The Economist

Who's Afraid?

If the current British furore over genetically modified foods were a crop not a crisis, you can bet Monsanto or its competitors would have patented it. It has many of the traits that genetic engineers prize: it is incredibly fertile, thrives in inhospitable conditions, has tremendous consumer appeal and is easy to cross with other interests to create a hardy new hybrid. Moreover, it seems to resist anything that might kill it, from scientific evidence to official reassurance. Now it seems to be spreading to other parts of Europe, Australia and even America. There, regulators will face the same questions that confront the British government: how should the public be reassured, and how can the benefits of GM foods be reaped without harm, either to human beings or to the environment?

At least most governments will not have to deal with a rebellious royal: Britain's protesters, once a handful of cranks, now march under the Prince of Wales's colours. Retailers and manufacturers have been bounced into promising to banish the stuff from their shelves and stocks. The finer points of genetic engineering were once confined to scientific conferences; now, protesters have been pressing for discussion at this weekend's G8 summit in Cologne. Even America, home to the world's leading GM crop breeders and growers, is discovering a new vein of domestic protest. The consumer backlash threatens to undermine both this new technology and the credibility of the agencies that regulate it.

Modified medicine, but not modified foods

With medicine, the boon of biotechnology has been obvious. People readily accept it when they see how better drugs and clearer diagnoses improve their lives. Why is it different when biotech is applied to agriculture? The answer is that the clearest gains from the current crop of GM plants go not to consumers but to producers. Indeed, that was what their developers intended: an appeal to farmers offered the purveyors of GM technology the best hope of a speedy return. For consumers, especially in the rich world, the benefits of super-yielding soyabeans are less clear: the world, by and large, already has too much food in its stores; developing countries principally lack money, not food as such. Yet companies still pitch their products as a cure for malnutrition, even though little that they are doing can justify such a noble claim.

The next generation of GM crops may at least offer more gains to eaters as well as cultivators: foods that taste better, can be stored for longer, grow more readily and are less likely to trigger allergies. But, inadvertently, in hyping the technology as the only answer to everything from pest control to world hunger, the industry has fed the popular view that its products are unsafe, unnecessary and bad for the environment.

Such fears are largely groundless. Of the two main charges against GM crops, by far the weaker is that they are unsafe to eat. Critics assert that genetic engineering introduces into food genes that are not present naturally, cannot be introduced through conventional breeding and may have unknown health effects that should be investigated before the food is sold to the public. GM crops such as the maize and soyabeans that now blanket America certainly differ from their garden-variety neighbours. Indeed, this is why their creators, such as America's Monsanto and Switzerland's Novartis, can patent them. But there is a broad scientific consensus that the present generation of GM foods is safe. Even so, this does little to reassure consumers. Food frights such as mad cow disease and revelations of cancer-causing dioxin in Belgian food have sorely undermined their confidence in scientific pronouncements and regulatory authorities alike. GM foods have little future in Europe until this faith can be restored.

Transparent, but also tested

Making the regulatory system more transparent would be a good place to start. At the moment, many British consumers are unaware that there is any procedure at all for vetting GM foods. The European system of approving such foods for sale on the shelves or for planting in the fields is a mishmash of national and supranational authorities that ends up blurring the line between scientific concerns and political interest. A co-ordinated pan-European system to deal with the scientific assessment of GM foods, along the lines of Europe's medicines evaluation agency, would go some way towards cleaning up this mess. Public confidence would also be boosted by giving consumers a clearer sense of participation in the regulatory process, so that they do not feel that such products are being foisted on them by authorities who are cosier with the industry than with shoppers. So Britain is wise to include public-interest groups and consumer representatives on the advisory committees that are being set up to look at the social and ethical aspects of biotechnology. The American government is following suit. Labelling is also essential if consumers are to make informed choices. The EU has mandatory labelling laws, but they are hard to implement without clearer technical standards. Sweet are the uses of adversity, though Monsanto and its peers may find this difficult to swallow.

The second big worry about GM food is that it may harm the environment. The producers argue that the engineered traits-such as resistance to certain brands of herbicide or types of insects and virus-actually do ecological good by reducing chemical use and improving yields so that less land needs to go under the plough. Opponents retort that any such benefits are far outweighed by the damage such crops might do. They worry that pesticide-resistant genes may spread from plants that should be saved to weeds that have to be killed. They fear a loss of biodiversity. They fret that the in-built resistance to bugs that some GM crops will have may poison insects such as the Monarch butterfly, and allow other, nastier bugs to develop a natural resistance and thrive.

Many of these fears are based on results from limited experiments, often in the laboratory. The only way to discover whether they will arise in real life, or whether they will be any more damaging than similar risks posed by conventional crops and farming practice, is to do more research in the field. Banning the experimental growth of GM plants, as some protesters want (and some EU governments have indeed done), simply deprives scientists of their most fruitful laboratory.

Much of the public fuss about GM food is misplaced. But governments or companies still cannot ignore it. Food fears and environmental qualms spread more readily than good sense or wise science. The best ways to win public support are to offer full information; to regulate openly and responsibly; and to ensure that the benefits of genetic engineering are seen to go not only to companies. Doing all this would go a long way to allaying people's fears about GM foodand might even persuade them of its potential benefits.

Links

Genetix Snowball's campaign against GM foods is explained in its handbook. Friends of the Earth has also joined the campaign against GM foods. Mothers for Natural Law takes up the fight against GMOs in the United States. Monsanto, AstraZeneca, Novartis and AgrEvo present their arguments. Two British supermarkets, Sainsbury's and Tesco, have issued statements on the debate. The Royal Society published two reports on GMOs, in April 1999 and September 1998. Dr Arpad Pusztai's response to those reports is published on his site. The British Medical Association released its interim statement on the subject in May. An American group, the Union for Concerned Scientists, has produced a collection of briefing papers on the use of biotechnology in agriculture. The US Food and Drug Administration has produced a series of publications on biotechnology and food. Details of the International Food and Information Council's survey on consumers' attitudes toward food biotechnology in the United States are available from the IFIC site. Britain's National Farmers' Union has produced a set of guidelines for farmers growing genetically modified crops.