Published
by the IEA in March 2000
The GMO
Stories from the troubled beginning of the biological century
By
A note on funding.
This essay was mostly
funded by a fee equivalent to about two months' work and by travel and meetings
within Canada, sponsored by a group of Canadian bio-tech interests and
co-ordinated by Performance Plants,
a university-based bio-tech start-up (see Chapter Four). I am grateful for the
money, time and energy invested by everyone I met and am happy to declare that
I have felt no pressure whatever to conform to any party's views.
A note on notes
For ease of browsing and
searching, most references are in square brackets after the quotes used. Some,
numbered in square brackets in the text, relate to notes numbered in square
brackets towards the end of the text.
A note on links
Several useful links are
inserted in the text at the first mention of the organisation or site
concerned. There is also a links page where they are listed amongst others not
mentioned in the text.
Contents
Preface: My purposes and
prejudices
Chapter One: GMOs and the
New Dissidents: how GMOs got political
Chapter Two: Biotechnology
in practice: the Western perspective
Chapter Three:
Biotechnology and prejudice: the British media takes on GMOs
Chapter Four:
Biotechnology, the facts. Professor David Dennis answers common questions
Notes (numbered in text)
Author's biography
Links
Preface: My purposes and
prejudices
My purposes
This is a story about one
important way in which late twentieth century people looked at the world as it
transformed itself into the twenty-first. In Chapter One especially, it is an
account of the way debate about GMOs - genetically modified organisms -
transmuted into a debate about capitalism and quite a lot else.
In
This work is not a blow
by blow account of the science which underlies an assessment of the benefits
and risks of the agricultural and food revolution which are promised and
threatened by the genetic engineering technologies. But something like an
account of the science emerges in Chapter Three as we pitch the expert view
against the popular one in the
My prejudices
This essay is intended to
be fair, but it is rooted, as most writing or speaking does, in a prejudice. I
have what is becoming a long history of opposing the "green" and
leftist thinking which despairs of man's role on the planet [see my Life On a
Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress, Manchester University Press (UK) and
St Martin's Press (USA), 1995] GMOs have all the enemies I have found myself
viscerally to be opposed to, and I am disposed to defend most of their friends.
I believe the great corporations which are trying to develop this technology
are beleaguered and surprisingly powerless. So I am well-disposed towards, say,
Monsanto, the arch-villain for so many. I believe
the governments which are seeking to regulate but allow the introduction of
GMOs are broadly right in their approach. I approve of the way they are quite
deaf to the calls of "consumers", "greens", and the liberal
establishment of the media, and are not overly enticed by the immediate
electoral advantage of this or that case.
The Blairite modernisers
The Blair government in
the
With GMOs, the picture was clearer. This was a high-tech
business, underpinned by university work and cool start-up firms. It was
post-industrial. It was field in which
In
our times, the respectable voices of expert committees were largely, cautiously
but definitely in favour of GMOs. Only the public and the media were antagonistic. Well, so be it. Suddenly,
the government ceased to be populist and spoke of its respect for expert
advice. It stood by the elitism implicit in expertise, and warmed suddenly to
the stodgy respectabilities of Parliament, where its ministers were happy to
adopt the gravitas of old.
Naturally, as a reactionary and a conservative, I deeply
oppose the government over fur [RDN's
fur document] . I rail against the government's failure
to appreciate the dynamic contemporary relevance of the hereditary element in
the House of Lords [see richarddnorth.com].
I approve of the foot-dragging over foxhunting and hunting in general [see richarddnorth.com].
But I especially warmed to the government when it stuck
by GMOs. That picture has unfortunately worsened in recent months (see Mr
Blair's comments below [The Times,
I am disposed to
like government of any stripe when it does the unpopular, right, thing. I am
instinctively hostile to the approach of the media and the campaign groups
which oppose the government, GMOs and the WTO.
I believe that the impulse which drives people who are
variously well-informed, older, experienced or right of centre to support GMOs
and the WTO is simply that they see scientific progress and the orderly
development of free trade as lying
firmly in the tradition of their culture. I assert, in company with others,
that the 17th Century British Enlightenment is the core of that tradition. [The
Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes, Little, Brown, 1998]
I am in thrall to the Enlightenment project, which I take
to be the effort to celebrate the rational individual and his right to live his
own life with as little interference from others as possible. The Enlightenment insists that we
should try to place evidence and reason before impulse and superstition. It leads
one into Euro-centrism above undue admiration of the "noble savage";
it supposes that scientific medicine is better than quackery; it supposes that the human person is
similarly valuable, and probably rather similar, wherever he or she is found;
it supposes that civilisation is finer than the primitive. It is elitist and
not alarmist; it tries to discover what rules work, and discounts the impulsive
as way of running societies. In politics, it celebrates the representative
democracy which elects a parliament more liberal, thoughtful, stern and
generous than the people who elect it. It is worried by the prospect of a more
febrile, plebiscitic style of government because it would of course be
crueller.
The Enlightenment
project is a hard master: it imposes the obligation that we inform ourselves as
well as possible. It requires that we build institutions we can trust on
matters we cannot understand. It insists that we respect evidence. It calls on
us to respect the competing rights of our fellows. Thus does the project embed
the individual in two societies, a "virtual" society of agreed facts,
insights and expertise (I shall call it the "Academy" for shorthand),
and the actual society of his fellow man.
It is the growing gulf between unruly, populist
individualism and its sponsors on the one hand, and the "Academy" and
government, on the other, which makes the GMO and WTO issues so interesting.
Oddly, only the discipline of the
"Academy" and society really confer freedom on individuals. That is
why the "new dissidents" are so dangerous. They figure deliberate
irrationalism as representing freedom of thought, and they propose populism as
representing society.
Any casually interested observers will be wondering about
that gulf, especially if they look at the reports of the Royal
Society
(see the "science policy" section of its site), the House
of Lords select committee on the European Communities, or the Nuffield Foundation's ethics council. The reports to be
found there are valuable because they are measured as well as informed. The
Nuffield report, especially, is the work of a group of people whose remit freed
them from the need to consider commercial drivers, and which included people
whose bias was "green". But all those documents are the result of
scientifically-informed assessment of the benefits and risks the new
technologies offer and pose. They are a cautious endorsement of the current progress of the technology,
and call for a regulatory approach which is similarly permissive, and similarly
cautious, to those regulating, say, the chemical and nuclear industries. I am
inclined to trust their judgements. But the important thing to note is that
they have made no dent whatever in the outpourings of the campaigners and the
media. That is the peculiarity we shall be looking at, rather than
second-guessing the science involved.
Science is not certain or
monolithic
Scientists have their
biases, too. And they do not all agree on the interpretation - the status and
meaning - of any particular piece of evidence. Often, minority voices within
science are proved more right than the conventional wisdom. A layman cannot
believe everything science tells him, because it tells him contradictory
things. He must come to a judgement which cannot be deeply informed but can yet
be canny. It will be a judgement which steers its way around the rocks of dissension
on which live the competing sirens of, to port, excessive caution, and to
starboard, of excessive aggressiveness. The Precautionary Principle is supposed
by many to be a beacon leading to very great caution. As I argue elsewhere [see
my Life On a Modern Planet, Manchester University Press, 1995, and Risk: The
human adventure, forthcoming from
I have long experience and a certain expertise in the
assessment of debates, and especially a debate of the kind raging round GMOs
and the WTO. This gives one no monopoly on wisdom, and it does not infallibly
lead to one's making the right decision on policy issues either. But it gives
one the leverage with which to suggest to interested bystanders that the
overwhelming consensus they hear in the popular media is deeply flawed.
It may seem odd that a self-proclaimed reactionary and
conservative is espousing the cause of progress and modernity. So be it. It
seems to me that there is a very old tradition of supporting science as it
explores the world, and of technology as it seeks to use knowledge to better
mankind. It was the tradition of mankind and civilisation before it was given
names such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This confusion - this
nuanced understanding that life has its ineluctable dilemmas - is at the core of
the Enlightenment. It is why there is no dogma or orthodoxy to be wrung from
its values. [For a good discussion on this, see Henry F May, The Enlightenment
in
Further, there is an old tradition of appreciating
government as it seeks to balance interests within a nation. This is where the
second modern dissident misunderstanding is so important: government is not about pandering to the
passing whim of ignorant voters. It has responsibilities to unpopular matters
such as earning the nation's living, considering the long-term interests of the
people, and to the evidence which serious people place before it. We ought to bolster and respect governments
when we see and hear them being thoughtful and responsible, and though their
being unpopular is not a sure sign that they are being these things, it is
often a good beginning.
I plead guilty to not being a libertarian to the point of
being much of an anarchist. And I am not a conservative to the point of being a
Luddite. So this is an essay by a progressive, romantic, conservative,
optimistic, reactionary, modernist traditionalist. That, with any luck, will
add to its likelihood of being balanced, clear, rational, and emotionally rich.
We shall see.
I shall tell the story of the GMO saga in a slightly
unconventional way. I shall start with a look at the arguments, the debates and
debaters, into which this issue stepped. The I shall look at the way it has
been seen in a very different culture, one that has lived with these
technologies for longer than
Chapter One: GMOs and the
New Dissidents: how GMOs got political
GMOs and the debates they
are part of
The argument about GMOs
is the latest in a long line of debates in which there has been an
extraordinary gap between the messages put out by most of the media and the
"campaigners", and those put about by most of those who have
knowledge of the science. To put the thing in a nutshell, it is, like many
debates, a clear case of the polarisation of the "progressive" on one
hand, and the "Luddite" on the other. Many people seem now to feel
the need to construct a powerful "parallel universe" in which to
shelter from the real world. Many of them adopt alternative therapies for every
ailment of body, mind and spirit. Others figure the corporation, the
Establishment, "politicians", the City, and "reductionism"
as malign. They believe their world to be polluted and ecologically condemned.
Some of such people go beyond mouthing these platitudes, manifestly falsified
by their own vibrant, free and affluent lives, and take action in order to bear
witness to what they take to be perennial and proven truths, or at least valued
insights, in a world dominated, as they see it, by a footloose greed and empty
scientificism.
The GMOs debate was manna from heaven for all these. It
is quite new and it is amazingly vigorous. Five years ago, it had barely
surfaced. It developed in the next few years, and especially during 1997 and
1998, to the point where in 1999 it became the hottest non-political issue in
the British media. It may assume something of that status in north America1.
After all, this sort of debate is good at travelling: its first really
passionate inspiration came to
Several extraordinary features combine to make the GMO
debate the glorious beast it is. It is, first, being conducted in part by
highly professional people. It is, second, a debate for which the public has a
great appetite. It is, third, curiously familiar: the arguments used may be
good, bad or indifferent, but they are being played out in an arena which has
heard many similar arguments.
This is not to say that the outcome is at all
predictable. Indeed, if it has elements of a morality tale, a soap opera, a
mythological saga, it also has elements of a war game. The actors and the
audience cannot predict the outcome of the play.
Most stories are about the past, and the myriad
interpretations that can be put upon it. In the modern world, where the media
is so important, the most exciting stories are about the unfolding of the
present and the battle for the future. They are not so much a battle for the
public mind, or for a majority view, but a battle for the media. The
professionals gathered around this story must fashion accounts which are
believed by the media because what the media believes will be crucial to how
the politicians respond and how the next chapter of the future unfolds.
So this story is being scripted, like a soap opera, as
the performance rolls on. It is a drama which at some points touches the real
world and is touched by the real world. As in any soap opera, the writers know
what the actors like saying and how they relate together. But, as Harold
Macmillan is supposed to have said, "Events, dear boy, events" will
intrude. It is even more like an improvisation than most soap operas: the
actors and writers have to respond to sudden new inputs of evidence, fact and
whimsical circumstance. The actors are pundits, experts, spokesmen, and
politicians and how they react, in real-time, live on the media, determines how
the script proceeds. Besides, this is a drama which is being put together by
diverse hands, and by opposing hands. This is a propaganda war.
Of course, no
debate is quite new: each newcomer tends to fit, or to stretch, a template
which has evolved historically. It is
fashionable nowadays to discuss issues in terms of the "narrative"
they present, and it certainly makes sense in the case of GMOs to stress how
this technology fitted rather well as the latest episode in an unfolding drama.
The drama's main players were familiar to us, and its main themes were
recognisable though they were appearing under new names and in different
costumes.
GMOs seem likely to be a very bad thing to most British
people. Who needs a Frankenstein technology, introduced by American
corporations for the improvement of their profits, whatever the effect on
people? Who can feel safe, when they are safe-guarded by a ministry of food
which brought us BSE and a ruined countryside? Who can trust a Labour
government which is obsessed by its relations with
With these strands woven through the story, we see how it
snowballed so amazingly during 1999. More people, or at least more campaign
organisations, seemed able to combine, or at least share a hymn sheet, against
this technology than could agree on nearly anything else. Christians saw that
it was an offence against God and his nature. Consumer groups saw that they
were being denied the choice and the right to refuse to consume GMOs [3].
Greens of a political kind could see
this is a typical product of industrial capitalism. Wildlife bodies could see
GMOs threaten the inherited landscape and its denizens [4]. Conservation and
environmental bodies could see it as an unacceptably risky threat to the public
and the wider world.[5] Food writers could see it as threatening the cherished
"naturalness" they had always argued for. Early in January 1999, several
"foodies" teamed up to form a new campaign with Greeenpeace (one
which took that environmental and conservation organisation in to a new
consumerist and health field).[6] The organic movement, already widely seen as
involved in a David and Goliath struggle with corporate farming, determined
this new contaminant as even more nasty than the chemicals they had already
been fighting. Third world development charities could see GMOs as technology
poor farmers could not afford, but which might help rich farming interests and
therefore was a typical modernist assault on the picturesque and slightly
enhanced poverty they had long considered proper to the developing world. [7]
Opposition parties agreed that the government's enthusiasm for GMOs represented
perhaps the first issue in which New Labour was out of sync with popular
opinion as it sought to remake
Of course, the professionalism of many of the more moderate
of these groups demands a diplomatic language which is especially
mealy-mouthed. They have populist constituencies and prejudices, which tends to
make them absolutist, but they have a place at the negotiating table, and often
a degree of wisdom, which requires an incrementalism.
Many of the groups
- the consumer groups and development agencies amongst them - tended in various
degrees to note briefly the potential advantages of the technology to their
constituencies, and then to pronounce gloomily on bad likely outcomes.
Thus, Christian Aid
pronounced
"In theory
biotechnology could be of significant benefit to farmers, including to small
and marginal farmers in the developing world. Apart from resistance to insect
pests (thus reducing pesticide costs), it could create drought resistant crop
varieties which would therefore not require the expense of irrigation, for
example, or varieties which would grow in saline and other poor soils. However,
in practice there are significant concerns about the risks involved in using
GMOs in general and about its effects on small farmers in particular. There are
also concerns about ownership and control of the technology." [8]
These groups need to keep
their "stakeholder" places at the table in the forums of consultation
by stressing the need for lots regulation. They are also free, of course, to
develop the most popular of all modern arguments: that in favour of caution.
For the Consumers' Association, for example, Sue Davies told a House of Lords
inquiry, "I think it is very
important to be far more cautious about what we are doing , particularly as we
are likely to be growing these crops on a very wide scale across the
world".[9] This language often leans on the idea of the Precautionary
Principle, whose dangerous superficiality is little understood. Campaigners
routinely claim the Precautionary Principle as insisting that mere absence of
certainty that a product or process poses a risk is sufficient to condone a ban
on it. Regulators have only ever conceded that a ban may be justified if there
is good suggestive evidence that a product or process may be a serious risk.
Some of the groups took an absolutist line. This is
normally based on a strict interpretation of the Precautionary Principle. For Greenpeace, GMOs could never be proved safe and
therefore direct action against tests and trials designed to find out where
problems might lie could be assaulted and halted at will. Greenpeace's
philosophy can be seen in the following exchange at the HoL inquiry:
"Chairman: Your
opposition to the release of GMOs, that is an absolute and definite opposition?
Lord Melchett: It is a
permanent and definite and complete opposition based on a view that there will
always be major uncertainties. It is the nature of the technology, indeed it is
the nature of science, that there will not be any absolute proof. No scientist
would sit before your Lordships and claim that if they were a scientist at
all." [10]
The difficult is of
course that it is absolutely impossible ever to prove that anything at all is
safe. But the reader need only look at Lord Melchett's remarks and see how
totally prohibitive they would be if applied to any new technology whatever. He
prescribes an end to everything new. He deploys an argument which might be
called "luminous irrationalism": stating a nonsense which is so much
on the side of the angels that it eludes serious discussion.
Going further than the Consumers' Association, which
merely presses the case for consumer choice, some of the food writers asserted
that freedom to choose to eat or not eat GMOs was not enough. Supermarkets must
prove their trust-worthiness by refusing to stock them at all. Joanna Blythman,
for instance, went beyond the common suggestion that labelling was necessary:
"As food writers we intend to focus the debate by sending out a powerful
message to food producers, the food industry and retailers: 'If you want us to
trust your brand, to give you our business, don't stock gene food'. Thus, she
wanted to deny other shoppers the choice to buy GMOs if they wanted. [Observer,
1999a]
Most of these groups could see how GMOs fitted in a line
of argument they had been developing for years (some quoted BSE as its
immediate precursor). Some might be suspected of seeing how GMOs represented an
infusion of life into what had been a flagging enthusiasm for their causes.
Others - and especially the political parties - simply had to get a handle on a
debate which was hot.
The campaigners and politicians had the run of the media,
and those who opposed them were largely dismissed as merely self-interested.
Those broadsheets which were prepared to give a fair voice to the proponents of
GMOs had plenty of high profile and impressive voices to express the populist,
antagonistic view which they knew mattered and which they mostly found
attractive anyway [11]. The majority of opinion formers in
But it is important to see that the real importance of
the GMO debate is that it is only partly about GMOs, or about the impact of
GMOs in themselves. We have been looking here at GMOs as a technological
development in food and agriculture. They are much more than that. GMOs are an
issue which fits beautifully a quite modern concern about capitalism. Just as
socialism was finally declared dead, at least for now and in the boom times
which were always bad for the corporatist view (as opposed to the corporate
view), it is not the fact of capitalism which is now controversial, but the
form in which it operates. The new campaign is very widespread, provided as it
is by arguments from all over the political spectrum, and with physical support
from people who have no politic at all
The new dissidents - scruffy
and respectable
During the late 90s we
had seen the development of a quite new sort of campaigner. It was bizarre.
There were scruffy young middle class kids hanging on to the tatters of a
charmed life and charming attitude who dug tunnels, squatted houses and lived
in trees, in order to stop airport, road and housing developments which had
been scrupulously discussed and re-discussed by every tier of democratically
legitimate authority in the state, from top to bottom. These people had
intermittently pleased the media and their new middle class neighbours as they
bore witness to scrappy woodlands which had acquired heroic status because they
stood in the way of a progress the temporarily scruffy scions of the affluent,
and especially the nearby, NIMBY, affluent, disliked.
These rather amiable protestors were joined by dead-head
grungy punks, the epitome of alienation, who looked a little like them, but
were drunker, more drugged and sadder than the others.
All these agreed that
GMOs were a natural new enemy alongside roads and runways and housing
developments. These new campaigners had not cut their teeth, as previous
protest generations had, on fighting The Bomb, chemical plants and nuclear
power, or on saving the whale. They have a different agenda, to do with living
a certain lifestyle on the fringes of society, yet reshaping its values from
this vantage point. GMOs represented at once the addition of a
"pollution" issue - an issue to do with industrial processes and
products, and science and technology - to their previous areas of concern. But
this new one also fitted their previous agenda, which was about power and
culture much more than about anything more easily and physically identifiable.
.... And the wider
arguments
This wider issue of the state's
role, of materialism and progress, of the corporation and the provision of
goods and services, has been discussed
in new ways by many articulate and academic voices. The soft left developed the
theme that the nation state and its accountability was being undermined by
footloose corporations and amorphous enemies such as the speculator. Some
successful speculators and entrepreneurs (Soros, Goldsmith, Perot) who had
flourished on global markets started to speak about the social and
environmental dangers of these tendencies. John Gray, in False Dawn: The
delusions of global capitalism [Granta, 1998] put a subtler case. He argued, as
many a pro-capitalist might, that the multinational might not be so
multinational as was sometimes thought (its culture, headquarters, major market
and legal frameworks were all likely to be firmly rooted in a nation state). He
argued, as an old fashioned traditionalist might, that the nation state was not
so weak as was supposed. Certainly, anyway, the multinationals and the nation
states needed each other. But all the same, Gray argues, the mobility of
capital and the tyranny of the free market ethos as espoused by the World Trade
Organisation, for instance, would lead to inequity and instability around the
world.
So the soft left and greens found themselves keen on
these billionaires, who would previously have epitomised the forces they most
abhorred. The nationalists, and union-based protectionists (Pat Buchanan, in
the USA, for instance) found common cause with the same sort of view, so the
far right and the far left rallied to the cause. The far right and the far
left, the intellectual and the worker, the green and the billionaire, the
academic and the squatter all had powerful points of agreement. Unwashed direct
action campaigners were allied with mortgaged, mainstream campaigners. Tories
and communists were of one accord. These all mostly agreed most about GMOs and
that quite wide agenda, but shades of all these sections of opinion saw the
link and the parity between GMOs and WTO, and so agreed about the widest
possible agenda as well.
It was a pretty pickle.
GMOs and globalism
Actually, international
trade and the relationship between farmers in one country and food consumers in
another is a very old one indeed. Free Trade and protectionism have been
amongst the fiercest of controversies in British politics for getting on for a
couple of centuries.
In recent years, it has seemed to define economic life.
As David Hale [in "Second Chance", published in Fortune, 22 November,
1999] says:
"While the
multinational corporation has spearheaded global integration, portfolio
investment has also grown deeper and broader. In the half-century before 1914,
most capital flows traced back to a few thousand wealthy European families.
Today they are driven by fund managers allocating the savings of hundreds of
millions of people in pension funds and mutual funds. Currently most of the
world's retirement assets are in the U.S., Britain, Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and a few other, English-speaking countries. But countries as
diverse as Chile and Thailand have been promoting pension savings, which also
should encourage the growth of their domestic capital markets. When the Cold
War ended ten years ago, there were probably about 100 million people on the
planet who owned a share of stock or had a pension plan. By the year 2010, it
is not difficult to imagine the number rising to one billion. China's stock
market is only eight years old, but the country already has more than 60 million
retail stockholders - that's more stockholders than Communist Party members.
The processes bringing the world economy together seem all but
irreversible."
Hale goes on to say that
nothing is, in fact, inevitable, as witness the first world war's rude interruption
of the Gold Age.
"The lesson from
1914 is that economic integration alone does not guarantee that nations will
agree to co-operate or even avoid trying to destroy one another. The forces of
nationalism, tribalism, and ethnic rivalry are still very much part of the
human condition, especially in developing countries. Remember that two-thirds
of the world's people still live in the countryside. Between now and the time
they are integrated into an Internet-ready, supranational, total-quality-management
economy lies great potential for conflict. The recent world-wide embrace of
market economies and global free trade gives us a second chance to share the
benefits of the Industrial Revolution with all the world. We should take care
to do better this time."
Historically, however,
Free Trade was an informal fact, and it was debated as an internal matter for a
country or between countries: it was an argument between the competing need of
farmers for protection and of citizens for cheap food. The danger of
protectionist policies was tariff wars, and there was of course the contrary
danger of exposing a nation's producers to the whims of the market. Countries
conducted discussions about how to avoid such disputes.
After the Second World War, however, the Bretton Woods
"family" of international institutions, including the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, sought to organise an international order which
was overtly and systematically devoted to the free market and free trade. GATT
developed into the World Trade Organisation in the 90s and the WTO found itself
almost immediately extraordinarily, and unexpectedly, famous.
The governments of the world, who largely accept a free
market doctrine, are edging toward a system in which the willing sellers of a
product made according to the laws of one country should be allowed to take
their chance on world markets as they seek willing buyers all over the world.
Unawares, this presumption came under intense attack. The bland globalisation
of world brands in every product from cars to coffee shops was part of it. The
sense - quite wrong - that the nation state was being over run by free-booting
capitalism was part of it. The very implacable certainty in most of the
political classes that there was no other place to go than global markets, was
part of it. Crucially, it was shift from the old view that the world was
suffering from poverty and pollution, toward a newer sense that it was a
psychological damage, a psychic and a spiritual deficit, that was now being incurred.
Anyway, the new protest of the late 90s felt and looked and was quite different
to the protest which previous trailblazing hotheads had known. It was incohate,
unfunded, unscripted. But it was powerful and successful.
GMO, free trade and
government
Those who seek to
persuade a consumer government to throw up bans against goods in such trade are
on easy street. They will usually point to an abundance of alternative,
uncontroversial products; they can show that by definition the suspect import
was produced without benefit to, say, British workers. It is the consuming
society's government which is in a terrible bind: they face the domestic
pressure for the ban and just as surely they face international pressure not to
legislate for such a ban. Politicians such as Tony Blair seem genuinely seized
of the merits of the idea of world free trade and are therefore predisposed to
accept that from time to time other prejudices - for instance against GMOs -
will have to be swept aside. They face the problem that large sections of the
public are indifferent to economic policy debate, and especially so in a period
of affluence when people are inclined to forget that economic policy underpins
affluence.
The world's politicians may have embraced free trade on
slender evidence that it will enrich their electorates. They may easily be
deflected from their free trade mission when very major interests at home seem
to dictate it. But for the time being, the last years of the 1990's seem to
confirm that mature economies which embrace the free market doctrine seem to
thrive. The top table, the major league, the major Western nations and those
Asian and south American nations which matter most, have embraced this
thinking. They do so ambivalently, and inconsistently, and they do so with an
agenda which is importantly set by the USA. But they do so, and - other things
being equal - they would much rather not pick a fight with the US about GMOs
and the north Americans' right to put into trade crops produced by using the
technology.
These progressive, populist, apparently left of centre
governments (Britain's is actually a right of centre government in disguise)
may have importantly underestimated the strength of feeling against GMOs. On
the other hand they may believe, and be right, that the slope of history is
with them and that opposition will fall away. Either way, the politicians and
their opponents, whether on Free Trade or GMOs - seem to be on different
planets. As the noisy forces which hate capitalism and corporations see that
Free Trade and the World Trade Organisation give them a perfect platform on
which to marshal their forces, GMOs give them a perfect banner around which to
rally.
So GMOs not merely represent the unacceptable face of
corporate progress, they also represent the unacceptable face of the drive
toward free trade. The opponents of capitalism have decided that it is
corporations, and the multi-nationalism of corporations, which they can best
target. In GMOs, then, they have everything they could possibly desire. The
have a frightening technology which is associated with an American
multinational which stands to lose mightily if its lobbying on behalf of free
trade were to fail. Hence the giddy trajectory which saw GMOs surface, like a
submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile, unexpected but highly developed, and soar unstoppably into
the heavens on target for the Seattle meeting of the WTO in late November 1999.
GMOs and other unnatural
technologies
GMOs fitted into a
pattern of previous issues. The obvious comparisons and contrasts are with
previous large technological developments, and amongst several candidates, the
nuclear industry stands out. Genetic engineering has close parallels with the
nuclear industry. Both involve rather fundamental interference with invisible
elements in the natural world. Both depend on uniquely Twentieth Century
insights about the physical world. Both promise great benefits but carry risks
which are harder to assess. Both threaten disasters whose reverberations might
be very long-lasting. Both are espoused by clever scientists whose familiarity
with arcane knowledge gives them insights denied the rest of us and about which
many people feel increasingly sceptical.
There are big differences, too. The largest is that GMOs
are being developed in a world in which protest is systemetised,
professionalised and popular. The drama into which the nuclear scientists
stepped was very different to the drama into which genetic engineers have
stepped. The modern version is a drama watched by an audience which is both far
more vocal and far more scientifically informed than greeted the rise of
nuclear fission. And yet the debate has not acquired scientific literacy along
with increased volume. We need to scrape away a little at this fact. When we do
so, we see that many modern people are
very sure that they have received many, perhaps too many, of the benefits of
progress and believe that they imagine that they now prefer live in world which
does not impose on them any more new technologies.
Peculiarly, it is not clear that the public is
particularly convinced that nuclear power is safe, or safe enough. More likely,
they realise that their own lives have not demonstrated any particular
vulnerability to nuclear power and thus they are not inclined to get
over-excited by it. But there is a quality of uneasy truce over the nuclear
issue. The publics of the West seem more or less to accept that nuclear
facilities exist and are not exciting. But the Governments of the west, and especially
of the UK and the USA, have not dared to propose further developments of
nuclear power and they have not dared either to press forward with long-term
disposal options for nuclear waste. Sooner or later, they will have to address
the waste issue. Arguably, they ought also to press ahead with explaining why
the nuclear risk is worth taking. In somewhat similar terms, they will soon
have to explain the merits of GMOs.
But GMOs already face far greater scepticism than nuclear
power ever did. The opposition to GMOs is far more mainstream than the
opposition to nuclear ever was. To be anti-nuclear in the 70s and 80s was to be
vaguely hippy and "alternative". The core opposition to GMOs includes
those tendencies, but transcends them too. At its core is dissidence, but it is
a new widespread dissidence.
An important part
of this matter is that it involves perceived government failures. Modern people
believe that they have already suffered some of the disadvantages of
ill-considered progress and that governments, indeed the official world in
general, has let them down. The formal democratic processes of regulations most
signally allowed the BSE crisis to develop. This simple failure inclines large
numbers of people to support the campaigners whose main profession it is to
second-guess the official world.
Chapter Two:
Biotechnology in
practice: the Western perspective
Background
The story of
genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) begins a long time ago. Its origins are
in rural regions far from urbanite Europe or north America. It begins when man
first worked with the woof and warp of the plant-life around him and
"domesticated" the wilderness. In truth, rather like the so-called
"domestication" of animals, the plants probably more than half
domesticated themselves and they probably domesticated man at the same time.
Just as many of our prized wild flowers are mostly weeds which have hitched a
ride with agriculture and forestry, and now depend on them, man developed crops
out of plants which thrived, for instance, in the circumstances of being freed from weedy competition. As they
thrived, so he settled.
For most of history, people would have agreed with
Jonathan Swift when he wrote: "And he gave it for his opinion, that
whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot
of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do
more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put
together [Gulliver's Travels, Voyage to Brobdingnag, ch 7].
Until very
recently, this was a message which nearly anyone in the world could understand
and accept. It was a vision of continuing progress which combined personal,
tribal and national advantage with a sense of what was fitting, and worth
taking risks for, in man's stewardship of the earth. It is, however, a vision
which has been largely rejected by affluent modern urbanites and does not
figure in their envisioning of the countryside.
To see GMOs halfway straight, we need to see that it is
too early to abandon mankind's old, hopeful vision of stewardship. Man's
domestication of the world's biology cannot ever be complete, nor would we want
it to be. But its processes are not finished yet either. They have not failed
us yet, and we risk failing the poor of the world - as well as ourselves - if
we jettison it.
The old dream remains in rather good shape in many parts
of the mid and western regions of north America. It is worth seeing why.
The prairie story
Jim MacPherson is a
typical north American westerner. He comes from farming stock and is now in a
high tech agricultural business. His background is part of a contemporary saga
in which families within living memory escaped poverty and what they thought
was a sort of social stultification in Europe, and exchanged it for risky
innovation in the New World. Jim's grandparents arrived from Scotland in the
Canadian prairies in the late 1920s, and were amongst hundreds of thousands who
took on a "quarter section": about 256 acres of unbroken, wild land.
The first year, his people lived in a hand-made "soddy": an earth and
grass house made from the topsoil which with luck would yield a crop very soon.
"People had a very hard time that first winter: they'd do anything to get
a crop in and harvested, ready to help the next lot of arrivals", says
Jim, and the point is that he is excited about the independence and the
interdependence of that culture, and about the agriculturalism it involved. We
will come back to Jim's current role soon, but for now let us pursue the
western history and tradition which made and sustain him.
Grandfather
MacPherson had arrived in one of the many parts of the continent's vast
prairies in which spring comes late and autumn comes early, where summers
produce a desert effect and where winters bring constant snow. So far as early man had been concerned, and
so far as the "First Nation" peoples of the nineteenth century
prairies were concerned, these lands had mostly produced grass, herbs, wood and
buffalo. For a few centuries after European involvement, the fur-bearing
animals of parts of the prairies had produced a fur trade. And then Europeans
settled in larger numbers and decided that the prairie must succumb to the
plough, and to cattle ranching where the plough could not succeed. The soils
did not give in lightly to agriculture. Two things were inherently against the
idea: it is best not to plough much of such land at all, and even when it's
been ploughed it is hard to find productive grain-bearing and oil-bearing seeds
which work well in so harsh a climate. The issue was the same as it had been
throughout the advance northward of the agriculture of the temperate middle
east: how to till shallow soils, and how to find species which would have high
yields, but survive wet, cold and sun in turn? A version of the problems
plagues the third world's tropical regions.
Canada is built on a large scale, and is thinly-peopled.
Especially in the West, it is a society which is proud of self-sufficiency,
innovation, survival, and it is proud of its own short but remarkable history.
It admires and remembers those who made the nation's farms productive, whose
histories are immortalised in books such as Grant MacEwan's Fifty Mighty Men
[first published 1975, Greystone edition, 1995]. Amongst the first agricultural
heroes was an English parson, John Brick, who established a mission and farm at
Dunvegan (typically, it was named after a Scottish town), on the Peace River in
northern mid-Alberta, in the 1880s. After extraordinary exertions, he and his
family succeeded in raising wheat . In the spring of 1892, he introduced a
wheat new to the area: Red Fife. The parson's son trekked a sample of the
season's crop to the World's Fair in Chicago: it took ten days to reach
Edmonton and temperatures dipped to 50 and 60 degrees below along the way.
These ears of corn grown north of 56 degrees were the world champion that year.
Seager Wheeler was another such. In 1911, he had been
struggling to farm around Saskatoon for twenty years when his farm at Rosthern
on inhospitable terrain produced the winner in the wheat section at the New
York land Show, in effect a world championship. The triumph was to have made
one of the least likely growing areas produce the word's best example of the
new variety, Marquis, which was superseding the previous variety of choice, Red
Fife
Wheeler went on to produce varieties which deserved their
own name, in wheat and in other crops. He did no engineering: he simply
selected seed for traits he liked, and bred them on, generation after
generation.
These heroes of western
civilisation were delivering Swift's boon. The had taken a crop which
originated as a weed near the equator and made a success of it near the arctic.
How unnatural was that?
The Canola development -
before GMO
Canada then and now was
dangerously dependent on exporting wheat, whose price fluctuated wildly
according to the vagaries of the world's crop. The First World war produced a
boom-time for wheat; the Second, however, was a disaster. Canada's west needed
alternative crops. It is typical of the story of most of the latter part of the
century in Canada that the solution came from government scientists working
with the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, an organisation which was then a farmers'
co-operative (in the 90s it floated on the stock exchange). [see Forging the
Prairie West by John Herd Thompson, OUP, Canada, 1998 and The Canadian
Prairies: A history, Gerald Friesen, University of Toronto Press, 1987 and
subsequent editions] Canada's culture is much more naturally corporatist than
is now fashionable in the UK. Anyway, as retailed in "From Rapeseed to
Canola: the billion dollar success story" [National Research Council
Canada, Saskatoon, 1992] in the 50s, Saskatoon became the centre of research
into oilseed rape, a crop which the prairies farmers knew they could grow
because it had been a useful stand-in crop during the Second World War, when
wheat sales declined and seed oil became a replacement for petroleum-based
industrial oils. But oilseed rape had the disadvantage that its oil was thought
to be dangerously high in a particular fatty acid and whose meal (a bi-product
of producing the oil) was poorly regarded in its main role, animal feed.
The new crop varieties were developed by men like Keith
Downey. Typically, he was a local "prairie boy" turned researcher,
and many of his colleagues were the sons of farmers and parsons. Now they
worked in government teams. New chemical techniques were deployed to discover
how to assay potential varieties for traits which overcame the problems with
oil seed rape. New techniques were deployed in the manipulation of the plants'
seeds so that they could be assayed and bred with far greater precision and speed. One involved
seed-slicing - a technique of surgical precision which presaged the work
bio-technologists now do.
One development involved the use of radio-nuclides to
trace the genetic pathway by which particular straits were passed from parent
to progeny. The use of the products of nuclear reactions was to become very
important, as we shall see.
Downey and others developed a new oilseed crop for
Canada's farmers. It was eventually called Canola and came to be a staple of
the prairies and later of Europe too. It was as much a product of government
interference as were all the loans which were transforming the prairies, as
labour was shed in favour of machinery, and capital took over much of the role
of sweat. Quite late in the day, development was, in the 70s, bedevilled by
food scares set off by further work - whose message was later largely
discounted - that suggested that the new rape seed oil could damage rats.
Chemical assessment and trials suggested that the damage was irrelevant to the
human case, and that actually Canola had a great merit: it was low in saturated
fat. It rode a food-fad to further success.
In Canada, it went from being a small time crop, grown
for industrial oil uses in a wartime emergency, to become, by the 80s, the
third most important crop, after wheat and barley. In Europe, oilseed rape (the
British did not fall for the "Canola" renaming) became a familiar
crop, its vivid yellow in summer time provoking those who liked their crops to
look green and then to turn a gold buff. Its pollen was thought by some bee
keepers to be a dangerous turn-off for bees, and by others to produce delicious
honey.
Canola and GMOs
I have crept up on the
issue of genetic modification in this crab-wise fashion because it helps show
how the anger about GMOs is not well found. First of all, GMO technologies in
themselves do not do something which is unusual. Before and alongside genetic
modification as it is now labelled, modern technologies have been deployed to
bend plant-life to our will but are called "conventional". These
techniques abound in the Canola story. For thousands of years, ecological
hazard of the kind now worrying campaigners have been imposed on the
"natural" environment by plant breeders variously using very
primitive and very sophisticated techniques, with or without the supposed taint
of "genetic modification".
To begin with this latter point. All farm crops have been
"introductions", and thus risk being weedily invasive, in the manner
of the Japanese knotweed (introduced into Europe from Asia) or the purple loose
strife (introduced into Canada from Europe). The crop introductions mostly come
from the Middle East and have been developed to grow in new and very different
environments. That means that any of them might, theoretically, become invasive
in their new environments.
All are "unnatural". To take Canola. It became
a huge success when a crop which originated in Asia and at first believed to be
poisonous and unproductive was chemically tested to be as safe as anything can
be proved to be and was agriculturally developed to be both high-yielding and resilient.
The agricultural part of this was not Luddite or peasant. Varieties were
chemically assayed to find a good "type": the millions of acres now
grown are almost all descended from one batch from Poland, obtained by
Canadians in 1967.
In the years since Canola first became a huge success a
crop, strains have indeed been developed using genetic engineering, and those
now compete side by side with "conventional" varieties. Some will
quite readily "out cross" with other varieties of the crop, others won't.
Some are "herbicide" tolerant, others are not. Those that are GMOs do
indeed have a particular form of herbicide resistance, but in that they are not
in principle different from other wild and conventionally bred plants which are
also pesticide resistant. Some are insect resistant, others not. They vary in
their oil content, in their resistance to vagaries in warmth and timing of
spring time weather. There is competition between two main multinationals to
sell those which are "genetically-modified", so we are not even
presented with a potentially evil monopoly.
Let's crack this in a different way. There are very few
plant traits which would produce environmental or health difficulties which one
might achieve by genetic engineering which might not as easily be achieved by other, non-controversial,
technologies in plant development.
Indeed there are very few changes of any kind which might not be
achieved by "conventional" means, if one was given enough time. We
will come to the one class of property (true "transgenesis") which is
achieved by genetic engineering which is not achievable by any other means and
wonder how frightening it really is.
But for now the point is that Canola and the other crop
developments which were "conventional" but highly sophisticated had
achieved - like other plant breeding successes before them - changes which were
very dramatic.
The most primitive man who brought one of nature's own
seeds and put it into a new environment would have hoped that its natural
insect-resistant properties were well developed. He might even hope that its
potential for weedy invasiveness did not spoil his other crops or even his
garden. He would not have known that it had properties which would in very
different times prove to make it resistant to this or that chemical herbicide,
but it might have had those properties anyway.
The dangerous ecological properties which GMOs are said
to have do in fact attach to many other non-engineered crops. The traits which
genetic engineering can uniquely bring have not yet been brought into the
market and are not inherently any more worrying than properties which plant
developers have brought to market already, by engineering them or not. Finally,
the techniques which genetic engineering uses are not more weird than the
techniques used by "conventional" agriculturalists.
Nature's
"mutant" plants vs GMO "Frankenstein" plants
One of these, and it has
been used to develop Canola's newer varieties, involves radio-nuclides and
their ability to cause mutations. This is the kind of territory in which it
would be usual to remind people that the kind of mutations radio-nuclides can
produce include cancer-forming alterations to cells. Plant breeders can
"force" plants to produce mutants, and then search amongst these for
properties they fancy. This demonstrates how man at his cleverest is often
merely mimicking nature.
One of the main
engines of evolution was the mutagenic power of radiation. Plant-life on earth
developed as fast and successfully as it did because billions of years ago, the
planet was much more radioactive than it is now. In such circumstances, plant
populations produced random mutations at a great rate. [see Gaia: A new look at
life on Earth, J E Lovelock, OUP, 1979
and subsequent editions] Most of these were a change which failed. A few represented a change which
produced benefits, as revealed in reproductive success, under the rules of
natural selection. Plant breeders in the post-war period have been using
radio-nuclides in just that way, but, like agriculturalists of any time, have
been able to some extent to dictate the terms in which such new plants had to
be successful. Usually, the benefit of a particular variety came packaged with
a disadvantage. For instance, a new variety might be highly susceptible to such
and such an insect, but that wouldn't matter provided there was a convenient
pesticide to hand to eliminate that threat. Usually, a variety which can
deliver, say, drought-resistance, will come within a genotype package which
will confer some disbenefit, perhaps a relatively low yield.
Dr Peter Pauls, of the Department of Plant Agriculture at
the University of Guelph, says that:
"There is a good herbicide resistant Canola produced by mutagenesis as a
result of work done in the same lab as produced another Canola by genetic
engineering. They have the same trait. The mutagenic variety is tolerant
of the herbicide Pursuit, and the
genetic-transfer variety is resistant to Roundup. What's the difference?"
It is time to develop more directly the benefits and
difficulties attaching to genetically modified organisms in agriculture. The
fragility of Canada's soils - like many around the world - is such that it is
really best not to plough them at all. Ploughing digs over the topsoil of a field,
and does so in order to bury weeds, recycle plant-based fertility and produce a
tilth (fine soil) for planting next year's seed. Dr Dwayne Hegedus, a research
scientist in the Molecular Genetics Section of the Canadian government's
Saskatoon Research Centre, says: "Traditionally, farmers cropped their
land and then rested it as fallow, in order to build up moisture and keep weeds
under control. But then it was ploughed, which puts the land at risk of drying.
There isn't much topsoil in parts of the prairies, and some of that was lost in
the 1930s anyway. As a result, north American farms have for a decade or so
moved to 'tillage-free' agriculture, which is very herbicide intensive."
Herbicide resistance and
zero-tillage
"Zero tillage"
has become a commonplace. Indeed, the main merit of the GMOs in most common use
on the north American prairies is that they allow a relatively benign herbicide
to be used in the new, cost-effective and conservation-based system. They do
this by giving the crop resistance to the "systemic" herbicides which
are often used in "no tillage" farming. The herbicides - Roundup is
Monsanto's, Liberty is AgrEvo's - are not without risk to the environment, but
they are less risky than most. Dr Hegedus continues, "Farmers for years have used what are
called broad spectrum herbicides, which have the advantage that there's no
residue. But with the use of GMOs [engineered to provide herbicide resistance]
the land can be treated in one "pass", instead of several. This means
the farmers only use one chemical, not five or six, and they use it very early
on. AgreEvo have developed a herbicide tolerant Canola with Agriculture Canada,
and we're very proud of it. It means on relatively good US conditions, you can
crop twice a year. And here in Canada it means you can crop every year. And it
delivers soil conservation".
To return to Jim MacPherson. He works in the Saskatoon
laboratory and offices of Performance Plants, a firm based for now in the
Biological Sciences building of Queen's University, Ontario. He is helping to
run the field trials which will demonstrate the efficacy and safety of one of
the firm's GMOs. The trials come after two and a half years of work with the gene in question. They are
designed to establish the seed's viability as a crop and its potential
riskiness in the environment. The way testing works in Canada, at least eight
generations of seed will have been grown before the plant can be released to
farmers commercially, in a process which takes between five and 10 years. Since
several of these crops have now be planted and harvested for four years, that
means that north Americans now have growing experience of between 10 and 15
years of outdoor, real life experience with GMOs. About half of those crops was
grown by a farmer who could see economic benefit from it, and every repeat crop
was planted because that farmer had evidence that the seeds worked in practice.
Performance Plants has been developing two main traits
from bio-technologies on which it has patents. One delivers drought-tolerance,
and a development of that has proved to deliver cold tolerance. The work began
by copying a gene from a mutant strain of a common Canadian weed. The rare
strain actually over-reacted rather badly to water shortage, and yet survived.
The upshot is that the gene can convey peculiar properties to crops - say
alfalfa - which do not normally have them. The plant becomes able, for
instance, to put a good deal of its activity on hold during short periods of
water shortage, and thus it is able to leave untouched such water as is in the
soil, rather than wasting it at the risk of undermining the soil's viability.
"Organisms spend most of their lives starving",
says Peter McCourt, the University of Toronto biology professor whose work on
the common weed Arabidopsis led to the patents underlying Performance Plants'
work. "Starve a worm and it goes into a dormant mode. All our work begins
with understanding how plants develop and make decisions about their
environment".
For David Dennis, one of the co-founders of Performance
Plants, this is the key to the firm's originality. He and his co-founders are
specialists in plant development. They work on how plants grow and survive.
Professor Dennis says: "The first wave of biotechnology conferred particular
traits, say the ability to produce proteins which made them unattractive to
insects. We are working on the next generation of progress: we work with the
plants' means of responding to the world about it. We are working on the
plant's metabolism, so it can switch on responses which are useful in different
circumstances, or which get it to alter the timing of different parts of its
growth cycle." Thus, a plant might be given valuable drought resistance in
two ways, and Performance Plants is working on both. One route makes the plant
flower earlier, so that it gets through that awkward stage before it is likely
that a dry late spring or summer stunts its growth. Alternatively, there are
genes which allow the plant to detect an untimely dry season and to put much of
its growth on hold for a while.
There were plenty
of surprises for McCourt and Performance Plants as their work unfolded. One was
that one gene coded for drought resistance, and the second was that it coded
for cold resistance as well.
The Canadian prairies chronically suffer dry and cold
seasons, and this sort of technology might well help farmers in the west
generally. Jim says: "We have had a long and bitter experience of bad
farming practices - our forefathers had the Dust Bowl experience, when people
tilled the soil and saw it blow away. They've had to keep innovating to keep
farming. They knew you couldn't just go on doing the same thing for twenty, let
alone two thousand years." So farmers are appreciative of the idea that
genetic engineering can bring real benefit to the comparatively rich farming
world of Canada's dry lands. "But all over the world, water is
scarce", Jim continues. He believes it is important to have seeds which
may one day benefit farmers much poorer than Canada's. It doesn't surprise him
that the development should happen in the western world before it is exported
south: that is the story of most development, from hybrid seeds to computers.
It might not be an argument in their favour that GMOs are
no worse than "conventional" crops, if those crops had now become
problematic anyway. We need to unpick some of the problems posed by crops of
any kind and then see what the GMOs dimension adds, if anything.
Frankenstein pollen and
insect resistance
This is a good moment to
introduce the idea of insect resistant crops and genetic engineering. We have
seen that many weeds and crops have a degree of insect resistance. Some produce
toxins which kill insects, others produce smells or tastes which deter insects
from eating them. The first wave of bio technologies produced varieties of common crops which had been genetically
modified to produce Bt, a bacterium which destroys the intestines of insects
and kills them. This is by no means the only tool which breeders use to confer
insect-resistance on plants. But leaving that aside, use of this particular
bacterium in a spray is one of the few techniques open to organic farmers as
they defend their fields, and it is common practice, so it is not the use of
biocides of this kind which can be in principle what the "green"
lobby dislikes. They say they fear the introduction of genetically-modified Bt
for three main reasons. One: Bt is engineered into a crop so it is permanently
available. Thus it might kill too many of the insects which prey on the
crop, and this might further damage
wildlife. Two: if there were too many fields using Bt insect resistance, the
insect populations which prey on them might develop resistance. And third: the
pollen of genetically-modified crops might damage non-target species.
These are all problems which we have to watch for with
any modern chemical agricultural systems, or indeed any system of agriculture
at all. We are not free to classify this sort of hazard as unacceptable, we are
only free to manage it as well as possible. Success in regulating the use of
Bt, typically of this sort of issue, will likely depend crucially on watching
the scale and the duration of the use of the bacterium. This is to say that
meeting the problems requires the same approach that being tolerably safe
alongside chemical farming does.
The first problem would only be serious if a particular
insect population was wholly dependent on the genetically-modified crop, and
there haven't seemed to be any such in practice. The second might indeed arise,
but can be overcome by retaining areas of crop which are free of Bt crops, so
that insect populations are given "refuges" where a sub-population
can remain sensitive to the Bt biocide.
The third problem is very similar to the effect of chemical
sprays, and the way they can catch species which aren't intended targets. In
one of the most famous incidents in the GMO propaganda war, the media were
incensed to find that researchers at Cornell University demonstrated that the
Monarch butterfly is damaged by pollen from a Bt-engineered plant. [Transgenic
pollen harms monarch larvae, Losey, J E, Rayor, Linda S, and Carter, Maureen E,
Nature, 20 May 1999]
Dr Wilf Keller, director of research at the Canadian
National Research Council's Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon is
unimpressed by the fuss. "This was a preliminary result from lab work,
sent as a letter to Nature and released to the media.. If you sprinkle any corn
pollen onto milkwood leaf, which is the butterfly's favoured food, anyone would
know you're going to have an adverse effect on them. You can take pollen from
an insect resistant plant and the butterflies can drown in it but not be
poisoned by it."
His point was reinforced when two prominent entomologists
(one of them from Cornell itself) published a paper in Nature Biotechnology
[False reports and the ears of men] Anthony M Shelton, Professor of Entomology
at Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture and Life Science and Richard
T Roush of the University of Adelaide, Australia urged that the public should
not be swayed "by laboratory reports that, when looked at with a critical
eye, may not have reality in the field or even in the laboratory". They
asserted that the scepticism should be applied to several cases which had gained
a good deal of publicity. One such arose when researchers at Kansas State
University reported in Science that they had discovered corn borer resistance
to Bt toxins, but did so in work which would not, in the Nature in
Biotechnology authors' view, cut the mustard with many entomologists. They
cited another scare, the result of work published in Nature by workers at the
University of Arizona, which might be taken to suggest that bollworms might
become less resistant to the Bt toxin than had been thought, and which they
thought largely irrelevant to the real world.
The authors, more
positively, cited work by Laura Hansen and John Obrycki, an Iowa State
University team, which suggested that the highest plausible dose of Bt pollen
had produced only low mortality in Monarchs. [Cornell University Press Releases
(1) and (2): ] More generally, these cases have been
taken as signs that academic journals are nowadays succumbing to a vulgar
desire for publicity. As we shall see, in both the insect-resistance stories
and in that of the research Dr Pusztai, these fears are real.
It is important to see that current problems with GMOs -
slight and theoretical as many of them are - shouldn't be allowed to blight the
principle of the technology. Dr Keller says: "There are tests now on
engineering Bt in such a way that it's only in the leaves, and not in the pollen.
Actually, I don't really understand why this is supposed to be such a problem.
Monarchs are not rare or threatened and are commonest where there is milkweed,
which isn't on farmland since farmers loath and attack it as a weed".
We have seen that the campaigners
against genetic engineering had a triumph with the supposedly Frankenstein
pollen GMO plants would produce. They had an equal success with the idea that
that GMO plants would be spectacularly successful as they escaped into the
wild, many of them bearing resistant to the pesticides by which such a disaster
might be controlled. Most knowledgeable researchers believe this scenario is
also largely a chimera.
Superweeds, outcrossing
and herbicide resistance
Bt crops are sometimes
claimed to be capable of becoming superweeds. Dr Malcolm Devine, of AgrEvo's
Biotechnology Research centre at Saskatoon, says: "Bt insect resistance
has been conferred by genetic techniques into a potato variety. But that
wouldn't make the potato a more viable weed in
farmers field: tillage or herbicide would still kill it. Similarly,
herbicide resistance doesn't make a superweed out of a crop."
Such a thing would not be
easy to achieve, even if it were an ambition. Crops seeds of any kind do not
commonly and successfully escape into the wild in north America, or - it can be
argued in most cases - in Europe either. In principle, to do so, they would
have to have weedy, invasive properties. If they did have these, they might
cross breed with neighbouring crops of similar type or existing wild varieties
and so in some way bastardise them. But as Dr Devine says: "We have an
idea of whether that is likely to happen with any particular crop under
development because we know if there are wild relatives of the crop." Canola,
for example, has wild relatives, because it is a mustard. Dr Devine continues:
"Many of our crops, say wheat, barely and rye - are from the Middle east,
and have no close relatives in the wild here. Flax does have relatives but
doesn't out-cross readily, even with itself. It's not attractive to bees and
insects, so its pollen isn't spread. Now, Canola is attractive to bees, and
lots of honey is produced from it. But Canola won't survive in woodlands,
though it will self seed as a volunteer in fields where or near where it's
grown".