A spokesman for the Government's GM Communications unit, based in the Cabinet Office, said Mr Meacher had always maintained that commercial cultivation of GM crops would not be allowed until the Government was satisfied that there would be no unacceptable impact on the environment. He rejected suggestions that the Government was staging an about-turn on the issue. It is not a U-turn. Under the extended trials programme, there will be about 75 farm-scale trials, compared to the 10 trials involved in the first year. Each will be around 25 acres in size.
Planting is unlikely to start before next spring.
To date all the farm-scale trials have been conducted in England, mostly in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. The locations of the new sites will be announced in February. Liberal Democrat agriculture spokesman Colin Breed called for tighter regulation of the farm-scale trials. But Prof Alan Gray, chairman of Acre, the Advisory Committee on Releases into the Environment, which advises the Government, said it had not recently changed its advice on buffer zones around trial crops. The committee's original advice to the Government was that a separation distance of 50 metres should be maintained.