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On Tuesday 11 May 1999, the Church of Scotland General Assembly passed the Report on Genetically Modifed Food presented by the Society Religion and Technology Project, and passed a number of Motions on issues of labelling, public accountability, the imbalance in products and research towards rich countries and the need for WTO rules to allow a country to decide its own ethics on sensitive traded goods. But the church overwhelmingly rejected a counter-motion calling for a 5 year moratorium on GM foods.
Why has the Church of Scotland not joined the bandwagon of organisations calling for a moratorium on genetically modified food? Why does our report warn that public concern about imports of unsegregated unlabelled GM foods from North American could mean soya bean being metaphoricaly thrown in Rotterdam harbour as a latter day reversal of the Boston Tea Party, and yet disagree with the highly sceptical view of GM foods in Christian Aid's recent report Suicide Seeds?
Six years ago when hardly anyone had heard about GM crops, the Society Religion and Technology Project saw something coming on the wind and began an Expert Study on the Ethics of Genetic Engineering in Animals, Crops and Food. Commercial application was on the horizon but hardly anyone had looked at the major ethical and social issues it would carry with it. We brought together experts from very different fields and sometimes radically different views - top geneticists like Ian Wilmut and Mike Wilson and key Scottish figures in agriculture, risk, animal welfare, environmental ethics and sociology. We often agreed to disagree but over five years of listenig to each other we found the single issue ethics of pressure groups - of either side - deeply unsatisfactory on such complex issues. Our book "Engineering Genesis" sought to expose injustices without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The General Assembly has chosen to agree with this more nuanced view .
For example, one clear messages that emerged was a sense of injustice over who was driving the technology, to what ends, and to whose benefit. Hardly any of the products nearing the market are going to justify the frequent claim that we need GM food to feed the world. How could a problem of inequitable food distribution in favour of the rich be solved by a technology which is already showing exactly the same bias? On this point we heartily agree with Christian Aid's report, but there is another side to the story. We also knew enough about the technology to see what might be done, if it were directed to the needs of the truly hungry. That's a very big "if", but while the long term potential is there to develop crops capable of growing in marginal conditions or more resistant to endemic pests of the developing world, for Christian Aid to write off the whole technology and declare that GM is "irrelevant" to solving the hunger problem seems just absurd.
It was the same with risk. We found the risks more complex than a blanket moratorium would solve. Different crops vary enormously over questions like gene flow or wild relatives which might become weeds. So a plant like oil seed rape merits much more careful attention than other less genetically promiscuous species. Talking to ecological scientists, it seems clear that five years of research is not going to give a generic answer to tell us whether "GM is safe" or not. We know so little about either the ecology or safety of normal foods that we often do not have a yardstick to make meaningful comparison with GM foods. Much better than a crude moratorium is to be precautionary but on a case-by-case basis, rather than assume that everything is equally risky. Rather than swallow whole the current green position on GM foods, we need to recognise that it is just as easy to exaggerate risks as it is to ignore them or pretend they aren't there.
And what of public indignation? Here the Kirk agrees with the Greens, but the issue is not about a moratorium but about proper and fair labelling. Current EU labelling is only mandatory if you can detect genes or the proteins in the food, but this only addresses a small minority of the concern. If someone objects to GM food on ethical or religious grounds or to the effect of the crop on the environment, present labelling misses the point completely. Here is a fundamental injustice which the Government has done nothing to address. The Church of Scotland calls for labelling of all foods where genetic modification has been used in the process.
The same goes for World Trade Organisation rules. Suppose Scotland did reject GM foods, the Kirk considers that WTO lawyers in Geneva must not be allowed to deconstruct a nation's sense of values and reinterpret them as crude economic protectionism. That is free trade turned into idolatry. But if it did happen then we might indeed have a Rotterdam Soya Bean Fest, but not that's not about a risk moratorium. It's about justice.
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