In-Gene-uity

Direct action came to the Royal Agricultural Show when the Kenilworth Croppers openly cut 75% of a GE display crop. The wheat, produced for 'improved bread making qualities', had been kept under close guard at the show all week, following the safe 'decontamination' of a GE wheat field at Cerea's '98. The wheat contains antibiotic marker genes, which could lead to antibiotic resistance in humans, and which the government's own advisory body has ruled as unsafe and so banned from future experiments. The developers have ignored the warning and are continuing to display their wheat as part of a 'public education project'.

A group of ramblers on an evening stroll in the countryside last week were most surprised and alarmed to find that the footpath they were following near a farm, near Ponteland, was blocked by a crop of genetically manipulated oil seed rape. The ramblers, disgusted that this unpredictable, uncontrollable, unnecessary, unwanted and dangerous crop was being grown in the north east, had no alternative but to destroy it, to stop the spread of pollen & help end the Genetix Experiment. RAGE! Ramblers against genetic engineering.

Elsewhere, a group calling themselves the Wardens of Wiltshire pulled up another lot of Monsanto's GE rape. Police came along but no arrests were made. Whilst 12 people did the decontamination work, 25 other locals came along to offer support, one saying: "We and others before us are neither 'eco-warriors' nor 'super heroes'. We are simply concerned mothers, fathers & other ordinary people that are unwilling to accept Monsanto force-feeding us genetically engineered crops - or their expensive and misleading PR campaign that is trying to sell them to us." That is the 27th site to be rescued from GE crops, and as yet no charges of criminal damage have been pressed by any of the biotech companies involved.

And finally a blackbird & friends announced they'd be landing on a GE field in Tyneside, only to find someone had already harvested the rape - poor hungry bird.