Pressure Builds on Supermarkets to go GE Free

On 20 October Friends of the Earth launched the results of a nationwide opinion poll of over 2000 shoppers conducted by NOP.

A significant majority (58%) of people said they want supermarkets to go GE free, whilst only a quarter (27%) think that shops should go on selling products with GE ingredients. Objections to GE ingredients for customers of the leading supermarkets were as follows:

Marks & Spencer	65%	Somerfield	63%	Safeway	61%
Sainsbury's	60%	Tesco	60%	Asda	56%
Co-Op	56%	Morrison's	54%	Kwiksave	53%

These results follow announcements by some stores showing that they are prepared to go some of the way in responding to customer demands, but will not ban GE food from their shelves altogether. For example, ASDA announced on 8 October that all its new food lines would go GE free and urged its suppliers to seek out non-genetically modified ingredients for existing lines. Tesco also announced it will go further than the EUEU labelling regulation requirements and will now label all GE products - including those which do not contain DNA or protein.