Should we become a GM Nation
Life and Work Article November 2003

Dr Donald Bruce
Society, Religion and Technology Project, Church of Scotland

Where are We Now?

Genetically modified crops and food are at a crucial watershed.  This year has seen a series of official reports on the scientific, risk and economic aspects, the results of the controversial ‘farm scale trials’ into the effect of GM crops on wildlife, and the outcome of two national public consultations. Internationally, the EU has passed new legislation requiring labelling and traceability of any GM-derived ingredients in food, and the USA has appealed to the WTO seeking to force it to open European markets to US GM foods.  The stage is set for the Government to decide whether or not such crops should be grown commercially in the UK.

For opponents it is an open and shut case. They cite overwhelming public opposition to GM food, clear evidence of detrimental impact of GM on wildlife, and unacceptable justice and liability aspects for non-GM growers.  Some, of a more cynical view say it is a closed case the other way. The Government will push through GM crops regardless of public opinion or risks, because it wants to promote them, it doesn’t want to risk EC sanctions or a trade war with the USA.  For the Church of Scotland’s Society Religion and Technology Project, these polarised representations are too simple. 

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SRT Project and GM

In 1993, long before ‘GM’ became a public issue brought together top researchers round the table with specialists in ethics, sociology, agriculture, risk and animal welfare in a far reaching five year study on the ethics of genetic engineering in crops and animals. Our book Engineering Genesis (Earthscan, 1998) played a significant part in the emerging debate, seeking to lay out the issues in a clear, informed and fair way.  SRT was one of the first organisations to draw to the Government's attention that if it did not take more seriously the emerging concerns of the public over GM crops and food, the public would vote with its feet.  We criticised the often dismissive attitude of Government, EU and much of the science community towards emerging public concerns as “irrational”, failing to realise the value-laden judgements of the pro-GM case and that public ways of rationalising the issues might be perfectly rational, but based on different criteria and framings of the issues. 

In an important report to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly in 1999, we did not oppose the use of GM food and crops as such, but we were highly critical of the above attitudes to the public, the spurious moral claims of the technology in relation to feeding the world, the excessive commercially drive of the technology which chose wrong priorities for GM development for a sceptical public, and which thrust GM imports into Europe without labelling or segregation. For more see SRT's GM Food pages.

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Ethics of GM

Four years on, where are we now?  The official scientific and economic reports support the view of the 1999 Assembly, that GM is not a simple ‘yes or no’ issue and must be taken case-by-case, weighing up many different factors.  Theologically, SRT has found no convincing reason to say it is a wrong act to transfer genes into a crop from a different species.  We do not support the argument from the organic lobby that GM is opposed to nature. In Christian ethics, what is natural is an ambiguous moral guide.  Humans have also intervened fundamentally in countless ways since our primitive ancestors walked the earth - including some dramatically ‘unnatural’ uses of selective breeding. We do not draw a fixed line at GM, just because it’s GM.  On the other hand, the way God through evolution has ordered the creation is not to be treated lightly, so we advocate precaution about risks. None of our present ways of growing food are risk free, so it’s not a case of “if in doubt don’t”. But novel aspects of GM need careful assessment. While no significant health problems have emerged, spotting any long term effects in the wider population of millions who have eaten GM food is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  More specific research on potential health risks is needed, but in general GM seems no more likely to be a cause of major health problems than conventional food, provided tests and regulations are adhered to properly.

Only some applications would be acceptable, however. Our 1999 Church of Scotland report urged that GM crops should focus on applications with obvious benefit to people or the environment. The GM tomato paste on sale in the mid-1990's was cheaper to both producers and consumers because less energy was used in production, and according to taste panels, it tasted better than non-GM tomatoes. It was easily segregated and labelled as GM produce. In contrast, the main GM crops being now being considered by the UK Government may not meet our criteria. Oil seed rape, forage maize and sugar beet made resistant to weed killers do not offer tangible benefits to consumers. In a climate of consumer scepticism of GM foods, the official economic report concludes that costs savings to farmers could be outweighed by the lack of a market. Only GM animal feed or crops for export may be economically attractive to growers.

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The GM Nation Public Consultation

The main public consultation was long overdue, but ridiculously short and underfunded. The SRT Project worked with the New Economics Foundation to produce the GM Democs card game, to enable informal groups of people to discuss GM issues themselves without needing ‘experts’. It was used in a number of tier 2 and 3 meetings, with the approval of the GM Nation Steering Committee we organised a public meeting in Edinburgh with the Centre of Human Ecology. I was also the expert presenter for a small series of focus groups with low income families and students organised by the Scottish Civic Forum on behalf of the Food Standards Agency, in its consultation on GM food in Scotland in March 2003.

For more on SRT's view of the debate and its process, see Reflections on the GM Nation Debate

I share the opinion of a number of observers that the open part of the GM Nation debate showed a sampling anomaly. The unrealistically short timescale of six weeks inevitably meant that those who took part in the open debate were those who happened to have been alerted to it. There was not enough time for it to have penetrated far into the wider population. The comparison between the open debate responses and those from the “narrow-but-deep” focus groups suggests that the former were more likely to be opposed to GM crops than a random sample of the general population would have been.  Nonetheless, several factors are very clear from both parts of the debate.

w     There is a deep scepticism about the current generation of GM crops, and there is no public mandate for allowing their commercialisation at present. There is substantial distrust of the role of government and multi-nationals and of commercial motives in the promotion of GM crops.

w     While focus group participants recognised that some future applications of GM crops might bring consumer and other benefits, this is tempered by scepticism whether these would actually be delivered, especially if in the hands of GM companies.

w     The potential for long term health risks is given far greater significance than current scientific evidence would appear to justify. It points to the complete failure of health assessment of GM food based on the notion of “substantial equivalence”. This clearly carries no public confidence as the basis for public regulation and should be replaced by some method that would command trust.

w     There is a near universal belief that we do not so far have enough data to be reassured about possible health and environmental risks (para 199).  "In both groups people consistently expressed a very strong wish – almost a longing – for more information about GM from sources they could trust. They wanted such information partly to resolve the contradictions and disputes, claims and counter-claims, in the existing body of information, science and research on GM issues. They wanted information which serves as a corpus of agreed “facts” accepted by all organisations and interests, and independent of any special influence."  It is now up to the Government to set up new means to address this question if it wishes to promote any form of GM crops in future.

Further analysis of the GM Nation debate is given in our separate article Reflections on the GM Nation Debate

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Environmental Effects and Farm Scale Trials

Loss of biodiversity in farmland is a long-standing trend arising from intensive agricultural methods. Would GM make it better or worse? The scientific study concludes that we do not yet have sufficient evidence to predict what long-term impacts of GM herbicide-tolerant crops would be on weed populations and the wildlife that depends on weeds for food.  In the best situations, it reckoned that using less herbicides could be an environmental advantage compared with conventional crops, especially for sugar beet, but less so for oil seed rape. Used in the wrong circumstances there might instead be detrimental effects. In practice, any benefits would depend on particular locations and farming practices, and would vary from season to season. 

The farm scale trial results, however, paint a more negative picture. This surprised some who believed it was a misconceived exercise. In the case of GM oil seed rape and sugar beet modified to be tolerant to a specific herbicide evidently can have a detrimental effect on weeds and some wildlife populations, when compared with non-GM varieties grown on the other half of the same fields. On the other hand the opposite happened with GM maize crops. The assessors of the trials rightly point out that the real life situations will vary, depending on the land, the crops being sown, the crop rotation practice, how the farmer decides to use any herbicides and which ones.  For example, if the non-GM maize had been used with a less aggressive herbicide, would the GM variety have shown no improvement?  And those who favour organic agriculture argue that the baseline should not be conventional use of herbicides but nil use. 

This means that environmental concerns about growing GM crops are not simply something to be dismissed. The companies promoting herbicide tolerant GM crops had not done sufficient tests and trials relating to UK conditions to sustain the claims being made about GM crops being beneficial to the environment. It gives a strong case for the UK to resist pressure from the EC or the WTO which would dismiss the public disquiet about GM crops, because some of those concerns are now backed by scientific data. It also suggests, as SRT has said for many years, that it was a mistake to focus on applying broad spectrum GM agronomic traits to common crops before we had a better understanding from more from narrowly targeted applications. We think it justifies the case-by-case precautionary approach which the SRT Project advocated in its 1999 report to the General Assembly – that the use of GM crops should for the time being be concentrated on applications grown on a restricted scale and which conferred strong human or ecological benefits.  The current generation of herbicide tolerant crops do not seem to meet this condition.

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Co-existence

Small amounts of “gene flow” occur in nature between some types of crop plant and their wild varieties or close relatives.  Hence some transfer from GM crops to non-GM varieties of the same species is to be expected, but it could not transfer to unrelated species like many common weeds.  Opinions vary about the ecological significance of gene flow.  On balance, it is unlikely to cause a major ecological disaster in the UK, but much care would be needed to protect those who wish to avoid GM-derived produce. The 2003 Assembly called for policies which would not make the growing of genetically modified crops and organic crops mutually exclusive. This means a compromise. Standards set for permissible levels of GM presence in non-GM food should be practicable rather than idealistic, in return for binding restraints on would-be GM growers as to how, where and when the GM crops may be grown.

Economics

The only remaining justification for growing the proposed types of GM crops would be if they made the difference for some farmers to compete in global markets, but the economic case is not strong. SRT's conclusion remains that we should probably wait for future GM crops which offer much clearer advantages to consumers or to particular UK environmental conditions.  A number of potential options include improved nutritional content or health benefits, perhaps reduced allergenicity or longer shelf life.  Non-food applications of GM plants for medicine or renewable materials, oils and fuels may hold more promise.  Some of these ends may of course be achieved in other ways, but we should not exclude GM just because it is GM. 

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If not for UK, what about the Developing World?

There is a moral imperative to use scientific discoveries to feed starving people, but serious questions must be asked if GM discoveries will actually do so.  The vast majority of applications are not targeted at the global poor but western farmers and supermarkets. The causes of hunger are too deeply rooted in poverty and inequity to be solved by any one technical improvement to production efficiency.  I would only resort to GM if, when all the options have been examined and assessed, it would address the needs the best, on the basis of independent scrutiny.

The dominance of global seed sales by a few large companies is of great concern. At present a narrow range of corporate GM products for herbicide tolerance and pesticide resistance dominates the picture. These are largely from one company, which was heavily criticised in the UK debate for its bad handling of legitimate public concerns. Such a monopoly is no one’s interest and needs examining. Crops and applications primarily intended to help southern farmers are not high on multi-national agendas. It is easy to make misleading generalisations, however. Not all companies behave badly. By no means all GM research is in the hands of multi-nationals or influenced by their funding. There are publicly funded academic research collaborations between developed and developing countries, which for example led to the GM Vitamin A rice variety which is now undergoing trials. Despite their glossy adverts, the US biotech industry had no part in this research and indeed their patents held it back for some time.  Elsewhere, scientists in countries like Mexico, Brazil and China believe they can develop indigenous applications for their own crops and conditions. Their work should not be dismissed out of hand. If scientists in developing countries believe they can develop indigenous applications for their own crops and conditions, we should not forbid them the chance. But we should warn that GM is not the panacea to feed the world and comes with its risks.

Widening pressure to comply to WTO rules means that developing countries need to be vigilant and canny. The reality is that they are often vulnerable in the face of global economic forces.  The attempted import of US food aid of unmilled GM maize to southern Africa was not a major health hazard, as some had advised the relevant governments, but it was a gross insensitivity to local concerns which should never have happened.  On the other hand, a black farmer in Kwazulu-Natal told me that sowing GM Bt cotton over five years has increased his yields on his small farm so that he can now afford to send his children to school. It seems locally sensitive use can be possible, but would it be the exception or the norm? This points to an urgent need to establish internationally agreed safeguards to allow a developing country the right to refuse sterile GM seed varieties and GM applications not thoroughly tested for its particular environments, or to refuse patents or other commercial developments hostile to its own farmers’ interests. If such protections could be achieved, GM need not be ruled out.  But that is a big "if".

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