Thread by @GMWatch

Available now on BBC Sounds bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0… (42 minutes) And it's repeated on Radio 4 next Friday 11 September at 9.00am. #gmo

Joan Ruddock: This was the whole of Europe saying, 'We want to decide how we permit [GMOs] and we must have labelling.' And since that time we've been protected in our choices by having EU labelling rules. [Now] there's a huge question about whether we'll continue to be protected

Joan Ruddock: And that’s why I'm now v v concerned that we could end up with a deal with the US where people are worried rightly about chlorine chicken and hormone beef but we would [also] have to accept unlabelled unsorted #GMO products as part of that deal. #DontHideWhatsInside

Jim Thomas—@JimETC: There’s now a whole new generation of genetic engineering products around called synthetic biology or gene-editing. And this time they’re trying to say it's non-#GMO. They’re trying to get around consumer concerns by pretending these aren’t genetic engineering

@JimETC .@JimETC: Big agribiz corporations have never fed the world. It’s the 70% of small farmers in local food webs that have.. But what worries me now is that the biotech industry is coming back with gene-editing [etc.] We’re seeing a renewed attack on our food systems by big agribiz.

@JimETC Sue Mayer: Does GM have a role? You need to start from a different end: how do we feed people properly? It’s a different question. And unless we start like that rather than trying to find something for GM or some other technology to do, I don’t think we will address the problems.