soidarity with Andy Abott and Jack Upton at present under arrest at Colchester Police Station for standing up for the community against the GM trials at this particular farm and the Bayer chemical company who are oranizing thispollution of the environment,

Great news :D
Sorry for my ignorance, but whereabout is Wivenhoe?
all the best to the Wivenhoe 2,keep trashin...

North Essex - near Colchester has two GM Maize croptrials - one in Weeley, one in Wivenhoe - check out local campaigners website for directions!!!
Check out Friends of Earth Website or www.geneticsaction.org.uk to see if there are GM sites near you!
Resistance Is Fertile!
Two arrestees are currently in Clacton Nick - supporters come and greet them upon release this afternoon/evening!
See website for what you can do to support.

Isn't this what's called 'cereal killing'?

What? Don't give me your anti-pun sanctimony. Fuck off! That's the best joke you will ever hear!

Very best wishes to all GMO crop trashers. This very vicious worldwide scam needs defeating and where better than on the home turf.
These people are doing the most important job in the UK
 http://www.geocities.com/orgonegal/no_gmo.html

It's good to know that people in Colchester/Wivenhoe are stil active and prepared to stand up for what they believe in. More power to them!!

Well done Jack & Andy

Sigh. How do you expect to be taken seriously with this sort of writing? You misspelled ten words in four paragraphs. It makes you look like an illiterate hick, and no one is going to take an illiterate hick seriously. Use a spell checker!

Oh dear! A brilliant, inspiring action, and all some people notice is the spelling!
Whilst I value good spelling and grammar amongst my students, what I really prize is the ability to select and analyse the most salient points.
Here, these would appear to be the fact that on the one hand multinational corporations seek total control of the food chain from plough to plate, privatising the worlds gene pool and on the other hand, people are willing to question and take action to resist this.
This is a social and political literacy and is far superior to the snotty disdain of some highly literate pedant!

Your point is well taken, but I was a little confused by the last line. In an article about crop destruction, to say, "the governements (sic) policy in taters," as opposed to "tatters" is just confusing. How did potatoes get involved in this, anyway?

As to the success of this direct action...kudos from the U.S. of A. Which U.S. coroporations are involved in these field trials, by they way?

The 'Gene Giant' of corporate power behind the UK GM trials currently troubling our tortured countryside is/was AVENTIS!

But Aventis have just sold off the hot potato of 'Aventis Cropscience' to the BAYER CORPORATION for the knock down price of a few billion Euro's.

So they are now called 'Bayer Crop Science', known to their close friends simply and affectionately as 'Bayerhazard'.


You asked about which U.S. corporation's are behind the contested UK GM crops?
Well, whilst US corporations, especially Monsanto have been the driving force of the genetic goldrush, European corporations have fought to keep up! (oh goody!)

Aventis was the spawn of Hoescht, Schering and Rhone-Poulenc's mega-merger a few years ago. But just as Monsanto have been hit by the public rejection of GM foods and agriculture, so have Aventis.

So now Bayer have taken up responsibility!
They are trustworthey types, with a nice history in the German chemical industry.

In those good ol' days of the 40's they were part of I G Farben, enthusiastic backers of da Furhers war machine and makers of his favorite brand of genocide-icide - Zyklon B, great for Nazi gas chambers.

Before this they were responsible for the trademarking of heroin (sold as a cough medicine). How kool is that!

Of course today they are different - now things are not that bad! But, of course!?!
Now they do nice things like own patents on vital medicines for Aids patients. In the past few years they have put in heroic efforts to keep prices really high in Africa, even joining a coalition of western pharmaceutical companies taking the South African government to court to stop them distributing cheap Aids-drugs.
But its ok - only a few hundred thousand died for lack of these drugs while the court case went on. ( http://www.oxfam.org.uk/cutthecost/index.html)

Bayer also faces numerous claims for poisoning people with toxins - they are heavily into pesticide chemicals, with a big role in the organophosphate scandals, giving them a renowned history of virtual chemical warfare against farmworkers and the land.

So hey USA - stop sending your capitalist bastards all over the world! We have already have some to fight and destroy in Europe! (Or: lets all share the task!)

Monsanto, in lil ol' St Louis, USA are also such sweeties! They wouldn't do anything like nasty old Nazi Bayer, no sir! They did sweet things like make Agent Orange defoliant to pour over Vietnam, and REALLY SAFE chemicals for your own food and land.
In fact, historically agrichemical pesticides and herbicides emerged as a 'peacetime' application of chemical warfare research and development.

The essence of today's struggle over GM agriculture is revealed by the way that the worlds giant chemical corporations moved into biotech in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

In the late 1990's Monsanto spent over $8 billion buying up the worlds seed companies. In 1999 Du Pont chemicals paid $7.7 Billion to aquire the worlds largest seed company, Pioneer Hybred. Not to be outdone Aventis bought the largest seed companies in the third world in India and Brazil.

As one of Monsanto's executives boasted: "What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it is really a consolidation of the entire food chain".

The corporate gene giants also control two thirds of the worlds pesticide/herbicide market.

Their aim has been simple- to genetically engineer the worlds food crops to be resistant to their own brand herbicides. These seeds are then sold as a patented package - their use boosts herbicide sales.

Aventis genetically modified crops to be resistant to their own brand broad spectrum 'liberty' herbicide. This was to compete with Monsanto, who hsd engineered the plants to be resistant to their brand of 'roundup' broad spectrum herbicide.This lucrative deal was the only way to recoup the huge amounts of capital invested in research.

These GM herbicide tolerant plants were only developed in the late 1980's. By the early 1990's they had been rushed through the regualtory process, before any real, independant reasearch had been done on their long term health and the environmental consequences.

In the six-year period since their first release in 1996 the global area of gm crops increased more than 30-fold, from 1.7 million has. in 1996 to 52.6 million has. in 2001.

Of these over 77% or 40.6 million hectares were genetically engineered to be resistant to these own brand herbicides. This massively boosts herbicide sales and increases the chemical dependence of agriculture.

This is the power of profits which overcomes scientific criticism and regulation, and rides roughshod over democracy.

But it has met the power of peoples resistance, and is reeling in shock. Shares will fall, along with empires!
That is why people in Wivenhoe, Essex and everywhere else in the world are right to rip up the GM crops!

RESISTANCE IS FERTILE!
UPROOT CORPORATE POWER!
STOP THE PRIVATIZATION OF SCIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE!
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT!
NO PATENTS ON GENES!
see

North Essex GM Campaigners - website
looks like its....
Part of freeessex network...
(  http://free.freespeech.org/freeessex )

NO GM CROPS!
OR SWEATSHOPS!

NO MORE WAR
ON THE WORLDS POOR!

RESOLVE WILL GROW HARDER,
THEY'LL BE GLOBAL INTIFADA!

SALAAM/SHALOM

STUFF DUBYA! LET FREEDOM RING!

The GM issue is 90% hysteria. We are in great danger of going back to the dark ages the media reporting has been completely biased and ignorant why do people keep harping on to 'the natural way'. Is there REAL SCIENTIFIC any evidence that organic food is safe or better? NO. Not at all. In fact genetic engineering is a new science of great potential. Man creative endeavor - superiority from inferiority. Takeing the genes you want, and building the plants, organisms and hopefully and eventually animals you want will benefit humanity. Animals grown as 'kidney farms' genetically engineered to have 8 human compatible kideys, that arent rejected by the subsequent human host as the animal has been engineered to avoid that.
Crops that are both resistant to weed killers and to insect parasitisation... and engineered to be infertile after one generation, to stop them spreading into the wild habitats. Crops engineered that wont only grow successfully in arid climates, but could also act as vectors for getting antibiotics or vaccines into the third world thought the diet.

getting onto the issue of current GM foods.... I think that all foods that contain GM ingriedients should be labelled as such so consumers can make their own minds up. But the choice should be there, so people like me , who would rather eat GM food, can choose to do so. Destroying crops removes the freedom to make that choice.

Jack and Andy's sole reason for this attack on the crops at wivenhoe, is nothing more then them venting their dislike at capatalism. It has nothing to do with the underlying facts regarding the GM organism issue. Essentially, they are blinded to the science of genetic modification by their unwillingness to read about issues outside of their latest Socialist worker magasine.

In fact destroying 'scientific test crops' is to me no differant from the nazis burning copies of the communist manifesto or the communists burning religious books.
IT comes down to people forcing their own wills on others, restricting information.

What are you scared off? The fact that properly monitored, checked scientific tests will prove that GM is totally safe, and yet another issue you use as an excuse to protest against the 'system' will be lost??? If you spent the time you waste on such futile projects as 'anti GM protesting' on actual environmental work, raising funds to buy land and creating habitats on it and things like that, then you'd be doing something real and valid for the environment.

None of the GM companies are saying 'YOU MUST EAT OUR FOOD' and there is alternative GM free food available. So stop interfering in peoples rights to grow and eat GM if they want it.

lol.... clearly forgot to spell check that one ;)

Hi Mike!
More than just a few spelling errors here, I’m afraid!
For instance, you claim:
"The fact that properly monitored, checked scientific tests will prove that GM is totally safe".
However, the current farmscale evaluations (FSE’s), like the one at Wivenhoe, are not designed to prove the "safety" or otherwise of GM crops. I’ll give you a brief overview of these FSE’s soon, but first I want to make a few general points about science, GM and uncertainty.

Firstly, you can not "prove safety”. Science proceeds by advancing hypothesis and then devising experiments to explore them. Therefore you can only check for certain problems you suspect may occur. You can’t devise a test for what is still unknown. So you would have to do many hundreds of experiments to explore each hypothetical problem. However, very few tests have been done on the T25 Maize (the stuff grown in Wivenhoe). It has been rushed on to the market from its development stage at stunning speed.

Recently, Lord Gray, Chair of the governments Advisory Committee on Releases into the Environment (ACRE) admitted the testing has been inadequate. He told the BBC that he “believed the research should have been re-analysed and that safety tests were not good enough to give a true picture of the risks involved”.

In 1996 as part of the approval process, Aventis (the company developing T25 Maize) had submitted its own test results. Only one feeding study had been done to test the effect of the whole grain. In this test the maize was fed to chickens. Twice as many chickens fed the GM maize died, compared to those fed conventional feed!

This should certainly raise questions. However the anti-GM campaign is not claiming this ‘proves’ the dangers of GM. Rather, the tests were poorly devised, with not enough of a sample base – not enough different chicken pens- to get meaningful results. The deaths could be for some other reason, but the statistical base of the study was too small.. Dr. Toby Knowles , and Dr Stephen Keston of the University of Bristol commented that Aventis’s tests were “not really good enough to base a student project on, let alone a marketing consent for a GM product”.

But consent had been given, in 1996, on this flawed evidence! This was the only study Aventis had submitted on the effects of the whole grain.

Furthermore, no tests had been done on cows, even though it was approved as cattle feed. The original approval for T25 maize was also base upon the incorrect assumption that the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter driving the expression of the pat gene for glufosinate tolerance, was not active in bacteria, and so it would not matter even if the gene were taken up by bacteria. In fact, CaMV 35S promoter has been known to be active in bacteria. Given the complex bacterial interactions in the guts of ruminants (4 stomached animals – or cows) this question now needs far more research.

Even Peter Ainsworth MP, Tory Shadow Sec. of State for DEFRA,said after this: "There are huge worries about this particular GM product but also about our checks and systems for growing GM crops... Something is clearly wrong with the system. I think we need the most thorough testing we can possibly get... There is no way that this product should be given approval... This is not a product in a fit state to come before the public... It should be dug up."

Many governments and international bodies have adopted the “precautionary principle” when considering the unknown consequences of new technology. This states that absence of the evidence of harm can not be taken as evidence of the absence of harm.

However, market forces have taken over science. These crops were only developed in the late 1980’s and there are still many ‘teething troubles’ and huge areas of scientific uncertainty.

Yet within five short years, by the mid 1990’s, they were being promoted commercially. Therefore, a critique of the capitalist social relations that gave birth to this new technology is entirely valid. Multinational corporations have to rush ahead, because they must see a profit returned on the huge investments made. This inhibits the proper democratic debate and scientific scrutiny we need. A more rational and democratic society would be able to make sure that the risks of scientific innovation could be more controlled, and the benefits more equally shared.

Today, many scientists are increasingly concerned at the patenting of basic knowledge – many now file for patent before publication. This, they argue, is stifling basic scientific research. Furthermore the scientific independence of university research is being increasingly undermined by funding from and contractual links to the biotech industry.

Now, briefly on the Farmscale Evaluations. These are designed to answer one question: What is the effect of Aventis’s ‘liberty-link’ package on biodiveristy? This technology involves the genetic modification of crops to be resistant to Aventis’s own brand ‘liberty’ broad spectrum herbicide. (Glufosinate Ammonium). This herbicide will kill all plants apart from the GM crops. Therfore, Aventis argue, it will require only one spraying, and be more environmentally benign. The FSE’s compare this ‘liberty link’ regime with conventional chemical agriculture, measuring some insect and wild plant populations near the crop.

However, science must ‘factor out’ what it can’t measure. So it doesn’t measure birds, they fly too far, and it doesn’t measure soil microbes – too many to measure. They also gather data on most sites for only one year – yet the ecological interactions between plants, microbes and wildlife extend over very many years. These are crucial areas – and a big weakness in the FSE’s.

But the central problem is this – the FSE’s also ‘factor out’ the commercial pressure on farmers – how these will be grown in the real world.
In the USA farmers have found one spraying is not enough – weeds still grow and compete with the crop, reducing yield (some UK farmers involved in the FSE’s have also confirmed this, as has our own monitoring of the sites in North Essex). So in the USA they have taken to spraying with several traditional pre-emergence chemical herbicides as well. In the USA Aventis have started marketing ‘Liberty ATZ’ – where Atrazine is mixed with the Glufosinate ammonium. No one can make any claims as to the benevolence of Atrazine! This invalidates Aventis’s claim that the new GM herbicide resistant crops use less herbicide. It means the whole rationale for the FSE’s are flawed.

The opponents of the FSE’s have been vindicated by the governments own advisory Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission’s report, which said the Farmscale trials can not provide adequate evidence on whether we should go ahead with these GM crops.

It has been suspected that this has been known from the start, and that the FSE’s had another agenda, to test out public reaction, and pave the way for mass commercial planting. Well, they have proved one thing with the precision of science! The public does not want them! Every crop trial has been met with protests by the local community. In Weeley, North Essex 95% voted against them in a Parish council referendum with a turnout of 40% of the voting population. In Wivenhoe it was 86%. Hundreds have attended meetings and protests in every affected village. And a whole range of people have followed the Shadow secretary of states advice to ‘dig them up’ – ranging from grandmothers, business people, farmers and as well as youthful protesters like our Jack!

Mike, your comments are too generalised, about ‘science and progress’, without enough attention to the specifics of what is actually happening.
I could also tell you about the problems of insect resistance. These plants have been engineered with the BT gene- from a bacterial organic insecticide. The evidence is that if BT GM is engineered as it is, to be permanently present in every cell of the plant and cultivated on a mass scale, then the pests will evolve resistance to BT. Then this powerful tool will be lost to farmers within a decade. This is already happening. The products will not last long. This is without considering the evidence that insecticidal GM plants have on benevolent insects.

I could go on, and provide more information about the problems of GM.
I could also tell you about the new agro-ecological techniques, that have received little funding, but that are raising productivity in many parts of the world.
But this has already gone on far too long, and nobody has probably read this far down.
Bye!