Peter Melchett, Soil Association policy director, said: "The Government is ignoring what consumers want to eat and their health and safety. Even in America, McDonald's, McCain, Pringles and Burger King, rejected GM potatoes years ago. The chances of anyone in the UK willingly buying GM potato crisps or chips are zero. This trial is a monumental waste of time and money.

Worse than that, GM potatoes are one of the GM crops where there is scientific evidence of potential risks to human health. And from UK government sponsored research which found stomach lesions in rats fed on GM potatoes, research findings confirmed by a second study in Egypt."

The risks inherent in GM potatoes are well documented, and are laid out briefly below. This includes information from a report by the National Pollen Research Unit, other information on the risks of GM contamination of non-GM crops, and also evidence of health problems.

• There would be no market for GM potatoes in the UK.
• Major food retailers rejected GM potatoes in the US in 2002, including McDonalds, Burger King, McCain and Pringles. The British Retail Consortium has said UK supermarkets won't be stocking GM potatoes.
• Given potatoes are a staple food - consumed fresh, and considered wholesome - there would be little or no desire to eat genetically modified potatoes.
• Any contamination would be very serious as it would result in whole potatoes being GMOs (as opposed to some GM presence in a quantity of grain), so all contamination of normal non-GM crops must be prevented. The 0.9% GM contamination threshold proposed by Defra is unacceptable for potatoes.
• With potatoes, there is little direct risk of GM contamination via cross-pollination than there is with GM grain and oilseed crops, as potatoes are tubers, not seeds. However, there is still a risk of contamination from cross-pollination in later years via potato volunteers ('ground keepers').
• Cross-pollination seems to be much greater when the GM and non-GM varieties are different and when the main pollinator is the pollen beetle, which travels far.
• A study found the cross-pollination level was 31% at 1km from the GM crop.
• Blight resistant GM potato varieties pose much more of a risk of contamination as the flowering tops are less likely to be removed.
• The NPRU has recommended a separation distance of 500m. BASF is proposing a 20m separation distance.
• There are major health concerns, as two animal feeding trials, one funded by the UK Government, found GM potatoes cause lesions in the gut of rats. There are more risks of intended side effects with GM potatoes though because they are produced vegetatively, so mutations are not reduced.

Although BASF plan to destroy the crops at end of the trials to attempt to prevent them entering the food chain, the experience of GM rice in the USA, where an experimental GM rice line has contaminated worldwide rice supplies, shows that these experiments are not always containable. Rice, like potatoes, has been considered a `low risk' GM crop for contamination, due to the low levels of cross-pollination expected. Yet recent events would indicate that even supposedly `low risk' crops can be involved in serious GM contamination incidents.

Yet as any Iraqi citizen knows all to well, the British Government has a hell of a track record of ignoring the evidence. People, it seems are expendable - corporate bodies are not.