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Stop illegal GM products getting into the supermarketsIllegal GM rice in UK supermarkets In August 2006 the US Government revealed that illegal GM rice, unapproved for human consumption, had contaminated long grain rice supplies. It contaminated rice on sale in UK supermarkets and around the world on a huge scale. And because of lack of safety studies, we can’t be sure that the rice is safe to eat. The EU put in place emergency measures to help stop contaminated rice reaching our plates. In the UK, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) was responsible for dealing with the incident. But it failed to take the action needed to stop UK consumers from being exposed to the illegal rice. Friends of the Earth took the FSA to court over its failure to act. The High Court ruled that the Food Standards Agency did not act unlawfully over the GM rice contamination incident but that it did make mistakes. The FSA were clearly rattled. If contamination occurs again they will certainly behave very differently. The FSA also committed themselves to a review of their handling of the incident. This would have been unlikely to happen if we hadn’t taken them to court. In November 2007 the FSA finally held their review Take actionWe have updated our action guide to make it easy for you to write to supermarkets and rice companies. We need to keep them under pressure to make sure our food is not contaminated with illegal GM ingredients, now or in the future. Please write to as many supermarkets and rice companies as you can. We've made this easy for you to do with our revised short action guide (PDF† - 79K Feb 2007). We have also published a list of the products finally withdrawn by the FSA - due to suspected or known GM contamination. Although this isn't a comprehensive list of all the products that may have been contaminated, it does show those that were pulled from supermarket shelves. Image © Sawayasu Tsuji/iStockphoto.com
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Last modified: 15 Feb 2008 |
