- Britain's official food safety watchdog - which prides
itself on its "openness" - is embroiled in a row over the blanking-out
of large sections of a document relating to a banned GM maize illegally
imported into the country.
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- The Food Standards Agency had even erased the telephone
numbers of the European Commission and the biotech company Syngenta, along
with statistics on the total trade in maize between Europe and the US.
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- The documents, which were finally released under the
Freedom of Information Act after weeks of pressure from a small environmental
group, GM Free Cymru, help to expose one of the greatest GM scandals of
recent years.
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- As reported in The Independent on Sunday in April, at
least a thousand tons of the maize has been illegally exported from the
United States to Europe over the past four years.
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- The Bush administration failed to inform European countries
that they were inadvertently importing the maize, which had been confused
with a similar approved one. The imports were later exposed by the scientific
magazine Nature. Even then it was not revealed that the maize contained
a gene conferring resistance to antibiotics that could potentially cause
people to resist vital medicines.
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- The Food Standards Agency refused to try to track down
the banned maize in Britain. Having carried out no tests, it says it was
"not aware" of the crop's presence. It took action to stop the
imports only when forced to do so by the European Commission.
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- The censoring of the documents is bound to raise new
questions about the agency's role in the scandal, and its relationship
with giant biotech companies.
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- Dr Brian John of GM Free Cymru, who has lodged a formal
complaint with the agency, said: "After endless procrastination, we
have at last been sent a bunch of documents relating to the scandal, only
to find that they have been heavily censored in a manner that would have
done credit to Stalinist Russia."
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/
- envir onment/story.jsp?story=648020
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