The Council for Science and Technology are calling for a new assessment on GM crop production in the UK. They argue that there is sufficient evidence to prove their value and safety and that the EU regulatory process is stifling potential advances.

A group of scientists assembled by the council have released a report in which they state that GM crops are necessary to achieve a sustainable food source and that conventional breeding techniques are unable to meet the challenges posed by an increasing world population and the effects of climate change.

In their report to the Cabinet Office the group claims that the EU regulatory process has to be improved as the current framework is outmoded and confusing. There is, they say, no consensus amongst EU Regulators on what constitutes environmental harm. In the opinion of the group it is unlikely that more than a handful of GM crops will be approved by the EU in the short term due to the “dysfunctional approval process”.

They suggest that approval for commercial cultivation should be made on a national basis and that the process should mimic that of pharmaceuticals. The European Medicines Agency assesses new pharmaceuticals for humans and animals and, if they recommend use, a national decision is made by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the UK national competent authority. In the UK, decisions at a national-level to approve field trials of GM crops typically occur within statutory timeframes (3 months) and a related process could be used for commercially grown crops for which EFSA had made a positive recommendation.

On Farm Science Centres

The report calls for a “next generation” of farm scale crop evaluation centres to include high precision remote sensing of the growing environment and crop growth, high-throughput and high precision assessment of new crop varieties produced by advanced breeding and GM methods, disease and epidemiology, soil science, different agronomy practices (e.g. organic/low input approaches), environment and biodiversity monitoring. Crops for food, forage, bioenergy, and novel biomaterials could all be assessed according to their different output traits.

The report also argues that crop improvement including GM should be an integral component of the new Agricultural Innovation Centres proposed within the Agri-Tech strategy.

Public Trust

The group acknowledges that public trust is an important part of getting these crops accepted. Most people are unaware of the challenges of food production and distribution and it would help if food producers and retailers were more open about these challenges. “The case must be made that food developed from GM is the product of sustainable agriculture, is of the highest nutritional quality, and can meet the needs of communities in different parts of the world”.

Corporate ownership versus open source

Our final point is that the quality of debate is substantially enhanced if we acknowledge the different ways in which citizens very properly approach complex issues. Questions of value are at the centre of the debate. Fairness in the distribution of risks and benefits is critical to the acceptability of any new technology and a key factor in persuading many opponents will be reassurance that the benefits of GM will flow to those that need them, as well as to the companies who own the intellectual property. Many opponents are not in fact concerned by GM in itself, but by corporate control of the food chain. An automatic association of the concept of GM with multinational corporations needs to be challenged: the application of philanthropic funding by the Gates Foundation for GM research of direct benefit to small farmers is a case in point.