AT SOME point over the next few days or weeks, a small group of ecologists will march into a field of genetically modified oilseed rape (canola) somewhere in England. There they鈥檒l take soil samples, look for invertebrates and count weeds. It鈥檚 a routine they are well used to. For the past three years, such teams have been monitoring more than 70 farm sites dotted around Britain, all in a bid to assess the impact of GM crops on farmland biodiversity.
Activists have periodically pulled up the crops, and there have been relentless claims that the trials are environmentally risky and scientifically worthless. But for the researchers at least, the end is in sight. In six months, the weed counting will be over and the first results out. Then it will be ministers鈥� turn on the rack.
At the height of GM fever in Britain back in 1999, the farm trials bought the British government a three-year voluntary moratorium on commercial growing. After July, there will be no further respite. To grow, or not to grow: industry will demand one answer, greens (and quite possibly the wider public) another. Which side will prevail?
Advertisement
The farmers of the Midwest could be excused for thinking the answer hardly matters. With or without Britain, the portion of the planet covered in these crops will continue to grow. And even if Britain does join the GM club, the market for GM seeds in such a small land populated by so many sceptical consumers will not make 鈥渂ig biotech鈥� rich. But on closer inspection, the debate in Britain does matter 鈥� just not for the obvious reasons.
What is not at stake is public safety. It should by now be clear to everyone that past environmental and safety fears were overblown: the present generation of crops have killed nobody and produced no apocalypse. But the benefits of these crops have been overblown too. The biotech industry likes to depict the technology as a magic bullet answer to world hunger. As Britain鈥檚 farm trials have slowly gestated, this has looked increasingly like shallow propaganda. The world as a whole produces more than enough food for everyone. People go hungry because they lack the money to buy it.
The environmental pay-off is no more clear-cut. Most GM crops, including those in the British farm trials, are herbicide-tolerant. Whether this makes them good or bad for biodiversity depends crucially on how farmers use them. Those who let the weeds grow a little longer before zapping them later in the season may, as the biotech industry claims, provide extra plant food for wildlife. Farmers who spray early and repeatedly in pursuit of ultra-clean fields and bumper yields, or resort to using more toxic weedkillers 鈥� as some GM growers in the US have apparently been doing 鈥� will achieve the opposite. That is one reason why interpreting the British farm trials will be so difficult, and why, come July, everyone will be able to spin the results their own way.
So what should matter? If the British government does say yes to GM crops, then exactly what rules it introduces to govern how they are grown will be crucial. If the impact on biodiversity of herbicide-resistant crops depends on how farmers use them, it is logical to set rules that deliver biodiversity benefits. And if the present farm trials can鈥檛 tell you what those rules should be, or how much biodiversity to aim for on farmland, well, do more research.
Other questions may be harder to resolve. With some crops, cross-pollination of wild relatives or non-GM crops is inevitable. There is no serious evidence to suggest that cross-pollination from the present generation of GM crops is likely to cause any actual harm, by, for example, damaging the nutritional value of non-GM food. But green groups in Britain have succeeded in making the question of gene flow symbolic of the whole notion of consumers and organic growers being forced to accept a technology that they do not trust.
Since future crops may contain pharmaceutical genes that would be harmful if they got into the human food chain, this stance isn鈥檛 quite as irrational as some scientists claim, and deserves at the very least to be addressed with strict regulations. Expect a fierce scrap over this issue to come to a head in the next few months.
Even gene flow, however, is not the key issue. At present Britain as a whole, if not its government, is seen as something of a world leader in anti-GM sentiment. A Britain that is at least nominally pro-GM, even if the crops are seldom grown or eaten there, would shatter that perception. That in turn would boost the long-term prospects for those wanting to export GM foods to Europe and generally grease the wheels of world trade in high-tech mechanised farm produce.
And it鈥檚 this, above all else, that should concentrate our minds. Does it matter if the food chain is increasingly controlled by a handful of large companies? If food travels ever greater distances from farm to plate? If there is little or no social bond between growers and consumers, and even less awareness of the impact that this global market has on local food and trade needs? These are the important questions. Unfortunately, there isn鈥檛 a farm trial in the world that can put them to the test.