UK government denies split over GM testing

April 30, 1999


LONDON, Reuters [WS] via NewsEdge Corporation : Britain's Labour government on
Thursday fought to stamp out reports it was split over the thorny issue of
genetically modified (GM) food technology.

``There is no division in the the government. That is very, very unfair and
inaccurate,'' Food Safety Minister Jeff Rooker told parliament's cross-party
Environment Audit Committee.

Norman Baker of the minority Liberal Democrats, a member of the committee,
said Rooker and Environment Minister Michael Meacher were proceeding with care over
GM regulation while Prime Minister Tony Blair was ``gung-ho for the biotech
industry.''

Mad cow disease, the human equivalent of which has claimed about 30 British
lives, has made people deeply conscious of food safety issues and sensitive to
newspaper headlines about genetically modified ``Frankenstein foods.''

``It is BSE (mad cow disease) that has created the problem,'' Meacher said.
But among Labour ministers themselves there appear to be different views on the GM
issue.

On Tuesday, Cabinet Office minister Jack Cunningham said if all regulatory
hurdles were cleared, commercial planting of GM crops could begin in Britain next
year.

On Thursday, Meacher told the same committee: ``I certainly believe we are not
going to move to commercial planting for some considerable period of time.''

English Nature, a government advisory body, has called for a five-year ban
on the commercial release of GM crops to allow more research on their environmental
impact. It says concrete research will not be published until well into the
next century.

Blair on Wednesday refused to ban testing.

``If people study properly the scientific evidence I think they would have to
conclude...there is no evidence that GM foods are unsafe,'' he said.

Meacher confirmed he would replace 10 of 13 experts on the government's
Advisory Committee on Releases into the Environment as required by public
standards rules, because of concern about their links with the biotechnology
industry.

He said membership of the committee should be restricted to scientists
because of the complexity of the subject matter, but Rooker said he strongly believed lay
people should be included to question the scientists' judgment.

Rooker said that while GM crops -- resistant to bad weather, disease and able
to grow with less water -- could help tackle malnutrition in the developing
world, the honest answer to the question ``do we have to have these foods?'' was ``no.''

``The basic answer has to be no,'' he said. It is not the government's place
to push them one way or another but to regulate them.''

When heavy media coverage fuelled public fears over GM foods in February,
Blair said Britain was in danger of falling behind international competitors in
biotechnology, which he called ``the revolutionary science of the 21st
century.''

[Copyright 1999, Reuters]