America's GM backlash should give Britain food for thought | Peter Melchett

American consumers and farmers are rejecting a technology they once embraced. Let's not make the same mistakesThe election of a leftwing mayor in New York is not the only thing changing in the US after decades of pro-big business policies. Genetically modified crops and food have had an easy ride in the US, with no official safety testing, thanks to the influence of GM companies on the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations.Most US consumers say they want genetically modified food labelled (it isn't) and believe that they don't eat GM food (they do). November popular ballots to require GM food to be labelled were narrowly defeated in California (in 2012) and Washington state (2013).But the furore created by these ballots, and the huge sums spent by chemical and large food businesses to defeat them ($46m in California) have ignited the first popular debate in the US about genetic modification since the technology was introduced in the late 1990s. Two states have passed, and about 20 others are considering, GM labelling laws.Now, the first mainstream US food company has removed GM from a popular range. General Mills has started producing Cheerios free of GM. This makes the 73-year-old breakfast cereal one of the highest-profile American brands to drop GM ingredients. Overall, sales of certified non-GM products are growing, from $1.3bn to $3.2bn between 2001 and 2013.American consumers are beginning to discover, as Europeans did back in the late 1990s, that most of their...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Comment Food & drink industry theguardian.com United States Farming World news GM UK news Food science Environment Agriculture Comment is free Source Type: news