Europe split over safety of GM corn

Britain is pressing for a genetically modified sweetcorn to be allowed into shops despite an official French report warning that people eating it could suffer "unforeseen effects", The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The report discloses that crucial safety tests, claiming to show the sweetcorn is safe, were in fact carried out on a different type of maize, grown to be fed to animals.

Britain is pressing for a genetically modified sweetcorn to be allowed into shops despite an official French report warning that people eating it could suffer "unforeseen effects", The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The report discloses that crucial safety tests, claiming to show the sweetcorn is safe, were in fact carried out on a different type of maize, grown to be fed to animals.

The disclosure is hugely embarrassing for the official Food Standards Agency, which has been in the forefront of the campaign to have the corn approved for human consumption, which would end a five-year, Europe-wide moratorium on new GM foods.

Last Monday its representatives voted in an EU committee to approve the corn, which was developed by the biotech firm Syngenta and incorporates an insecticide. But the committee was deadlocked - splitting six countries to six with three abstaining - and the decision will now go before EU ministers in the new year.

Much of the case for the safety of the sweetcorn, codenamed Bt11, rests on experiments where maize was fed to cattle and laying hens, which showed no "adverse effects". But the French report reveals that these tests were done with a maize designed to be fed to livestock, which contains "significant genetic differences" from the sweetcorn.

It warns that "possible unforeseen effects" associated with the "genetic transformation" of the corn "cannot be discounted" and says that the tests must be done again.

France voted against approving the sweetcorn last week, together with Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, Austria and Portugal. Britain voted for it, with Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. Germany, Italy and Belgium abstained.

The report follows another devastating official verdict from the Austrian government last month, which also revealed widespread flaws in safety testing. The two reports cast doubt over the entire system for checking GM food safety in Europe.