'More stringent' GM crops trials to be introduced

Defra announced today that "more stringent conditions" would be applied to future GM crop trials, following the discovery of additional GM material at Farm Scale Evaluation (FSE) sites during the summer of last year.

Following this incident, the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE) were asked to review the inspection and enforcement regime for GM crop research trials. They have recommended, for future trials, a number of additional conditions to be placed on consents, placing the onus, and cost, on those undertaking such trials.

In particular ACRE will require detailed descriptions of the conditions under which seeds are produced as part of all applications for research consents, and in some cases independent validation by the GM Inspectorate of seed purity will be required. It would then recommend different inspection procedures depending on the conditions under which seeds are produced.

The government also confirmed today that, following investigation of the incident by the GM Inspectorate and advice from expert advisory committees, no prosecution in England will be taken against BayerCropSciences (formerly Aventis) the company concerned.

In Scotland the final decision on whether or not to prosecute will be taken by the Procurator Fiscal, to whom the issue is being referred.

Environment and Agri-environment Minister Elliot Morley said: "Although the Defra Prosecution Division has advised against prosecution in this case, valuable lessons on enforcement have been learned. In the case of any future research we will require a detailed description of just how the seed to be tested has been produced.

"This means that different inspection procedures can be applied depending on the different conditions for seed production - this may well include additional site visits."

Defra and the Scottish Executive announced on 15 August 2002 that some impurities had been found in the Aventis GM oilseed rape seed used in the Farm Scale Evaluation crop trials. This involved 12 sites in England and two in Scotland.

During the investigation into this incident the GM Inspectors also discovered that seed used in the remaining FSE sites (10 in England and one in Scotland) also contained impurities.

Although Bayer had technically breached its consent conditions ACRE concluded that no environmental harm resulted from the use of seed containing impurities in this case.

(gmcg)