PARIS, Feb 8, 2007 (AFP) - A French documentary on GMs watched by around 400,000 viewers on pay-TV when first screened has won more than a million new viewers on the net over the past 10 days, but it remains unclear whether fears over the environment or rumours of censorship are feeding the new interest.

Paul Moreira's "Are GM's dangerous for health?", which takes a critical look at tests carried out by US giant Monsanto on genetically modified (GM) crops, was first screened on France's Canal Plus channel in November 2005 and seen by less than half a million people.

But as of Thursday morning, Google video site had registered 1,146,742 connections on http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-8996055986353195886.

"When it was first put on line in November there were 300 connections a day, now there are 300,000", said Regis Castellani, who has a link to the film on his site on ethical issues and multinationals (www.fr.transnationale.org).

He told AFP that reports the documentary had been censored had fuelled soaring interest "like a summer forest fire."

But film-maker Moreira denied that Canal Plus had deleted a sequence from the original film. "All you have to do is to mention censorship to set off Internet paranoia," he said.

That view was not shared by one of the candidates running for the upcoming French elections, environmentalist Corinne Lepage. She said the documentary's new popularity illustrated France's "very real concern" over GMs.

Copyright AFP

Subject: French news, GM, Health