30 held at GM protest
26 July 1999
30 held at GM protest
By Johann Tasker
POLICE now say 30 people, including Greenpeace chief Lord Melchett, were arrested today (Monday) after a crop of genetically modified maize was wrecked in Norfolk.
Lord Melchett, executive director of Greenpeace, was detained after the protestors started uprooting GM maize crop being grown at Lyng, near Dereham.
Farmworkers called the police just after 5am complaining about people who were driving through the crop with a tractor and mowing machine.
About one-third of the 2.4ha (six-acre) crop of GM maize, developed by the biotechnology company AgrEvo, is said to have been destroyed.
“Police officers attended the scene and subsequently arrested 30 people for criminal damage,” a police spokesman told Farmers Weekly
Farmer William Brigham, on whose land the maize was grown, told Farmers Weekly last Wednesday the crop was “no more than a week away” from flowering.
He had refused to bow to pressure from Greenpeace and the Norfolk Genetic Information Network, describing the anti-GM protestors as “anarchists”.
Greenpeace director Peter Melchett, who is also a Norfolk farmer, called at a public meeting two weeks ago for the Lyng maize to be destroyed.
As well as his involvement in Greenpeace, Lord Melchett is the managing director of Courtyard Farm, a nearby 360ha (890 acre) holding he farms organically.
Lord Melchett had claimed that nearby organic crops would have been threatened with large-scale cross pollination had the GM maize flowered.
AgrEvo, the company behind the Lyng trial, insisted the crop was safe, although it emerged over the weekend that the GM maize had been banned in Switzerland.
The Swiss authorities banned the crop out of concern that it could contaminate crops and honey, according to yesterdays Independent on Sunday.
The paper quoted a report was published earlier this year by the Swiss Federal Bureau for the Environment, Forests and Landscape.
“Harmlessness to humans and the environment has not been adequately proven and the risk cannot be sufficiently reduced by taking technical measures,” it said.
The Lyng crop is the third of the governments seven field-scale GM trials to come to a premature end since they were planted earlier this year.
Captain Fred Barker was ordered to destroy a GM oilseed rape crop last month by the trustees of his Lushill Farm, Hannington, near Swindon.
Last week, more than 400 protestors attacked a 10ha (25 acres) site of GM oilseed rape at Model Farm, Watlington, near Oxford.
The withdrawal of those two sites means only one GM oilseed rape is left – at Boothby Graffoe, Lincolnshire.
The remaining three GM maize trials are at Spital-in-the-Street, Lincolnshire; Mortimer, Berkshire; and Harpenden, Hertfordshire.