Poodles and Wolves: Who will win the GM foods debate?

Sally Bee and Ellen Poliakoff

  There has been no escape from GM foods in the popular press in the last 18 months, yet, according to New Scientist, 30% of Europeans when asked did not realize that ordinary tomatoes contain genes! It is easy to get lost in the political, ethical and scientific issues surrounding this debate, so we decided to sit down with both an anti-GM foods campaigner and a geneticist and asked them to hit us with their best arguments.

Jo Hamilton graduated from Manchester in 1995, with a degree in Combined Studies. During her university years, Jo was an active campaigner in the Union and this led on to her involvement in protesting against GM foods. She is a member of Genetix Snowball, a nationwide nonviolent campaign group. She took part in their first action, in which a group of protesters, dressed in protective white suits, symbolically removed GM crops from a test site in Oxfordshire. Currently, she is fighting a court case against the food giant Monsanto.

What do you have against GM foods?
“There are several issues. There are health and safety issues - the unknown effects of GM may produce novel toxins and allergens. Then there are environmental issues. GM crops will increase the use of pesticides and chemicals in the environment. Crops with insect resistance will affect insect populations, which will upset biodiversity and natural balance. And there is the danger of cross pollination of GM crops with other crops.”
“Then there is what I call ‘corporate capture of the food chain’. Companies have been merging so that everything, from the production of the seed to the selling of the product, is controlled by a single company. This means that we are going down the same highly intensive, industrial and commercial agricultural road and none of the alternatives are being investigated. These large biotech companies are being allowed to force their view of the future onto the world.”

What about the promises that increased GM crop yield will feed the world?
“Imagine walking along a street lined with shops bursting with food. It doesn’t matter how many more varieties of food there are or how many more shops there are, if you have no money then they are no use. The UN estimates that, at the moment, we have one and a half times more food than we need to feed everyone in the world.”

So, what would be your ideal solution to all of this?
“We should stop the commercial testing of GM foods immediately. Food production should not be in the control of a few multinational companies. People should have the right to choose what they eat. It is not a choice if safe, healthy products are out of people’s price range and in a niche market. Safe food is a right and not a privilege.”
“GM foods have been brought in to solve problems mainly caused by large-scale agriculture. We should be thinking of the future and investigating alternatives to GM foods to solve our problems, for example, multicropping and organic farming. We should be supporting farmers and trying to reduce the problem of rural depopulation. Food from England should be available in England! All this should occur hand-in-hand with reclaiming the power of the citizen in determining what kind of future we want.”

Is the GM foods debate less about science and more about the politics of the underlying issues?
“They’re totally inseparable. The government is trying to narrow it down to just science, but it is impossible to separate it from profit. The reason that so many people have got involved in the campaign is that it touches on so many issues: for example, civil liberties, real choice and the role of the government and regulators in putting health and safety before commercial interests.” Is a tomato containing a fish gene vegetarian?
“I don’t know... it’s just details. There are moral questions about eating food with human genes in - does this make us cannibals? And there are moral questions about how we treat other species. I think all this hype underlies people’s concerns about species barriers.” Will people be swayed once they see the benefits of GM food?
“Hopefully, with all the campaigning, there will be an increase in awareness and people will take responsibility for what they eat. We are constantly being bombarded with advertising offering techno fix solutions to obesity. Rather than buying a low fat GM product, people should eat less or eat more healthy food!” To sum up
“Before we ask whether GM crops are safe, we need to ask whether we really need them. We should be tackling the root causes of problems. Labelling is a bit of a red herringÉ we should be guaranteed food that is safe and healthy.”

Enrico Coen is a plant geneticist who works at the John Innes Centre in East Anglia. He studies the molecular mechanisms underlying the growth and development of flowers. His work on Antirrhinum (snapdragon) genes led to the now widely accepted model for how flower development is genetically controlled. He has recently published his first book “The Art of Genes”, published by Oxford University Press.

Are the safety tests for GM foods enough?
“You could ask the same of non-GM foods. For example, coffee contains huge quantities of toxins and isn’t banned. The same criteria should be applied to all foods. There is no reason, at this stage, to think that there is anything more harmful in GM foods than in traditional foods.”

What are the risks associated with GM genes spreading to the wild?
“There are two reasons why this tends not to happen. Firstly, it is unlikely that there will be a wild species for the GM crop to cross-hybridise with. Secondly, the GM crop gene is unlikely to be of any advantage to the wild species and in most cases will be a disadvantage, as they are not designed for organisms to survive in the wild. For example, nobody is concerned about poodle genes being passed onto wild wolf populations! There are two issues to consider here. The first is the low probability of spread. The second is the consequence of a wild species acquiring a GM gene and this should be assessed in a case-by-case manner.”

On feeding the world...
“People have argued that we would be able to feed the world if only food was distributed better, but this would only happen in an ideal world and we haven’t been able to solve this problem so far. We should accept that there is a problem with distribution and increase our capacity to produce food, using new technologies, rather than rejecting these technologies and expecting the problem to go away.”

What do you think about the issue of labelling?
“Labelling is an issue for consumers, not for science. You could produce an infinitely long label for any food. You could give the chemical composition of yogurt to the last decimal place, but who would want to know?”

Is a tomato containing a fish gene vegetarian?
“If you fertilise a plant with bone meal, is it vegetarian? You are adding an animal product to a vegetable. A gene is just a chemical and adding a single fish gene to a tomato makes the tomato no more fish-like than using bone meal as a fertiliser make a tomato more bone-like!”

Isn’t it dangerous to let a few multinational companies take over the production of our food supply?
“You can argue that the production of GM foods is profit motivated, but this is true of most activities. You can’t be against GM multinationals without being against all multinationals. Take for example the car, obviously there are benefits, but there is clear evidence that they kill and damage the environment. The scientific case against GM foods is much weaker than against the car.”

To sum up...
“At the moment neither the benefits nor the hazards of GM foods are clear, as the technology has not really been used yet. As the benefits become apparent, people will feel differently. After all, it took 30 years for the potato to be accepted when it was first imported from South America...!”

Sally Bee and Ellen Poliakoff
Poliakoff_and_Bee@hotmail.com