GM crops 'no worse for the environment'

GM crops are no more harmful to the environment than traditional crops, a controversial government study concludes today.

The four-year Bright project looked at the effects of genetically modified sugar beet and winter oilseed rape. It found GM crops did not deplete the soil of weed seeds, needed by birds and other wildlife.

Dr Jeremy Sweet of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, who led the study, said: "This is a big step forward in our understanding of how GM crops work. We found the results of GM crops were largely in line with those from traditional methods."

Previous trials such as the Government's Farm Scale Evaluations have been done over a shorter growing period. The aim of Bright was to mimic normal agricultural practice and measure how GM crops performed in a crop-rotation cycle.

As well as finding no evidence of seed depletion, Dr Sweet claimed the method had some potential benefits for farmers. "There are ways of managing [the crops] which are quite practical and farmers can deal with them quite readily," he said, adding there could also be cost-benefit advantages.

A government spokesman said today: "This is valuable research, and complements the Farm-Scale Evaluations. It provides some valuable results and we'll ask Acre [the Government's advisory panel] to evaluate it."