This piece, excerpted from the Sunday Observer this week, was interesting. The British government is trying to take a pro-GMO approach. British media is delivering voluble objections.

Now that climate change appears to pose a greater risk, in the shape of absolute food shortages, reflexive opposition to GM crops could start to look, as Hilary Benn is hinting, like attitudinising. Already, he reduces the debate to a matter of safety: sorted. "The government's job is to ask if it is safe to eat and there is no evidence that it isn't," he told the Today programme.

"There is no evidence that it isn't"? As spectacular over-simplifications go, this is up there with the media's time-honoured reduction of the GM critique to Frankenprefixes and is, unfortunately, perfectly designed to rebut it. By focusing, to the exclusion of so much else, on the question of safety, the media have made it too easy for Mr Benn. He discovers no evidence of harm. But where would any intelligent person expect to find it?

While the investigation of safety, like every other aspect of GM, from research to patents to the sale of seeds to hard-up peasant farmers, is controlled by biotech multinationals, there will never be any trustworthy evidence one way or the other. The corporations are there to sell the world chemicals and seeds, not to look after it. Thus, the government's job is not, at the moment, to reconsider the safety of GM food. That can come later. Right now, it should explain how, in choosing to bring GM to Britain, it justifies placing this part of our national food policy under the control of a few fantastically aggressive and wholly unaccountable multinationals. Not that they can't be philanthropic. Monsanto recently gave a scholarly institution, the British Biochemical Society, a generous grant for educational materials, such as school websites.

...But the biggest question is for the government. Anyone can see why multinationals want control over our food production. But why on earth does Hilary Benn want to hand it over?