society.guardian.co.uk/environment/story/0,14124,1357822,00.html
The Guardian

Coming a cropper

GM companies seem to have finally given up on Britain. Last week, Bayer CropScience quietly dropped its last two GM seed applications. This means that from a high of 53 applications pending in 1997, there are now no GM seeds waiting to be approved. Bayer now prefers conventional breeding. Back in March, it said it would be pulling out of GM crop research in the UK; then, in June, it announced it would not pursue commercialisation of GM oilseed rape in Australia; and last week they also got out of GM in India, saying the future was conventional crop breeding.

Web of deceit

Could someone have a word with the Food Standards Agency? This government body has long backed GM food and thrown doubt on organic foods, and now has a spiffy new consumer website that could have been written by Mr Monsanto himself. Remarkably, the FSA does not mention one single doubt thrown up by years of government and industry research into the technology. When asked why, the FSA responds that "Defra, and not the FSA, is responsible for looking at the environmental impact of GM". See
http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthissues/factsbehindissues/gmfood
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more on the FSA: http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=43