The New Dark Age

In what has become a time-honoured tradition, yet another non-GM breeding success has been proclaimed a triumph of genetic engineering in an article written by Lucy Carter and published in The Guardian. The article says that three bean varieties have been developed in the UK. The varieties, named Olivia, Godiva, and Capulet, were developed by Prof Eric Holub at the University of Warwick. They reportedly “can germinate fast and in cold soils”. Prof Holub told The Guardian that the beans were made using “conventional breeding and genetics” – the latter referring to gene mapping, a biotechnology which was used to identify the desirable genes but which doesn’t result in a GMO. Yet bizarrely, Lucy Carter – or, perhaps more likely, a tabloid-minded editor – managed to headline her article, “Beans are being genetically engineered to grow in the UK”! Was this an innocent mistake, or the latest in a long history of deception, prompted by the decades-long catalogue of failures of promised GM “solutions” and the astonishing successes of conventional breeding? GMWatch

The industry’s cards are now fully on the table regarding the proposed deregulation of GM plants engineered with so-called “new genomic techniques” (NGTs), writes Franziska Achterberg of Save Our Seeds. Major chemical and biotech industries, commodity traders, seed breeders and the farmer umbrella group Copa-Cogeca have launched a full-blown attack on consumer rights. In a joint statement, they demand that EU legislators abolish a long-standing rule that all GM food must be labelled and GM plants must be traceable. This isn’t a new demand. But so far, the industry has not come up with a convincing argument to explain why consumers do not have the right to know how their food is made. When the Parliament voted in February last year to require consumer labelling of NGT products, the seed industry – the mouthpiece of the deregulation camp – said that “market labelling” was a “detail” that needed evaluation. Now, as lawmakers move forward in talks to finalise deregulation plans, this “detail” has turned into a major sticking point. Arc2020