GM Crops - Is Anyone Listening?

SRT Home Page

What is the SRT Project?
Site Map & Subject Index
What's New?
Highlights
Current Talking Point
SRT Publications
SRT Newsletter
SRT Information Sheets
General Assembly Reports
SRT Topical Papers
Press Room

Contact SRT
Send a comment
Guest Book
SRT Trust & Associates
Links

European Christian
Environmental Network
Eco-Congregation

Society, Religion and Technology Project

Church of Scotland

Looking at the ethics of technology for a New Millennium

GM Crops - Is Anyone Listening?

There have been some complaints about the low profile of the UK's new Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), which suggested a failure to gauge the public mood on GM crops. I don't think it's so simple. Since 1993 I have chaired a Church of Scotland working group on GM crops and animals with a small group of specialists of varying backgrounds and opinions. Although we disagree over many things, we all felt there has been a serious democratic deficit over decision making in biotechnology, and in 1998 report Engineering Genesis we called for an independent ethical commission which would stand back and ask the wider questions. It would need a wide representation in its membership, to do its business in public, and have extensive public consultation.

Belatedly, the government set up the AEBC. I attended its first meeting in London last December. They spent the whole morning hearing views from the public about what the AEBC's priorities and plans should be. In the afternoon the Commission meeting proper discussed what it had just heard, with all of us still there, watching and listening. At the end, we expressed our genuine appreciation at the Commission's surprising openness and willingness to listen.

Indeed, two comments had come from the Black Isle group opposed to the local crop trials and from Highland Council in nearby Inverness. As a direct result, the AEBC came up to Inverness in February to hold a public meeting about the trials controversy. It has since had public sessions in three parts of the UK, including Edinburgh, where they also met with our Church of Scotland group. It may not be perfect, but compared with the past, the AEBC and its sister bodies the Food Standards Agency and Human Genetics Commission have gone quite a long way in consulting.

... but how do you "consult the people"?

I think these bodies have a willingness to be open, but there is a basic problem. How do you consult with 5 million Scots on biotechnology, let alone 56 million Brits? No one has come up with a satisfactory answer. It isn't just a matter of getting consumers on to advisory committees. I am a member of one such group of the Biotechnology Research Council on issues of public concern, where I and others have considerable freedom to express concerns on current issues. But these committees are finding it difficult to keep the commitment of individual lay members, who have no wider organisation to report back to. 'The public' are proving hard to find.

Opinion poll percentages do not always prove reliable when checked against in depth focus group studies, or against consumer behaviour. At a conference in August 2000 on agriculture and food ethics, Dutch and British social scientists announced results of surveys where they compared stated consumer preferences on food choices - like free range eggs - with what the same consumers did in practice in the supermarket. Both studies found that they bought much more by price than for their claimed ethical preferences.

Who says we are all opposed to GM crops?

The true picture on GM opinion is a lot more complex, some thing you only find by asking in more depth, as I have also found when discussing GM issues with church groups across Scotland. Some people are opposed, some in favour, but the most frequent response has been one of confusion. Very reasonably, they ask, who we can trust to tell the truth, when companies, trials trashers and the Government all have vested interests, and they only tell you the aspects of the story they want you to hear?

So are we all as opposed to GM crops as some newspapers suggest, ready to take to the streets if the Government ever dared to go ahead with some GM commercial planting? Or is that only what vested interests would like us to believe? The truth is that no one actually knows.

Is anyone actually bothered what the public think?

Against the charge that the AEBC is just a 'sop to public opinion', for a government which already has its policies decided, I would ask which organisations truly want to hear what people think, and would they change their behaviour accordingly? I suspect that biotech companies and environmentalists may both be too committed to their particular causes to be as open as that. Would intending demonstrators or trashers stop to find out first if they had a popular mandate, any more than Monsanto did before importing unsegregated GM soya into Europe?

We in the SRT Project and others are watching closely to see if the UK Government, and not just AEBC, is indeed open. But we shouldn't knock them for trying to listen at last.

Based on an article by Donald Bruce published in The Scotsman newspaper, Friday 3 August 2001

Return to Top of the Page
SRT Project Home Page
SRT GM Food Pages
Go to SRT Contents Page
SRT Website Map

This page was created on 15 August 2001.