Gm Over Asia – genetically modified crops – Brief Article
Thailand, which had already banned all commercial growing of GE crops, halted all approvals for GE field trials. This should also mark the end of ongoing field trials on Bt (bacillus thuriengiensis) Boligard cotton and Bt corn, both genetically engineered to kill insects, being conducted by Monsanto, the second-largest seed provider in Thailand. In the Philippines, meanwhile, hundreds of farmers from all over the archipelago protested outside the International Rice Research Institute which has applied for open-field testing of various strains of GE rice. At a meeting on biotechnology in Beijing, Professor Chen Zhang-Liang, vice-president of Beijing University and director of the National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, said that commercialisation of GM crops was likely to undergo a 3-5 year moratorium, while the issues were debated.
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