Today's News

03 March 2010

First GM potato to be grown in Europe:
Farmers will be able to grow GM potatoes in Europe for the first time after a controversial ruling by the European Commission. The GM Amflora potato has been developed by German chemical giant BASF to produce more starch. It is expected to be mostly grown in Germany for industrial purposes like the paper industry, but not food. However it is unlikely to be grown in Britain because there is no demand for the potato in industry. Luca Zaia, Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia, said his country was against the decision. Martin Hausling, a German Green MEP said approval of the potato "flies in the face of the 70 per cent of consumers who are against GM food, as well as the anti-GM position of the European Parliament." Heike Moldenhauer, of Friends of the Earth, said the potato carried a controversial antibiotic resistant gene that could cause problems if it enters the food chain through feeding the industrial pulp from the potatoes to livestock: "This decision puts profit before people or the environment and will do little to increase public confidence in the Brussels bureaucracy.”
Daily Telegraph (3 March)
Financial Times (3 March, p.5)
New York Times (3 March)
The Times, news in brief (3 March, p.35)

Factory farms, welfare and a load of bull
Terence Blacker comments on the Lincolnshire ‘super-dairy’: “When farmers involved in large-scale developments protest tender concern for animal welfare, it is prudent to assume that they are up to something. When they make promises of bringing money into the community, one should become even more wary.”
The Independent (3 March, p.39)


Britain’s first milk factory
Patrick Holden, Soil Association director, is quoted: "You can't just blame the supermarkets, that is pointless. The choice is with us, the customers: it's we who have to change the way we buy. So we farmers must help the public to relearn where milk comes from, to value it and the animal and the land and the people that produced it."
Guardian blog


Farming Today
Website summary: Protestors against what could be Western Europe's largest dairy farm demand planners give them more time to have their say. Bad weather is causing anxiety for sugar beet farmers in East Anglia. Anna Hill hears how live pigs are being exported to China.
BBC Radio 4 (listen again)


And finally…revenge of the chickens
A four-strong gang of chickens has managed to kill a fox that had slunk into their pen hoping to gobble them up for his dinner.
The Daily Mail (3 March, p.3)


Quote of the day
“If we mistreat living creatures on a grand, institutional scale, all the while allowing sleazy advertising to peddle reassuring lies about industrialised agriculture, we have no claim to be a morally aware society.”
Terence Blacker – The Independent – 3 March 2010