Jeremy Sweet
Jeremy Sweet is a scientist who is vice-chairman of the European Food Safety Authority GMO panel, which makes recommendations to the European Commission on the approval of GMOs for food and feed use in Europe.
This biography is taken from the website of a conference he chaired in 2008:
- Jeremy Sweet has spent the last 17 years conducting research on the risk assessment of GMOs. He was coordinator of the UK BRIGHT project and the the European Science Foundation GMO programme. He is a coordinator of the EU SIGMEA project which is bringing together data on gene flow and gene impacts as well as a participant in the EU COEXTRA programme. He is currently vice-chairman of the EFSA GMO panel and has served as an advisor on GMOs to the European Commission, Danish parliament, UK government, FAO and scientific organisations in several other countries.[1]
As might be expected of someone who sits on a panel that as of May 2008 had never made a negative recommendation about a GMO it has considered,[2] Sweet appears complacent about the risks of GMOs. This can be seen from his review of a book whose authors are all keen GM supporters, in which he states:
- thousands of Europeans consume GM foods annually when they travel abroad and in fact most express little concern in spite of all the media hype.... We already widely use GM technology in medicine, we now expect to buy a greater diversity of introduced food crops and products from around the world, with associated depletion of non-renewable resources, and introduced alien whole genomes abound in our cities, towns and countryside. How long will it take to put the introduction of a few novel genes in our food crops into the correct perspective?[3]
Notes
- ↑ "Message from the Programme Chair", 10th International Symposium on the Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms (ISBGMO), Wellington, New Zealand 2008, accessed March 25 2009
- ↑ This fact is confirmed up to 8 May 2008 in the press release, "[www.foeeurope.org/press/2008/Coverage/EurActiv_Commission_hesitant_to_approve_GM_crops_080508.pdf Commission hesitant to approve GM crops]", Euractiv.com., 8 May 2008, accessed March 25 2009
- ↑ Jeremy Sweet, Review of GM Crops: The Scientists Speak, ed. Brian J. Ford, Rothay House, Cambridge, UK, ISBN: 0-9543595-2-6, 2003, in International Journal of Food Science and Technology, December 2003.
