The Brexit race to the bottom

January 2020

By the time this article pops up on the net, who knows what Brexit chaos might be unfolding. It is, however, worth being forewarned about what's been sneaked into place at the time of writing. As GM Watch points out, there's so much political upheaval in the UK and Europe, we risk "being so overwhelmed by the noise and sense of urgency that we miss what's really going on".

For example ...

Cost-cutting in Brazil

November 2018

In 2016, organic food sales in Brazil were mushrooming by 20 to 30 percent a year.  At the same time, some 70 percent of organic produce was being exported to Europe.  Farmers there recognise that "Growing organics is the future", and the people are increasingly "wanting healthier food free from pesticides".

Were it not for the alliance between the government and Big Agriculture, which is driving the economy, and the supermarkets, which are controlling the food supply system, organics would be a key growth industry.  Instead, it remains a tiny fraction of the whole, swamped by Big Ag's desire for GM crops and their supporting chemicals.  Supermarkets, of course, promote cut-throat competition amongst their suppliers, and the 'winners' are the unrestrained fraudsters passing off conventional pesticide-laden food as 'organic'.

Faced with this scenario, the Brazilian government is busy pushing through two far-reaching pieces of legislation.

GM creep

December 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Products with GM labels are creeping quietly onto our supermarket shelves.

None of them is likely to appeal to your average real-food locavore. However, it's good to be GM-aware. GM offerings are turning up, not only in budget stores, but in the top-end supermarkets Waitrose, Selfridges and Marks & Spencer.

And, keep on your toes, because a 'suspect' which carries no GM label one day, may appear in novel form when the next batch arrives.

What to look out for?

Well done Waitrose!

December 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

Three years ago, when major supermarkets, such as Tesco, Mark & Spencer, Sainsbury's and the Co-op, collectively moved to allowing GM-fed animal produce on their shelves, whether their customers wanted it or not, Waitrose went out on a limb.

Feed me the truth

November 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Most people in the UK don't eat food made from GM ingredients, but supermarkets across the UK are selling products from GM-fed livestock with not a GM label in sight.  

This means that, unwittingly, people are eating eggs, milk, dairy products, poultry, red meat and farmed fish from animals that have been fed GM soya and/or maize.

On the subject of the absent labels, one professor of food marketing told farmers "we find it convenient not to make a big noise about it".

TAKE ACTION

It's time YOU made a big noise whether food marketers find it convenient or not.  

Check out GM Freeze campaign at www.gmfreeze.org/feedmethetruth/ and demand to be FED THE TRUTH on GM animal feed in your food-chain.

Glyphosate damages soil

September 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

When crops are sprayed with glyphosate, a large proportion ends up on the soil. The GM plants themselves exude glyphosate through their roots into the soil. Also, any plant debris which ends up in the soil will come complete with accumulated glyphosate.

The discovery that GM cotton plants which generate 'Bt' insecticide suffer from impaired ability to support the vital associations with soil fungi in their roots wasn't anticipated [1]. Increasingly, these same Bt crops are also being genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate herbicide.

Just how Bt plants adversely influence the fungi in and around their roots is unexplained, but glyphosate's effects are highly predictable: fungi are plants and can be harmed by herbicides such as glyphosate due to the same toxic mechanism which kills the weeds. Indeed, a study by Argentinian scientists on grassland, typically treated with glyphosate in late summer to promote the growth of winter annuals, found reduced fungal spore viability and fungal root-colonisation.

GM-free fed Lidl

August 2016

Photo Creative Commons

If you follow the business news, you'll be aware that the Big Four UK grocers have seen their sales figures go into reverse in the past few months. Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Asda are just discovering that, in uncertain times, customers are less interested in choice and brand names than they are in value-for-money.

German 'discounter' Lidl, which offers select bulk-bought staple products at a minimum price, is one of the up-and-coming grocers into which the Big Four's customers are diverting.

Germany shows the way to GM-free soya

December 2015

We're at last beginning to face up to the reality that the world's natural resources are finite and that we're choking to death in waste of our own creation. The buzz-word du jour is 'sustainability', because without it, we're doomed.

Sustainability of our food crop production is of course a multi-dimensional issue.

Germany demands GM-free animal feed

September 2014



Photo by Greenpeace

In April 2013, four major UK supermarkets announced, in concert, that their poultry products would no longer come from livestock fed GM-free feed [1].

The move followed a direct approach to supermarkets from one large soya supplier which had decided to discontinue its non-GM soya line. This was shortly followed by an appeal to retailers from major farmers' representatives for a lifting of the ban on GM feed. The reasons given were cost and a shortage of supplies.

GM feed ban dissolves, except at Waitrose

May 2013

Photo by Greenpeace

In early April, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's, the Co-op, and Tesco all announced they will no longer require that farm animals in their supply chain are fed a non-GM diet. This orchestrated action follows on from previous one-man-stands by ASDA (owned by US retail giant Walmart) in 2010 and Morrisons in 2012.

The reason given for this move is that there is a shortage of non-GM soya.

Retailers seem to have been panicked by the action of one large supplier of non-GM soya, which informed them directly that it would no longer be supplying non-GM soya. Its reasons are not fully apparent. That was in December 2012. In February 2013, farmers' representatives (the National Farmers' Union, British Egg Industry Council, British Poultry Council) made a direct appeal to the supermarkets to lift their ban on GM-feed citing shortage and cost.

This 'shortage', however, can't be quite what it seems. Brazil has just had a record harvest of soya, of which about 25% is non-GM. ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association of Non-GM grain producers, has pointed out what's behind this 'shortage' myth.

Food industry: anything left to trust?

March 2013

Horse-meat-sold-as-beef generated a lot of very predictable responses (see THE CURIOUS TALE OF A HORSE THAT BECAME A COW - March 2013).

The public response to finding it was eating horse was to take evasive action. Plastic-enshrouded 'beef' in supermarkets was spurned in favour of the traditional skills of the local butcher. Shoppers diverted away from frozen ready meals to prepare their own from scratch. In other words, the oft-stated consumer demand for cheap food (the justification for our current mass-produced, over-processed food supply) was shown to be a myth. And the claim that only the middle classes worry about what's on their plate, has also been blown out of the water. Customers across the board were very quick to stop buying cheap food when that 'food' was revealed to be untrustworthy.

Other healthy outcomes to have emerged from the horse-meat fiasco include consumer demand for transparency, for shorter supply chains, for traceability, and for labelling accurate enough to allow them to choose British.

The curious tale of the horse that became a cow

March 2013

As the horse-meat-sold-as-beef scandal runs and runs, one thing is clear. The gap between what we understand as 'food' and what we're actually being sold is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

The tale started as a mad maze of international intermediaries shuffling papers to which a lump of meat was loosely attached. ...

Do we need to produce more food when we throw so much away?

February 2013

Discarded food salvaged from a skip in the United States
Photo by gabriel amadeus on Flickr

British families throw away 7 million tonnes of food, worth more than £10 billion, in a year.

On a global scale, a recent report estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of food produced annually (that's 1.2-2 billion tonnes each year) never reaches a human mouth. It's wasted in the field, wasted in transit, wasted in storage, wasted in the shop, or wasted in the home.

This means that, in a world where one in eight people goes to bed hungry every night, we're actually already producing enough food to feed them two to four times over.

GM food through the back door

July 2012

Basmati rice. Photo by cookbookman17 on Flickr

Despite its almost total rejection of GM in food, feed and the environment, Europe is getting a lot of GM by the back door.

We all know about the GM animal feed widely used to produce our meat, eggs and dairy. Different UK supermarkets have confusingly different policies on what feed they allow, and consumers will rarely find a label to tell them what they're eating has been eating.

Put pressure on Morrisons

April 2012

Entrance to Morrisons. Photo by mattingham on Flickr

Morrisons supermarket has dropped its GM-free feed requirement for poultry produce.

The reasons it gives seem to be three-fold.

One, is that the move will take some pressure off farmers, by which Morrisons seems to mean the pressure of the higher cost of non-GM feed. As GM Freeze has pointed out, the supermarket's acceptance of cheaper feed is likely to lead to a drop in the price it will pay farmers rather than, as Morrisons hint, any benefit. Sceptics might suggest that the pressure on farmers is due to the supermarket's refusal to give them a fair price for their poultry products.

Put pressure on Walmart / Asda

April 2012

Asda / Walmart store in UK. Photo by joshuawillis on Flickr

Americans are about to be fed a hush-hush GM sweet corn. It will be sold to them fresh, frozen or canned, but otherwise it will be unprocessed and indistinguishable from any other sweet corn.

Monsanto's incentives to farmers to grow its new GM sweet corn seed are the stacked genes put in to combat insect pests plus a gene put in for herbicide-resistance. After that, the product's GM nature will vanish from view and the Company will be relying on supermarkets to sell the GM vegetable to consumers. (See below)

But, what if the supermarkets refuse to stock it?

Sainsbury's needs a reminder

January 2012

Greenpeace anti-GMO protest
Photo © Greenpeace / Eric de Mildt

Tell the Government that using a GM-sympathetic supermarket to persuade the public that GM is “good to eat and safe to eat” is NOT representing your best interests. At the same time, remind its pals in Sainsbury's that you won't buy GM food.

Sainsbury's managers seems to have an attitude problem: they view their customers as “naive”, and unable to think for themselves without “an independent voice” to tell them about GM.

Could that be you they're talking about?


Perhaps the UK government is awash with Sainsbury's customers, because it seems unaccountably naive on the subject of GM food.