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Farmer quits GM trial after phone threats

A Derbyshire farmer has pulled out of a GM crop trial due in the new year, citing fears for his personal safety.

The German plant science company BASF confirmed it was looking for a new site to conduct a trial of GM potatoes after the unnamed farmer in Draycott, Derbyshire, withdrew yesterday. He is believed to have received anonymous phone calls about his involvement in the trials.

The company was granted permission this month to plant GM potatoes at two single-hectare test sites in Derbyshire and at the National Institute for Agricultural Botany in Cambridge. The experimental potatoes are modified to resist late blight, the fungus that devastated Ireland's potato crop in the 1840s famine, and were expected to be planted in April. They would be incinerated after the trials.

BASF yesterday insisted the five-year trials would still go ahead, the first in Britain since the government's field-scale evaluations in 2003 to examine the environmental impact of herbicides used with some GM crops. Crop scientists were yesterday dismayed that tactics used by protesters during the height of the GM debacle of the 1990s seemed to have returned.

"What we find reprehensible are attempts by some groups to derail this sort of research by intimidation," said Julian Little of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, a GM crop industry group.

Derbyshire police last night said they were unable to comment on the situation.

The trial was approved by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs after a green light from the government's advisory committee on releases to the environment (Acre), which assesses all GM crop trials.