THE HANDSTAND |
FEBRUARY-MARCH2010
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ISIS
Press Release 05/02/10
UK Chief Scientist
Misrepresented Over GM
Britain
must launch GM food revolution, says chief
scientist was the headline of an article in The
Guardian (6 January 2010http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/06/gm-food-revolution-government-scientist).
The article, written by John Vidal and Felicity Lawrence
and based on a paper seen by the Guardian,
reported that the governments chief scientist Prof.
John Beddington will warn today at an Oxford
farming conference that Britain must embrace
both GM crops and nanotechnology to avoid
catastrophic food shortages and future climate change.
However,
on 9 January, The Guardian published a letter
from Prof. Beddington (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/09/gm-food-farming-supermarkets-ombudsman)
stating categorically: Your article misrepresents
my position and my paper
. The paper makes no
mention of GM and I have not said that Britain must
launch a GM food revolution. It went on to say:
GM technology is not something that should be
simply accepted or rejected, the question is what
problems in agricultural production it can solve.
So
whats going on? Did the journalists completely
misunderstand the paper? Or was the paper they saw ahead
of time not what was actually presented? Is it possible
that Prof. Beddingtons staff - at the Department
for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs perhaps - are
much keener on GM than he is, and wrote a speech for him
that was leaked ahead of time to The Guardian?
Could it be that Prof. Beddington, after seeing the
prepared speech, changed it out of all recognition?
Unfortunately, his actual speech has not been reported
anywhere.
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