Now two studies discussed at a conference in London last week show that women who receive high doses of drugs to stimulate their ovaries into producing lots of eggs - so that the best possible ones can be picked once the egg has been fertilised by sperm in the laboratory - are more likely to produce embryos with genetic defects and suffer harmful changes to their womb lining.

Most embryos will never develop into babies because the defects make it impossible for them to survive when they are implanted back into the womb. But the discovery explains why so many fertility treatments fail, with thousands of women going through several expensive and painful cycles of treatment in the hope of having a child. It will add to worries that some genetic changes may occur in the children which are not yet being picked up by doctors.

At last Friday's conference, Professor Antonio Pellicer, of the University of Valencia, presented initial results from a trial of 10 women who were put through a stimulated IVF cycle employing routine amounts of stimulating drugs, known as gonadotrophins. The same group then received half the dose in a second stimulated cycle.

Researchers looked at what happened during the time when the embryo might be implanted back into the womb, and found a high rate of abnormalities in the genes that would normally become active. When they halved the dose of the drugs, they found the rate of abnormalities fell from 50 to 33 per cent.

'It is time for a complete rethink of how we approach IVF today,' Pellicer said. 'We should be looking to reduce the dosage of these drugs and take a much gentler approach that could be beneficial to both the women and their babies.'

In another study, soon to be published, researchers in the Netherlands looked at 400 couples, and compared those who had a high dose of stimulating drugs with a group who underwent a more 'natural' form of fertility treatment now being pioneered by some clinics. Over one year, both groups had exactly the same proportion of live births, showing that the outcomes were just as good, though in the lower-dose group only one embryo was ever transferred back into the womb. That compared with more two or three embryos transferred in the other group.

In Britain, fertility clinics generally allow the transfer of one or two embryos, but some specialists feel that just one should be implanted. Problems can also arise because the ovaries are sensitive, and the hormones used can cause ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a painful condition affecting up to 6 per cent of patients. In August a woman died of the syndrome at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

One in six UK couples has difficulty conceiving and the problems are growing as men and women are waiting until they are older before trying for a child.

On Tuesday, barring some extraordinary intervention, the six medics - a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses who have been in prison in Libya for seven years - will have their sentence confirmed by a court in the capital, Tripoli: execution by firing squad. The case has sparked unprecedented mobilisation in support of the medics among international scientists who have found the Libyan evidence groundless . European governments and the United States stand accused of abandoning the medical workers for powerful strategic and economic reasons.

'We are still hoping wisdom will prevail,' said the head of the nurses' defence team, French lawyer Emmanuel Altit. 'The court has not granted the defence its rights, the Libyan evidence in the case is discredited, and the medics' confessions were extracted under mental, physical and sexual torture.'

The six - Dr Ashraf al-Hajuj and nurses Kristiyana Vatcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka and Snezhana Dimitrova - took up government contracts at the hospital in Libya's second city in March 1998. The first cases of HIV infection were reported the same year. A World Health Organisation report found that the virus had probably been spread because of a lack of proper medical equipment. The six were imprisoned in March 1999. Libyan courts ordered reports from the world's top Aids scientists and epidemiologists, including Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of HIV. Montagnier found the high rate of hepatitis B and C at the hospital suggested that poor hygiene was to blame for the spread of HIV. But the prosecution ignored his report and ordered one from Libyan researchers in 2003.

On 6 May, 2004, the death sentences were pronounced. On Christmas Day last year the Libyan Supreme Court ordered a retrial, which led to a new call for the death sentence this August. A verdict is expected on Tuesday.

European doctors who, under a €2m (£1.3m) EU initiative, have treated the children in Libya say most are now aged around 12. They suffer from tuberculosis and other Aids-related illnesses.

According to a French foreign ministry spokesman: 'They cannot so much as go to the dentist in Benghazi because the Aids stigma is so powerful in Libya. It also appears that, because most of them are outpatients, their parents are not all administering their tablets correctly.' As a result of care problems in Libya, the 374 surviving children are now outpatients at hospitals in Italy and France.

Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi, who is reportedly terrified of dissent in the opposition hotbed of Benghazi, is paying millions of euros for their treatment at the Vatican's Bambino Gesu Hospital as well at French clinics in Lyon, Montpellier, Strasbourg and Toulouse. Experts on Libya say Gadaffi is using the children as a pawn in his discussions with Western powers over burning issues including contracts for oil, arms and aircraft and diplomatic relations in the Middle East. Gadaffi also remains bitter about the pariah status he acquired after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this year Libya said Bulgaria should pay the families of the children $2.7bn (£1.8bn) in compensation - which is exactly the sum paid by Libya for the 270 lives lost in the Pan Am 103 bombing.

International scientists say the 2003 Libyan report was written by 'pseudo experts' and has no value. Last week a paper in Nature magazine by a team led by British evolutionary biologist Oliver Pybus show ed that the Benghazi strain of HIV was introduced at the hospital before the arrival of the medics.

Pybus, of Oxford University, said: 'By looking at the genome sequence of the virus found in children at Bambino Gesu hospital, we established that the estimated date of the most common recent ancestor for each cluster predated March 1998, sometimes by several years. The virus is of a kind found in West Africa, which makes sense as Libya has a large population of guest workers from there.'

The medics' lawyers hope that, even if the death sentences are confirmed on Tuesday, the case will return to the Supreme Court where a judicial council could throw it out for a second time. But Altit said diplomatic efforts to secure the medics' release after more than seven years in jail had been disappointing. 'Libya is coming out of the cold and there are many lucrative contracts in the works. If the sentences are confirmed it will be a disgrace for the European Union. If there is one thing Europe stands for, it is values, such as justice.' A Foreign Office spokesman would not comment on the accusation that European governments were sacrificing the medics in the name of trade relations. But he said: 'The case is not over yet and we understand it will go to the Supreme Court. The EU has made significant eff orts to help the families and upgrade facilities at the hospital. We hope these efforts show that everyone sympathises with the families.'

"A trade in stem cells exists here... I suspect there is a lot of bribery going on, right up to highest levels.

"Pregnant women, especially from rural areas, are very vulnerable targets as they will obviously believe whatever the doctors tell them. It's easy to take their babies from them and tell them they died or were born dead due to complications."

The Council of Europe is to investigate allegations that newborn babies, and foetuses, have been killed to provide stem cells and internal organs for controversial medical and cosmetic treatments.

Officials of the Strasbourg-based human rights organisation are to travel to Ukraine in February to investigate the role played by some of the country's research centres and maternity hospitals in the international trade.

The council launched an inquiry in 2004 when several mothers accused hospitals of snatching their newborn babies to harvest their organs and tissue for the booming new industry of rejuvenation treatments, as well as treatments of illnesses such as Parkinson's disease and cancer. The treatments cost up to £12,000 in the Ukraine, but much more in western countries.

The inquiry was abandoned for lack of firm evidence, but is to be reopened after fresh allegations in the press. A BBC report on the subject, claiming that healthy babies may have been killed, is to be broadcast tonight on Radio 4.

Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold, a Swiss MP who is a member of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, and who previously investigated reports of missing babies, said: "I have obtained reliable information, from mothers and other sources about five cases of newborns that went missing ... I believe the mothers were telling the truth. I am more inclined to believe the babies were stolen for the purpose of adoption in the West." Some 300 mothers who claim to have suffered the same fate are represented by the All-Ukrainian Federation of Families with Many Children. In 2003 its head, Tetyana Isayeva Zaharova, gave Council of Europe investigators a video which was said to show babies' bodies partly dismembered so that stem cells and organs could be removed.

Wall of silence

The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.

In 2003 the authorities agreed to exhume around 30 bodies of foetuses and full-term babies from a cemetery used by maternity hospital number six.

One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.

In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.

The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.

A senior British forensic pathologist says he is very concerned to see bodies in pieces - as that is not standard post-mortem practice.

It could possibly be a result of harvesting stem cells from bone marrow.

Hospital number six denies the allegations.

Gamida Cell is developing drugs based on stem-cell research. Stem cells are primordial cells, early in development and non-differentiated. In response to biochemical stimuli (that are not well understood), the stem cells differentiate into specific ones, such as heart, nerve, muscle, epidermis and so on.

The company has developed a unique platform to expand stem cell lines without them differentiating as they proliferate, which has been a serious problem in stem-cell research. It uses this unique technology to develop products for cell- replacement and tissue-rejuvenation therapies, by implanting cells that do not originate from the patient.

It envisions therapies for presently incurable illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, heart disease, and so on.

Its flagship product is StemEx, a therapy under development for leukemia. Gamida Cell is developing StemEx together with Teva through a joint venture. Teva owns 30% of the joint venture at this point and expects to raise its interest to 50%, with another $25 million investment in StemEx.

Gamida Cell CEO Yael margolin explains that StemEx' addresses the problem of the paucity of bone marrow donations, which are desperately needed by 25,000 leukemia patients each year. Without a donation of bone marrow, which is basically tissue that makes new blood cells, their death is certain. Leukemia is essentially a cancer of the bone marrow usually treated with chemotherapy and radiation.

But chemotherapy kills the bone marrow together with the disease, and to survive, the patient needs a transplant to resume making blood cells. Tissue matching is crucial to prevent rejection or attack by the body's immune system.

Because of the matching issue, only 20% of sufferers find suitable donors within the family, and 10% more find from a pool of donors. That leaves 70% with no solution.

Hope arose ten years ago, when it turned out that these patients could be helped by blood collected from the umbilical cord of newborns. But the problem is quantitative: there simply is not enough tissue in the cord blood to help any body weighing more than 30-40 kilos. In short, it would only work for kids, not adults.

Enter Gamida Cell's StemEx, which can take that cord blood, weed out the necessary cells and expand the line without causing the cells to differentiate into specific tissues.

The Gamida Cell-Teva joint venture have received United States Food and Drug Administration approval for the structure of clinical trials, which will enable the company to carry out pivotal clinical trials simultaneously. Margolin believes this can be done by the end of 2008 and a product could be launched in 2009.

She says Gamida Cell has no real competition at this stage. The only company developing a competing solutionis ViaCell (Nasdaq: VIAC), which finished first-phase clinical trials. But informal information in her possession indicates that the trials didn't go that well, Margolin says. There are other potential rivals but they aren't at the stage of clinical trials yet.

"When Teva carried out due diligence on Gamida Cell before entering the joint venture, it received an assessment that StemEx could be addressing a billion-dollar market," Margolin relates.

Lilly's own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more.

But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa's sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover 1995 to 2004.

Critics, including the American Diabetes Association, have argued that Zyprexa, introduced in 1996, is more likely to cause diabetes than other widely used schizophrenia drugs.

Lilly has consistently denied such a link and did so again on Friday in a written response to questions about the documents. The company defended Zyprexa's safety and said the documents had been taken out of context.

Side effects

But as early as 1999, the documents show that Lilly worried that side effects from Zyprexa, whose chemical name is olanzapine, would hurt sales.

"Olanzapine-associated weight gain and possible hyperglycemia is a major threat to the long-term success of this critically important molecule," Dr. Alan Breier wrote in a November 1999 e-mail message to two-dozen Lilly employees that announced the formation of an "executive steering committee for olanzapine-associated weight changes and hyperglycemia." Hyperglycemia is high blood sugar.

At the time Breier, who is now Lilly's chief medical officer, was the chief scientist on the Zyprexa program.

In 2000, a group of diabetes doctors that Lilly had retained to consider potential links between Zyprexa and diabetes warned the company that "unless we come clean on this, it could get much more serious than we might anticipate," according to an e-mail message from one Lilly manager to another.

And in that year and 2001, the documents show, Lilly's own marketing research found that psychiatrists were consistently saying that many more of their patients developed high blood sugar or diabetes while taking Zyprexa than other antipsychotic drugs.

Unsealed documents
The documents, which until earlier this week remained under court seal, were collected for lawsuits on behalf of mentally ill patients against the company. Last year, Lilly agreed to pay $750 million to settle suits by 8,000 people who claimed they developed diabetes or other medical problems after taking Zyprexa. Thousands more suits against the company are pending.

The Zyprexa documents were provided to the Times by James B. Gottstein, a lawyer who represents mentally ill patients and has sued the state of Alaska over its efforts to force patients to take psychiatric medicines against their will. Gottstein said the information in the documents raised public health issues.

"Patients should be told the truth about drugs like Zyprexa," Gottstein said.

On Friday, in its written response, Lilly said that it believes Zyprexa remains an important treatment for patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The company said it had given the Food and Drug Administration all its data from clinical trials and reports of adverse events, as it is legally required to do.

Lilly also said it shared data from literature reviews and large studies of Zyprexa's real-world use.

Lilly said the documents should not have been made public because they might "cause unwarranted fear among patients that will cause them to stop taking their medication."

Continued marketing
As did similar documents disclosed by the drug maker Merck last year in response to lawsuits over its painkiller Vioxx, the Lilly documents offer an inside look at how a company marketed a drug while seeking to play down its side effects.

The documents - which include e-mail, marketing material, sales projections and scientific reports - are replete with references to Zyprexa's importance to Lilly's future and the need to keep concerns about diabetes and obesity from hurting sales. But that effort became increasingly difficult as doctors saw Zyprexa's side effects, the documents show.

In its statement, Lilly called the release of the documents "illegal." The company said it could not comment on specific documents because of the continuing product-liability suits.

The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market.

But the excitement of the team from Sick Kids, whose work is being published today in the journal Cell, is almost palpable.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. "In my career, this is unique."

Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses -- the body's immune system turning on itself.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn's disease.

The "paradigm-changing" study opens "a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact," said Dr. Christian Stohler, a leading U.S. pain specialist and dean of dentistry at the University of Maryland, who has reviewed the work.

"The treatment and diagnosis of neuropathic diseases is poised to take a dramatic leap forward because of the impressive research."

About two million Canadians suffer from diabetes, 10% of them with Type 1, contributing to 41,000 deaths a year.

Insulin replacement therapy is the only treatment of Type 1, and cannot prevent many of the side effects, from heart attacks to kidney failure.

In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to shift glucose into the cells that need it. In Type 2 diabetes, the insulin that is produced is not used effectively -- something called insulin resistance -- also resulting in poor absorption of glucose.

The problems stem partly from inflammation -- and eventual death -- of insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas.

Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an "enormous" number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.

Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick -- injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.

Healthcare specialists and government officials across the political spectrum say the healthcare debate has reached a turning point, with both liberals and conservatives ready to compromise.

Liberals are setting aside old demands for a single-payer system, while conservatives are showing a willingness to consider more government involvement in the provision of healthcare.

With Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, an architect of the state's plan, mulling a presidential run in 2008, healthcare is likely to be a big topic in the both the GOP and Democratic presidential primaries, party officials say. The attention the Massachusetts plan is getting in individual states, especially Iowa, the site of the nation's first presidential caucuses, is also pushing the healthcare issue to the forefront.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy , Democrat of Massachusetts and the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said he will call hearings in the new Congress to explore using the Bay State plan as a national model.

And some Republican senators think the plan might help US companies compete in the global market by easing the burden of rising healthcare costs. Representative Edward Markey , Democrat of Malden, said he will push for similar hearings in the House.

"It's a conspiracy of the left and the right," said Ed Haislmaier , a healthcare specialist with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Haislmaier has been to different states promoting the Massachusetts approach, which requires residents to obtain health insurance, imposes an assessment on employers who do not provide it, and creates a private taxpayer-subsidized plan to cover people who cannot afford insurance.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, a member of the Clinton healthcare task force in the early 1990s, said the status of the uninsured -- including the growing number of uninsured people and the burdens they impose on hospitals and government programs -- has forced old political foes to work together on a different approach.

"I think, over the years, it's become clear to me that we can't keep waiting for the ideal," said Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and Children's Hospital at Montefiore in New York. "We have to be a lot more innovative if we want to get this done in the United States."

John McDonough , executive director of Health Care for All, a Boston-based advocacy group, said two dozen states are seriously considering universal healthcare plans patterned after the Massachusetts program. He called that a stunning response, considering the potentially high price of copying the Bay State plan, especially in states with higher numbers of uninsured citizens than Massachusetts.

Iowa lawmakers recently drafted a bill for universal healthcare inspired by the Massachusetts plan, and New Jersey legislators are preparing legislation with a mandatory insurance provision for residents. State Senator Richard Moore, Democrat of Uxbridge, has traveled around the country at the invitation of lawmakers to describe the Bay State model.

"Because Massachusetts took the initiative and said everyone is going to be insured, it is now the model that other states are going to follow and should follow. That's what we're going to follow," said state Senator Jack Hatch , a Des Moines Democrat who heads the Iowa Senate's health and human services budget committee.

Officials say the issue will be featured in the 2008 presidential campaign debate as well. Healthcare was a pivotal issue in the 1992 presidential race, and after winning office, President Bill Clinton assigned his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton -- now a Democratic US senator from New York and a potential 2008 presidential candidate -- to head a task force to prepare a national plan.

The package failed in a bitterly partisan Capitol Hill fight, and Congress has not taken up the issue on a grand scale since then. But with the number of uninsured rising yearly, candidates will be forced to discuss the Massachusetts plan as a possible solution, lawmakers said.

Because Iowa is an early caucus state, Hatch said, "we're not just going to be asking [candidates] how [they] feel about it. We're going to be asking how you can help Iowa and other states do it."

Some small businesses and insurers are wary of the plan, said Merrill Matthews , director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, which opposes most government mandates on healthcare because of the high costs. But "the country's in a mood now to just do something" about the uninsured, he said.

Congressional hearings to examine the plan, though proposed by Democrats, would probably boost Romney's profile and add to his credentials at a time when the governor is exploring a presidential bid, Democrats acknowledged. But Moore and others said the issue itself was too important to subject to political warfare.

Kennedy said the Massachusetts plan would not work everywhere because states have vastly different demographics and healthcare problems. But the idea of state-run programs to cover nearly all of the uninsured was catching fire, he said.

"If you look at [mandatory] auto insurance, the first state to have it was Massachusetts," Kennedy said in an interview. "It set the example for the nation," and Massachusetts' bipartisan plan could do the same for healthcare, he said.

Hearings would focus on what states and the federal government can learn from the Massachusetts plan, but are not meant to push a uniform, national program, a Kennedy aide said.

The federal government must approve such approaches as the Massachusetts plan by providing a waiver, even if the idea doesn't cost the federal government more money. Because Medicaid, a federal program, is part of the Massachusetts approach, the federal government has an interest in any plan that follows the Bay State model, McDonough said.

Senator Trent Lott , a conservative Mississippi Republican and a newly-named member of his party's leadership, called the Massachusetts plan "a good idea," and said he wanted to examine what parts of the program could be used elsewhere in the country.

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and a member of the HELP Committee, said, "It has aspects I'm interested in. I think it merits some examination."

Timothy R. Murphy , Massachusetts secretary for health and human services, said he has been swamped with requests from other states to discuss to Massachusetts plan, and has already been to Minnesota, California, and Missouri.

Moore recently outlined the program at a conference in Texas of the National Council of State Legislatures, and said he has been approached by a member of the Irish Parliament as well as a foreign ambassador who were interested in the idea.

"Massachusetts is going to do one flavor of healthcare reform, and other states are going to look and do something that fits their needs," Murphy said. "Maybe there is a broad national application" of the program, but at least, "we clearly have reignited the healthcare debate across almost every state capital," he said.

Globalization has meant that, with the click of a button, we can connect with people and places halfway across the country or the world. But rather than just exchanging ideas and cultures, we've increasingly come to depend on the rest of the world for our consumption of goods, services, energy -- and food. With the speed of clicking a button, an E. coli outbreak in California or China can threaten our entire food supply and risk a widespread pandemic.

Gone are the days of family farms, which would produce sustainable, healthy food that also fed the local economy. Today, a staggering 330 farmers abandon farming each week. In the 1930s, there were over seven million family farms in our country. Today, roughly two million remain.

In their place, large, corporate-run farms have driven down the price of food, thanks largely to massive subsidies from the federal government but also "economies of scale." Yet we cutting costs comes at a price. When you buy an apple at your local farmer's market from a farmer's in your region, there's no packaging involved and the only energy the farmer spent to get you that apple was a few miles worth of gas.

When you buy an apple grown all the way across the country -- or on the other side of the globe -- that apple is wrapped in paper and cardboard and shipped over boats and planes and then trucks to your store, a considerably greater cost to the environment.

The money you spend on the apple, after the grocery store takes its cut, goes into the mega-profits of some distant agribusiness, a considerable cost to your local economy.

But also, aggregating farming means aggregating risk. In the case of the E. coli contaminated spinach outbreak this past September, the spinach was grown at massive, industrial farms in southern California and shipped around the United States.

The E. coli came from an industrial cattle ranch nearby. Tightly packed cows were over fed with unhealthy grain and produced E. coli in their feces. The contaminated feces washed downstream into the water supply, infecting the spinach fields.

There is much talk right now about "energy independence" -- the idea that the United States should rely on sustainable, renewable energy sources rather military conflict and political instability in the pursuit of oil. Food must be no different. Given the recent E. coli scares, we can no longer ignore the warning signs. Long-distance food of corporate agribusiness threatens our environment, our economy and our health. If we're feeling insecure, it's no wonder. We are what we eat.

There's a movement afoot to restore the health and safety of our food supply and support the livelihood and culture of small, family farmers. "The Meatrix", an incredibly clever animated spoof that exposes the dangers of factory farming, was viewed online by over 4.2 million people in the first three months it was released.

And just this past October, hundreds of thousands of people from over 150 continents convened in Turin, Italy, at a gathering for the international Slow Food organization, which calls for food that is good, clean and fair.

On it's website, the organization Local Harvest lists almost 10,000 farmers' markets, cooperative grocery stores, restaurants and more that provide locally-grown, organic produce to consumers. From Pulaski, Tennessee, to Moline, Illinois, there are already opportunities in big cities and small towns across the entire country to buy safe and nutritious food right from our own backyards. As demand for local produce grows, these markets will grow too.

Those of us who can afford to buy local, organic food grown sustainably by family farmers should do so. From jams and breads to apples and nuts, if we lead with our taste buds and our wallets we will over time help bring down the cost of locally grown food by eliminating the unfair competition of subsidized, artificially cheap agribusiness.

We will also solve the food crisis worldwide, where U.S. agribusiness has similarly trampled family farms and local food production from Mexico to India. Our reward will be a better world -- and food on our table that is nutritious, delicious and safe to eat.

Sally Kohn is the director of the Movement Vision Project of the Center for Community Change, which is interviewing hundreds of activists across the country to determine the progressive vision for the future of the United States.

Growers warned of dire consequences for British farmers and said imported produce would appear on the shelves to appease consumers' demand for soft fruit whatever the season.

Residents have waged a long campaign against the 'pastures of plastic' created by the ugly tunnels blotting vast swathes of land. MP Bill Wiggin, a rising star of David Cameron's frontbench, warned recently that eating strawberries out of season was ruining the British countryside.

The polythene tunnels allow farmers to extend their growing season well beyond the traditional six-week season, resulting in a booming industry worth £200million.

Until now, farmers have avoided planning rules because they have argued the tunnels are classed as temporary structures.

But a test case was brought to the High Court by the Hall Hunter Partnership, which owns Tuesley Farm, which is on green belt land near Godalming, Surrey, and last year had 60 hectares of land covered by tunnels.

The farm owners had lost a planning inquiry in December last year and wanted the High Court to overturn the decision of the planning inspector, who ruled that erecting polytunnels amounted to 'development' under the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act and therefore required planning permission.

Timothy Straker, for the farm, argued the plastic tunnels were 'an agricultural use of land' and a 'permitted development' which meant planning permission was not required.

He claimed the tunnels could not be described as 'buildings' under the planning rules as they did not have a sufficient degree of permanence. They were a 'moving feast', he said, as they were erected on a rotational basis according to where a crop was growing, and did not alter the land.

In contrast, a 'building' needing planning permission was 'something that has a fixed place in time and space', argued Mr Straker.

But the judge rejected all the grounds of challenge, saying the inspector had made no error of law.

And he upheld the inspector's decision that stationing some 45 caravans on the farm for hundreds of seasonal workers was also not a permitted development.

From January 1, 2007, all growers will be required to comply with the new rules.

Tim Harrold, chairman of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (Surrey), said: 'We are absolutely delighted, and we will be celebrating the ruling with local residents and the wider community.

'I personally think it is a wonderful result because people have stood up and been counted defending some of the most important countryside we have.

'It is not unreasonable to expect landowners to obtain planning consent.'

But the National Farmers' Union expressed 'extreme disappointment' at the landmark judgment.

The union's horticulture board chairman Richard Hirst said: 'The use of Spanish polytunnels by the British soft fruit industry is absolutely vital in allowing growers to provide consumers with the quality product they have come to expect.

'We are very concerned. The industry has shown it is sensitive to concerns raised by members of the public by developing a national code of practice for the use of all types of polytunnels in the soft fruit industry.'

British Summer Fruits, the organisation representing growers who supply 92 per cent of UK soft and stone fruit, also expressed concern.

Chairman Laurence Olins said: 'Polytunnels, which are used for protecting berries from our inclement weather, cover a mere 0.01 per cent of UK agricultural land.

'If UK growers are unable to meet the increasing consumer demand for berries then imported fruit will appear on supermarket shelves during our summer season.'

Growers claim the tunnels reduce the use of herbicides and pesticides by 50 per cent and banning them would allow Spanish strawberries to flood the £96million UK market.