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Is the GM debate based on emotion, not evidence?
Sustainable EU, 10 July 2010
http://www.sustainableeu.com/article/243/is-the-gm-debate-based-on-emotion-not-evidence

In a recent interview published on www.sustainableeu.com, Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission Professor Anne Glover called for a better debate on the topic of GM, claiming that the argument should be based on evidence and not emotion. This special feature examines that claim, looking at the image problem that genetically modified crops seemingly have within the EU, and whether the potential benefits they bring outweigh the health concerns surrounding them. Could GM hold the solution to world hunger, and could it support farmers or multinational agri-businesses?

Here, a panel of leading figures offer their views on what the main challenges, concerns, and opportunities are.
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Exploring and evaluating
Sir Roland Jackson
Chief Executive
British Science Association

The simple answer is that the GM debate is based on both emotion and evidence, and so it should be. It would be surprising if it weren't, since it touches on so many aspects of life that matter to people, including conceptions of nature and the natural. Emotions spring from strongly held values, principles and beliefs. Some scientists tend to forget that the GM debate is based as much on the sort of society, economy, intellectual property rights, relationship with nature and landscape that some people want to have as on the science per se. It is not simply a question of risks and benefits of particular GM applications that can be expressed in scientific terms for analysis.

'Evidence' of course comes in many forms, of which scientific evidence is only one, though critical to this debate. However, even when it comes to the science, that evidence can be strongly contested. What counts as evidence (i.e. who decides if it counts) and what the evidence means (i.e. who adjudicates) can be, and is, disputed. It has been interesting recently to observe the online GM discussion in the UK run by the 'I'm a Scientist' team http://gmfood.imascientist.org.uk/, which itself followed the often vitriolic debate around the protest at Rothampsted. Just a glance at that will illustrate the range of questions, including but not at all limited to the scientific, that people want to ask of these technologies.

So, what is the lesson for policy-makers, researchers and commercial enterprises that believe GM has a role to play and want those opportunities explored? To some extent the GM debate has become a cause celèbre or a proxy for wider issues, which may be unfair, but does not make them any less valid. Given where we are now there is no easy answer, but any response must surely involve exploring with wider publics, in a deliberative manner not just some narrow focus on risks and benefits, but wider questions of the sort of agriculture that people want to see and what systems and technologies might work best in different circumstances. Simply communicating 'the evidence', however defined, is not going to resolve this debate as far as much of the public is concerned.
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Leaving GM on the shelf
Mute Schimpf
Food Campaigner
Friends of the Earth Europe

Rejection of genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe has been consistently strong for more than 15 years. Consumers dislike GM food; most European farmers never sow a single GMO seed, and supermarkets and food processors have invested billions to avoid having to label any product as containing GMOs. 

Yet still, according to EU Consumer Commissioner John Dalli, "the Commission is acting to smooth the way for greater acceptance of GMO innovation", and to force GM crops onto citizens.

Instead of focusing on how the European Commission and six biotech companies can open Europe's fields, shops and kitchens to GMOs, the question should be what kind of food and farming do we need and want in Europe?

Consumers want healthy, high quality food that preserves Europe's diverse food cultures. And after 20 years of research, two types of GM crop have been developed one which produces a toxin that kills plant pests, and one that survives pesticides that harm all other plants.

The GM crops system was designed for highly intensive monocultures in North and South America. Farmers there are now confronted with the escalating problem of weeds that are immune to pesticide sprays, and more and more GM maize plants being attacked by pests. 

The response from GM companies is to design GM crops with tolerance to more toxic pesticides. In the US, the use of the pesticide glyphosate increased more than 2.5 fold per hectare between 1994 and 2006.

Most European farmers use other tools to reduce weed pressure, and crop rotation remains the cheapest and most effective way to limit damage from various maize pests.

It is no wonder that European consumers remain unconvinced that GM plants can be classed as healthy or high quality food. The food sector and consumers understand that GM crops are not innovative and deliver no real benefits.

Decreasing soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and more and more landscapes being turned into 'green deserts' dominated by monocultures these are the real and urgent challenges facing European farmers and society. The GM crops model does not address these critical issues and does not contribute to the desperately needed shift to a more sustainable and green farming sector in Europe.
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A focus on the facts
Dr Julian Little
Chairman
Agricultural Biotechnology Council [GM industry front]

The recent anti-science protests at Rothamsted demonstrated that many opponents of GM crops will continue to base their arguments on emotion, rather than the available evidence that proves previous media hysteria over the safety of GM crops was unfounded. Over 2 trillion meals containing GM ingredients have been eaten without a single substantiated health issue reported something confirmed by a recent report from the European Commission, which is not usually known for its pro-GM rhetoric.

Recent surveys also suggest that there is now a pragmatic and open-minded silent majority who recognise that the development of innovative agricultural technologies, including GM crops, is vitally important if we are to grow more with less and feed an ever-increasing global population.

The evidence shows that there is now a significant challenge facing the global food supply as a result of climate change and an increasing world population, and polls show that UK consumers recognise that we need as many tools as possible to help us grow more food in a sustainable way. A recent survey conducted by the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD) showed that five times as many people believe that GM crops can help to feed a hungry planet than believe they cannot. 

GM crops are just one of many ways we can try to improve yields while reducing pesticide use, cutting carbon emissions and conserving water. In terms of providing such benefits to farmers across the world, the evidence speaks for itself farmers in 29 countries have chosen to grow 160 million hectares of GM crops last year for various reasons; for some it is about a reduction in spraying and ploughing and an increase in soil moisture, for others it is about stripping out costs and increasing the yields of a crop. If GM were used in Europe, for example, the estimated economic benefits would exceed €440 million, while permanent reductions in carbon emissions from agriculture due to GM crops were estimated at 1.7 billion kg of CO2 in 2010 equivalent to reducing the number of cars on the world's roads by 0.8 million. These are benefits that the UK is currently missing out on.

Of course there is not one solution to food security or food inflation; GM crops are by no means a 'silver bullet'. However farmers and consumers should be given the choice of voting with their wallets on whether GM crops should be grown here. In Europe we have an opportunity to put emotive scaremongering behind us, to focus on the facts about biotechnology, and to think about what role we would be prepared for GM to play in our farmers' agricultural 'toolkit'.
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Business-based emotion?
Emma Hockridge
Head of Policy
Soil Association

We strongly believe that the debate regarding the safety and efficacy of GM crops should be based on evidence. Yet claims that GM crops will solve world hunger, or will deliver drought resistant, nitrogen-fixing or nutrient rich crops, are not science but prophecy. The pro-GM lobby and the media treat these claims as if they are science, but they are opinions often expressed by companies or scientists with a strong financial interest in seeing them treated as fact. 

In the UK, those of us who have concerns about GM crops have been accused of being 'anti-science', emotional and irrational.  The conflict over GM is routinely presented as a debate between those who are pro and those who are not. In fact, we are strongly in favour of good science to support the development of agriculture for everyone. GM is a niche within agricultural science, where much has been promised and little delivered, which distracts public attention and investment from reliable and inclusive approaches to innovation.

Increasing numbers of scientists and policy makers around the world including the largest ever review of its kind, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development recognise the weight of evidence that agro-ecological systems such as organic farming can provide the range of outcomes we need from farming. These include more affordable food where it is needed most, fertile soils without depending on fossil fuels, more farmland wildlife, better animal welfare, more farming jobs, less pollution and lower greenhouse gas emissions. We don't have all the answers and we need more research, yet other scientific techniques, such as marker-assisted selection, which uses knowledge of the genome to assist plant breeding, are yielding much faster results than GM technology.

Despite huge amounts of research funding, GM crops have failed to deliver their promised benefits or provide more food for a growing world population. The majority of the world is fed by small, local, often low input or organic farmers, whose systems are better for the environment, better for animal and human welfare, and offer more resilience to issues such as oil and fertiliser price rise shocks. Despite this, much of our politicians' attention and research budgets are focused on GM and other biotech solutions. This is a case of business and profit trumping good sense and evidence.