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Professor Carlo Leifert, Professor for Ecological Agriculture, University of Newcastle. Specialist in child cancers.
Professor Leifert thinks GM food is risky and unnecessary. He has been professor of ecological agriculture since 2000, and previously lectured at the universities of Aberdeen, Manchester and Central Lancashire, as well as working for Neo Plants Ltd and Howegarden Ltd.
Professor Leifert is working on several projects at the organic agriculture centre, which he set up in 2001 with 425,000 investment from Tesco.
They include fertility management in potatoes and avoiding use of pesticides in cucumber production.
In 2001, he helped set up a project to improve the production of organic crops. The aim was to reduce the cost of organic produce, enabling it to compete with conventional agriculture. The centre also helped in trials that showed that an eastern European potato is apparently resistant to the potato blight that prevents organic potato production meeting demand.
Professor Leifert sees his work as reducing herbicide use and encouraging sustainable agriculture. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Trade and Industry and the European Union have supported his work, but up to 50 per cent of funding has come from the industry.
Professor Leifert, who is German, took his first degree at the University of Gottingen. He settled in the UK after meeting his English wife on a desert agriculture project in Israel.
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