This leaves soya and imports of the beans are expected to jump by about 3

This leaves soya, and imports of the beans are expected to jump by about 3.5 million tons this year.Virtually all of this will be genetically modified, says the UK Agricultural Trade Supply Association, because almost all unmodified soya has been bought up to meet demand following campaigns by environmental groups.Prices of GM soya have jumped, and the future of Monsanto has been transformed. Its share price, which fell during the past two years when the stock market was booming, has leapt by 50 per cent over the past three-and-a-half months.Eight of the ten leading analysts of its stock are advising investors to buy. The most bullish include Deutsche Bank, which 18 months ago advised selling, saying that GMO stock would be “perceived as a pariah” and that GM soya could become an “earnings nightmare” for Monsanto.. Camden and Haringey in London and the centres of Newcastle and Nottingham have some of the cleanest air in the country, a new government report concludes. It found that they suffer only a fraction of the number of days of severe pollution experienced by some places in the heart of the British countryside. Camden and Haringey in London and the centres of Newcastle and Nottingham have some of the cleanest air in the country, a new government report concludes.

It found that they suffer only a fraction of the number of days of severe pollution experienced by some places in the heart of the British countryside.
This startling finding – published in the first of a series of annual assessments on how ministers are meeting their environmental, economic and social targets – dramatically illustrates the Government’s failure to control pollution by ozone within its clean-up strategy.A troublesome constituent of smog, which aggravates asthma, ozone is formed by a complex series of chemical reactions caused by the effect of sunlight on other pollutants, largely emitted from vehicle exhausts.This takes time to happen, and in the meantime the pollution drifts out from the cities to cover the countryside.The report, Regional Quality of Life Counts, published by the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, measures contamination by ozone and four other pollutants: sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and particles made up of tiny specks of soot in smoke which kill about 24,000 Britons a year from respiratory and heart disease.It adds up the number of days in which these pollutants exceeded health standards at each of the Government’s monitoring sites. On average, Camden suffers only 13 days a year past the limit, while Haringey has 12, Newcastle 16 and Nottingham 18. By contrast, Lullington Heath on the Sussex Downs undergoes 65 a year on average – exactly five times as many as Camden. Somerton, near Yeovil, in the Somerset countryside, has 56 days.The cleanest air measured was at a roadside in Sutton, virtually a London suburb, which on average experiences only three high pollution days a year. The dirtiest, unsurprisingly, was at industrial Port Talbot, with 75 days.Other, relatively unpolluted city centres included Sheffield, Birmingham, Bolton, Liverpool, Manchester, Wolverhampton and Southampton, all ranging from 20 to 23 days, while the comparatively rural Norwich has 53.On average, the report concludes, the countryside sites suffered 44 days of health-threatening pollution a year, compared with just 27 in towns and cities.Measures to clean up emissions from factories and vehicles – including fitting catalytic converters to exhausts – have greatly improved city air. The reports shows that the number of severely polluted days in urban areas has dropped by half since 1993.Meanwhile, however, air pollution in the countryside has remained at much the same level so that, since 1997, it has been worse than in towns and cities.The main source of the problem, the department and environmentalists agree, is ozone, an odourless blue-tinged gas, which has been particularly troublesome in sunny years such as 1999; during last year’s wet summer, pollution levels were much lower Once formed, it wanders freely over the countryside. Lullington Heath suffers particularly badly because it receives the pollution from continental Europe as well as from elsewhere in Britain.Successive governments have failed to control it.

The Conservatives promised to solve the ozone problem by 2005, but neither they nor Labour has made any real impact.Environmentalists say that they have sought to tackle pollution by concentrating on hotspots in the cities and cleaning up emissions, rather than getting to grips with the ever-growing volume of vehicles on the roads.”This report shows that Britain has got a problem with smog which is not going to go away,” Roger Higman, senior air pollution campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said yesterday. “The only way of solving it is to cut the amount of traffic.”. The true extent of the damage to Ellen MacArthur’s Kingfisher after her collision with a container last Tuesday will only be visible when the leaders of the Vendée Globe single-handed round-the-world race arrive in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, next weekend after about 100 days at sea. The true extent of the damage to Ellen MacArthur’s Kingfisher after her collision with a container last Tuesday will only be visible when the leaders of the Vendée Globe single-handed round-the-world race arrive in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, next weekend after about 100 days at sea.
MacArthur, around 70 miles behind Michel Desjoyeaux in PRB late yesterday, is expected to finish exhausted, the mental scars of the last few tough months compounded by the events of the last week. She has been forced to extend herself beyond her physical and mental limits, having had to wrestle with the demons induced by a collision with a submerged obstacle while working hard to get Kingfisher back in working order.It should have been a relatively easy phase: simple upwind sailing, tactics dictated by wind out of the north-eastern sector that allows the boats to point very nearly towards their final destination. But, instead of being able to luxuriate in the formidable upwind performance of Kingfisher and the knowledge that running down Desjoyeaux’s lead was a reasonable prospect, MacArthur has been forced to work out depressing mathematics.The sums will tell her that she is only able to sail Kingfisher at between 95 and 98 per cent of performance potential, since she has lost both her port daggerboard and the tip of her port rudder.

Although that equates to a worst-case scenario of losing just over another 100 miles while her nearest pursuer, Roland Jourdain on Sill, is a full 300 behind, simple mathematics do not tell the whole story.MacArthur’s worst fear will be a light and flukey final upwind phase to her odyssey. This would demand numerous tacks to chart her course back into the approaches to western France while having to swap her one remaining intact daggerboard from side to side for every tack. That, she has said, would be “a painstaking, strength-sapping and longwinded exercise”.No sailor in the race has more determination and, though she said it through tears of frustration and exhaustion, MacArthur has professed: “In my mind, the race is still on. I promised myself I wouldn’t give up until we passed that finish line.” Realistically, though, her chances of overtaking a sailor as good as Desjoyeaux are now remote.Meanwhile, in The Race, Club Med has escaped the gripping calms of the Cook Strait and is diving south again towards the big winds of the second Southern Ocean phase. Grant Dalton’s anguish as Club Med virtually stopped had been compounded by the fact that the second-placed Innovation Explorer was steaming up behind at record-breaking pace – she added 4.52 miles to Club Med’s outright world sailing record of 625 miles early Friday.At the back of the fleet, Tony Bullimore is up to Southern Ocean speed and making inroads into Warta Polpharma’s advantage. In under a week Team Legato has taken 700 miles out of the fourth-placed Polish boat’s 2000-mile lead.. It is easy to catch the spirit of speedway, still the most fan-friendly sport around.