4 SCIENTIFIC OUTPUTS AND COLLABORATION
The Consortium has submitted a paper to the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that gives more scientific background to the project. A less formal paper on the project has been published in NERC news. Consortium members have spoken to a number of scientific meetings on the farm scale evaluations and related research projects.
The first in an intended series of meetings has been taken place between the project statisticians and those of the BRIGHT project, that is addressing different management regimes of GMHT oil seed rape at a smaller scale.
5 CONSORTIUM MANAGEMENT
All senior staff required for the project are now in place, including those required for the beet trials. Their roles are given in Section 4, October 1999 report.
The next phase in project management is planning the field surveys for spring 2000. A training course will be held for field surveyors will be held on 7-8 March 2000.
It was originally planned that lab books would be maintained to a common standard across the Consortium. We have now decided to use Institute-dependent standards, making the maintenance of lab books a line management concern, rather than a project management one. This brings it into line with project safety policy. This does not affect quality assurance of the project, because all critical records of field visits, data entry etc are maintained centrally, while all procedures are in accordance with the project protocols.
6 HEALTH, SAFETY AND SECURITY
All staff are bound to the health and safety policies of their employers. In addition, all protocols address safety issues to guide risk assessments. In general, there are no risks over above those typically encountered on agri-environmental research on lowland farms. There remains a potential security issue for our staff, but no problems have been encountered so far.
7 PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF THE PROJECT
During the period of the report, there have been no new plantings, nor have there been any incidents of direct action against the project. Perhaps for these reasons, press and public interest in the project has been, in general, less intense than during the summer of 1999. Nevertheless, we expect the level of interest to increase once the new round of sites is announced.
We therefore welcome the new web site looking at GM issues managed by the Cabinet Office as an excellent resource for the public, and perhaps especially for teachers. Also, we welcome the decision by Government to organise a series of local public meetings to help clarify the farm scale evaluations for the spring 2000 plantings.
8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are enormously grateful to the farmers involved in the study, for all of the time and effort that they have contributed, both to the management of the crops, and to the dialogue with both pressure groups and members of the general public.
We thank representatives from SCIMAC, notably Stephen Haynes, Cathy Hooper, Judith Jordan, Daniel Pearsall, Paul Rylott and Roger Turner, for their help in identifying possible sites and establishing procedures. We thank Nick Brickle and Linda Smith for their help and support at DETR, and the Scientific Steering Committee for their involvement and guidance.
9 MAJOR OUTPUTS TO DATE
Firbank, L.G., Dewar, A.M., Hill, M.O., May, M.J., Perry, J.N., Rothery, P., Squire, G. & Woiwod, I.P. (1999). Farm scale evaluation of GM crops explained. Nature, 399, 727-728.
Firbank, L.G. (2000). Science meets policy: Farm-scale evaluations of genetically-modified crops. NERC News, Spring 2000, pp 10-11.
Published 13 June 2000
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