About 60 per cent of a Monsanto sugar beet trial site in Co Wexford has been contaminated by the spraying of a petrol-based chemical on to the crop. Gardai at Duncannon have initiated an investigation after the extent of damage was confirmed last night.
The company said it remained to be seen if the trial at the farm of Mr Martin Foley in Arthurstown was still viable. This is the second year in a row that the site at Ballyhack has been sabotaged but last year's incident involved only the pulling-up of plants. The US biotech company is conducting four trials here at present, with others in Cork, Carlow and Meath.
Monsanto business manager in Ireland Dr Patrick O'Reilly said the latest attack was "a cowardly act carried out by faceless people who clearly have a luddite view of the world" and could not be considered a token gesture.
The main group campaigning against GM crops in Ireland, Genetic Concern, dissociated itself from the incident though it said it understood why people carried out such actions. "They feel very alienated by the whole regulatory process," its spokeswoman, Ms Sadhbh O'Neill, said. "But we have always pursued legal courses of action."
"It appears that 60 per cent of the crop was sprayed with what we believe to be a petroleum-based product, probably petrol, and further minor damage was done with the digging-up of 20 plants," Dr O'Reilly told The Irish Times.
Such research trials were fully approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and subject to regular, stringent monitoring and assessment, he said.
Dr O'Reilly described groups who sabotage GM test sites as people with an "oxen and plough attitude to agriculture" when biotechnology could help farmers effectively manage crop production, pest control and chemical residues in crops without a detrimental environmental impact.
The incident follows increased cases of GM crop sabotage in Britain recently, including one which was led by Greenpeace. It is the third year in a row that a Monsanto trial in Ireland on sugar beet genetically modified to withstand its own herbicide, RoundUp, has been tampered with or destroyed. No one was charged with the widespread damage caused to the GM crop at Teagasc's facility in Oakpark, Co Carlow, in 1997.
But after a case at New Ross District Court in Co Wexford on April 1st last, six environmentalists, who admitted their involvement in an incursion on to the Foley farm in June 1998, were given the benefit of the Probation Act. A seventh was bound to the peace.
A number of groups opposed to GM crops, other than Genetic Concern, plan to protest at the site of another GM trial at Shanagarry, east Cork, next Sunday.
