Take the Flour Back

More than 400 grow­ers, bak­ers and fam­i­lies from across Eng­land, Ire­land, Scot­land, Wales, France and Bel­gium marched against the return of open air GM field test­ing today. Take the Flour Back linked arms with their Euro­pean coun­ter­parts, notably France’s Vol­un­teer Reapers and walked calm­ly towards the site, before being stopped by police lines.

Kate Bell from Take the Flour Back stat­ed that “In the past, kids, grannies, and every­one in between has decon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed GM tri­al sites togeth­er. Here at the begin­ning of a new resis­tance to this obso­lete tech­nol­o­gy, we see GM hid­den behind a fortress. We want­ed to do the respon­si­ble thing and remove the threat of GM con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, sad­ly it wasn’t pos­si­ble to do that effec­tive­ly today. How­ev­er, we stand arm in arm with farm­ers and grow­ers from around the world, who are pre­pared to risk their free­dom to stop the impo­si­tion of GM crops.”

Peo­ple enjoyed a GM free pic­nic whilst lis­ten­ing to a range of speak­ers oppos­ing the tri­al, includ­ing Gra­ciela Romero, Inter­na­tion­al Pro­grammes Direc­tor of UK devel­op­ment char­i­ty War on Want. Lawrence Wood­ward, pre­vi­ous­ly Direc­tor of Elm Farm Organ­ic Research Cen­tre, for­mer head of stan­dards at the Soil Asso­ci­a­tion, and now involved in Cit­i­zens con­cerned about GM. Plus sev­er­al British farm­ers includ­ing Peter Lund­gren, a con­ven­tion­al wheat farmer from Lin­colnshire.

Gath­u­ru Mbu­ru, co-ordi­na­tor of the African Bio­di­ver­si­ty Net­work, spoke on the glob­al fight for con­trol of our food sup­ply.

Mbu­ru explained that:

“Exper­i­ment­ing with sta­ple crops is a seri­ous threat to food secu­ri­ty. Our resilience comes from diver­si­ty, not the mono­cul­tures of GM. Beneath the rhetoric that GM is the key to feed­ing a hun­gry world, there is a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry – a sto­ry of con­trol and prof­it. The fact is that we need a diver­si­ty of genet­ic traits in food crops in order to sur­vive wors­en­ing cli­mates. Above all, peo­ple need to have con­trol over their seeds”

This state­ment is released amongst grow­ing calls for the sci­en­tists to demon­strate sen­si­tiv­i­ty to pub­lic con­cern by har­vest­ing the crop before pol­li­na­tion, remov­ing any risk of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion with non-GM plants.

Two peo­ple were arrest­ed for tres­pas­so­ry assem­bly and oth­ers were searched and escort­ed on their way to the park, or searched on their way out.  Foot­paths had been closed by order, huge num­bers of cops and secu­ri­ty were in place, a cam­era on a cher­ry-pick­er close to the open-air exper­i­ment, and a spe­cial Sec­tion 14a Tres­pas­so­ry Assem­bly applied to a large area.  The peo­ple arrest­ed were in a small group, though this is only an offence for groups of 20 or more peo­ple and they may well not have known 14a was in force.