UK: The government’s backing of GM foods is short-sighted and wrong

The following is an excerpt.

The call to relax the rules on GM crops from Sir Mark Walport, government chief scientist, comes as no surprise. A strong belief in GM seems to have become a basic qualification for the chief scientist job in recent years.

The problem for successive pro-GM UK governments, starting with Tony Blair’s evangelical support for GM, is that consumers and the market, not politicians or their advisors, have decided what actually happens. So despite Blair’s strong support for GM, in 1999 supermarkets took GM ingredients out of 70% of UK food in response to their customers’ wishes, and have kept it out of all UK food ever since.

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View the original article here: Comment: The government’s backing of GM foods is short-sighted and wrong