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Just because GM is gaining popularity doesn't make it right

This article is more than 11 years old
Lucy Siegle
The government has warmed to the idea of genetically modified food but sceptics are right to raise concerns

To approve or not to approve? The transgenic question is back in the form of the super salmon or the Frankenfish (which sobriquet you pick depends on how GM-tolerant you are). Take a growth gene from another type of salmon, mix with a bit of DNA from the eel-like ocean pout, as US biotech firm, AquaBounty has done, and you get a creature with all the appearance of an Atlantic salmon that is actually produced in a giant, inland tank. AquaBounty has spent 15 years trying to get US regulators to approve the advanced hybrid fish for supermarket shelves and now appears to be very close.

The engineered salmon represents a watershed moment for GM foods as a whole. For one thing, it is the first animal to get this far. If and when it's approved, it will join the 180-plus transgenic crop "events", involving 15 traits that have been deregulated or approved in one of 27 countries. Earlier this year, a 12-year European stalemate on approving GM crops (politely called a moratorium) came to an end when power to approve was devolved to individual nations. GM's fortunes are looking up.

Acceptance of GM varies from country to country. In Europe, Sweden and the Netherlands are considered pro GM and Germany and Austria are considered staunchly against. On the surface, the UK has appeared hostile. The Flavr Savr tomato (the rotting gene was removed) was approved for sale in the UK, but its arrival was pre-empted by hysterical protest about GM ingredients and it never made it to the shops. And all the 54 GM crop trials attempted since 2000 have been torn up by protesters and no GM crops are grown commercially.

However, behind the scenes there's some serious rapprochement going on.

Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association and Britain's most famous crop trasher, who famously pulled up six-and-a-half acres of GM maize in 1999, says that £20m of taxpayers' money has gone into GM crop research since 1997, despite the fact that not a single crop is grown in the UK.

If New Labour noticeably warmed to the idea of GM, the new government is showing even more love. One of the first acts by the coalition (anti-GM wags point out that this is in itself an unnatural hybrid) was to approve a Leeds University crop trial of GM potatoes. Meanwhile, environment minister Caroline Spelman is the former director of a biotechnology lobbying group.

We are still far from wholesale consumer acceptance of GM, but listen and you'll hear people beginning to shift their position. GM is gaining currency as a pragmatic solution to food security and even an environmentally responsible way of providing food and fuel. It's reminiscent of the extraordinary volte-face about nuclear energy, from classic eco-campaigning territory to a climate change-adaptation technique. We haven't yet heard from the big-name environmental recanters as we did with nuclear but the signs of change are there. The award-winning environmental writer Richard Girling has argued "that GM crops are good for people and good for the planet".

But we should be careful not to throw caution or transgenic materials to the wind. While Frankenfood arguments overplay risks to human health, many GM concerns are important. The worst-case scenario would be that we feel under pressure to acquiesce.

There is a tendency to depict anyone with reservations about GM as a Gaia-fearing lunatic. "The pro-GM lobby has done a fantastic job in persuading the media and politicians that even the most modest GM-scepticism is tantamount to extreme science-hating emotionalism," Jonathon Porritt has written. "To express any reservations about the notional sustainability benefits of current GM crops, let alone about the massively hyped potential benefits of future GM products, is to open oneself up to the charge of debilitating technophobia."

At the risk of inviting such charges, can I point out that many of the concerns that motivated the crop trashers in the 1990s are still pertinent? The thing that conventional and organic farmers fear most is the contamination of their crops with genetic material should transgenic fields be planted nearby. As the 2009 report "Agriculture at a Crossroads" puts it: "Despite technical solutions to prevent such gene movement… and traditional plant variety purity protocols, no method is likely to be completely effective in preventing movement of transgenes."

We know that genetic modification of plant matter has been carried out for millenniums, but let's not pretend all interference is the same. True, a version of GM allowed Mexico to become self-sufficient in wheat in the 1950s, but positive outcomes have been eclipsed by the consolidation of the seed and agrochemical industries and their use of patents. Increasingly, you hear pro-GM arguing that acceptance of GM is about increasing choices for farmers, but there are disastrous examples in developing nations where GM has proved the antithesis of choice, where promised yields haven't appeared and where farmers are trapped in a cycle of poverty and forced to buy seed each year from seed agents because they can no longer save seeds as is traditional practice (one of the GM traits in crops is that they don't produce seeds).

The top 10 biotech companies control half the world's commercial seed sales. Explain to me how channelling that power into the hands of a few corporations gives us food security.

But mostly we need to stop promoting GM as a silver bullet. Last month, speaking at the 15th World Congress of Food Science and Technology in Cape Town, Sir David King, formerly Tony Blair's science adviser, could be found on his favourite hobbyhorse: "Food insecurity in developing regions such as Africa is partially a result of the anti-GM campaign. In Europe, people might have a choice between conventional and genetically modified products. In Africa, this is not the case. Here, any food that is available is great." Members of African GM-free groups and civil society reacted furiously.

After all, it's a "solution" that appears to ignore that Africa's food security has been trashed by the way organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have pressured farmers into farming cash crops for export while simultaneously the west dumps surplus commodities on African markets.

"King is clearly not aware of the fact that Africans have common sense. Does he think we are stupid, can't think for ourselves and still listen to whatever Europeans tell us to do, like we did in the colonial era?" asked Mariam Mayet, who runs the African Centre for Biosafety, a non-profit organisation. She was at a loss to understand how GM technologies producing GM crops also for export would really help matters and, frankly, so am I.

More on this story

More on this story

  • GM food battle moves to fish as super-salmon nears US approval

  • Cloned meat and milk: confusion and clamour

  • Genetic modification: glow-in-the-dark lifesavers or mutant freaks?

  • Why the case for GM salmon is still hard to stomach

  • Who dares question the industrial food system over GM salmon?

  • Turning gene science into a fishy business