Boffins make GM food breakthrough

The Genetically Modified Foodstuffs Science Advisory Panel today announced an extraordinary breakthrough in understanding why the GM food trials have been so comprehensively bolloxed up.

Bees, birds, and fieldmice are completely unable to read the signs placed at strategic intervals around GM fields, the government's chief vet told a packed conference room, which explains how strains of modified foodstuffs have made their way into GM-free fields.

A spokesman for the panel commented later: "We couldn't understand why it was that seeds from the GM strains were persistently appearing in neighbouring, supposedly GM-free fields with the regulation 100 yards separation. But birds, it seems, shit seeds wherever they happen to be flying. Bees will also quite happily pollinate flowers without — and this crucial — without first reading the notices, and those cheeky little fieldmice don't give a tinker's wet fart for where they build nests or what they stuff in them. Seems we were wrong all along. Funny old world, eh?"

Asked to comment on what this means for the government's prior view that GM trials could be wholly isolated from the foodchain, the spokesman simply shrugged and wandered off towards the bar.