North Yorkshire's beef farmers could be exporting to the Continent again within six weeks, farmers' leader Ben Gill predicted today.

Ministers are expecting European Commission inspectors to pave the way within hours for the beef export ban - imposed three years ago in the wake of the BSE scare - to be lifted at last.

Food Safety Minister Jeff Rooker is waiting for their draft report which they "verbally promised" to deliver by today, or tomorrow.

The inspectors are checking that Britain's abattoirs and other elements of the datebase export scheme are up to standard, and Ministers are optimistic their findings will be positive.

Mr Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union and a farmer from near Easingwold, said: "I'm very hopeful. The lifting of the ban is long overdue. But this is not the end of the problem, it is the beginning of the end.

"It will still be a number of years before all the normal trading practices are established. At least we are on the road."

But John Greenway, Ryedale MP and Tory home affairs spokesman, warned that the matter could still drag on. We need this ban lifted. A lot of beef producers will be hoping that this is sorted out."

Meanwhile, any North Yorkshire farmers hoping to grow genetically-modified foods commercially could be facing a long wait after the Government's top scientific adviser backed a call for a four-year ban.

Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Robert May is reported to have told the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that GM crops should not go on sale until farm-scale trials are completed at the end of 2002.

In another blow for supporters of so-called Frankenstein foods, scientists have claimed that GM maize grown commercially in the US can prove fatal to one of the world's most beautiful butterflies in America's mid-western "corn belt".

Laboratory tests show that pollen from the GM corn, which contains an insecticide gene to protect the crop from predators, kills the striking black and orange Monarch butterfly by making it vulnerable to infection.

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