Could 'farmer power' force Australian state governments to back down on their moratoria on GM crops? Graeme O'Neill reports.

The chair of the NSW Agricultural Advisory Council on Gene Technology, Prof Tim Reeves, has expressed concern that anti-GM representatives on the council have breached its confidentiality code by claiming that the council had already decided to recommend a large-scale trial planting of genetically modified canola in NSW.

NSW Agriculture Minister Ian MacDonald has advised Bayer CropScience that it will not have to destroy a trial crop of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant canola near Wagga, despite the discovery of a small number of canola plants in the surrounding buffer zone.

Agricultural scientists and biotech researchers should not concentrate on new biotechnology solutions at the expense of traditional methods -- the latter still have plenty of promise, a recent Sydney forum has been told.

The NSW Centre for Agricultural Genomics will expand, after recieving the first injection of funds from the NSW government's BioFirst Intitiative.

Rice's genome has been sequenced and is the first complete cereal plant sequence to be publicly released.