Science for a Sustainable Europe

I was asked to speak on what changes in science research and other policies are needed to shift away from GM in order to support and invest in sustainable agriculture. I therefore propose to concentrate on three issues:

1. current commercialisation and politicisation of science and how is should be countered;


2. current GM international legal and administrative framework and its deficiencies and how that should be countered;


3. a new direction for science towards promoting sustainable agriculture.

On the first issue, the �science for sale' claim may be exaggerated, but the background influences undermining scientific independence and integrity today are malign.

First, the Rothschild revolution under Thatcher made the funding of science much more subservient to business interests. Over the last two decades, getting finance for scientific inquiry inimical to the commercial and political Establishments has become increasingly difficult. The stranglehold of the large companies is well illustrated by the science process that feeds the debate on GM crops. The science is owned by a tiny number of very large companies. Much of the research is dubbed commercially confidential and never published if it conflicts with the interests of the company. It is largely carried out with the sole intent of generating future revenue, raising worrying questions about the quality and transparency of the research.

Companies have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programmes or hiring professors for out-of-hours projects can produce disproportionate payoffs in generating reports, articles, reviews and books which may not reflect the public interest, but certainly benefit corporate bottom lines. And academics who raise embarrassing questions � like who is paying for the lab, how independent is the peer review, who profits from the research, is the university's integrity compromised � soon learn that keeping their heads down is the best way not to risk their career, let alone future research funding. The message is clear: making money is good and dissent is stifled.

Second, the scientists staffing the official advisory committees and Government regulatory bodies in a significant number of cases have financial links with the industry they are supposed to be independently advising on and regulating. A recent study found that of the 5 scientific committees advising ministers on food safety 40% of the committee members covered had links with the biotechnology industry, and at least 20% were linked to one of the Big Three � Monsanto, Zeneca or Novartis. Nor is this an accident. The civil servants who select for these bodies tend to look for a preponderant part of the membership, and particularly the chairman, to be �sound', i.e. can be safely relied on not to cause embarrassment to the Government or industry if difficulties arise.

Third, the presentation of scientific results sometimes needs to be treated with caution. The false argument is still regularly deployed by ACRE, the Government's main GM advisory committee, when it announces that �there is no evidence that this GM product is any greater risk to human health than its non-GM counterpart�. In fact they have not sought such evidence directly, merely relied on the biotech companies telling them that their GM product was �substantially equivalent' to its alleged non-GM analogue.

What all this means is that science can only be fully trusted if it is pursued with the most rigorous procedures that guarantee total independence and freedom from commercial and political bias. That is too often not the case today. The implications for policy are clear. If the Government truly wants independent research, it has to be prepared to pay for it, not lay down as it has that 25% of finance for publicly funded research should come from private sources, thus forcing the universities into the hands of corporate sponsors. The Government should also require that no member of its advisory committees or regulatory bodies should have any current or recently past financial or commercial link with the industry concerned. And contributors to scientific journals should be required to make full disclosure of current and prior funding sources, so that any conflicts of interest can be exposed and taken into account.

We should never forget the words of Winston Churchill, who said �Science should be on tap, not on top.�

On the second issue of current GM international legal and administrative framework, dominated by laissez faire free trade WTO philosophy, the US has made three complaints against Europe in the WTO. One is that the moratorium on approvals in Europe and the national bans in some EU countries have adversely affected agricultural and food imports from the US, Canada and Argentina. The second complaint is that the moratorium and national bans are not allowable under WTO rules because, it is said, they are not scientifically justifiable and there has been undue delay in assessing applications for marketing. Third, it is claimed that the European delays will hinder development of the technology which its proponents say has great promise in reducing hunger and improving health worldwide.

Europe strongly rebuts all three of these arguments. On the first point, Europe took the action it did because it was clear in the mid-1990s that the regulatory framework could not deal adequately with the risks of releasing GM organisms, and consumer choice was not provided for. New regulations were needed and new research had to be undertaken. Article 5.7 of the WTO's SPS Phyto-sanitary Agreement allows countries �in cases where relevant scientific evidence is insufficient� to adopt provisional measures to protect human or plant health if they take steps to collect the additional information needed. A provisional measure could sensibly include halting approvals.

Even the biotechnology industry agreed that more research was needed, and in 1998 in the UK it entered into a voluntary agreement with the UK Government not to commercialise GM herbicide tolerant crops until after �farm-scale evaluations' had been completed. This industry-backed research has now shown that the use of GM oilseed rape and sugar beet with the herbicides to which they are tolerant leads to damaging effects to biodiversity on a range of indicators. The aim of Europe's action was not protectionist, but to prevent harm to the environment which we now know would have been caused if this research had not been done. The key point is that it has been consumer pressure, not regulatory delays, which have damaged the exports of GM crops from North America, as even the US Department of Agriculture has acknowledged.

On the second complaint, the approach being adopted by Europe in its revised risk assessments is fully consistent with the Biosafety Protocol regulating the environmental safety aspects of GMOs, and also with the WHO Codex guidelines. The former states (Article 10) that �lack of scientific certainty �.shall not prevent that Party from taking a decision, as appropriate, to avoid or minimise such potential adverse effects�. The latter acknowledges that the so-called �substantial equivalence' of GM products to their non-GM counterparts is not a sufficient basis on which to evaluate the safety of novel foods. A WHO expert has recently noted that �for plants generated by recombinant technology, unanticipated effects may additionally arise from the process of introducing foreign genes�. The Codex, specifically referred to in the WTO's SPS Agreement as having competence to set international guidelines, has therefore developed new risk assessment guidelines for GM food safety which were agreed in July 2003, and Europe has now adopted these.

Nor has there been undue delay. It is clear from the time taken to agree both the Codex guidelines (4 years) and the Biosafety Protocol (4 years) that taking 5 years to revise regulations and put them into operation in Europe is not unreasonable.

On the third complaint, it cannot therefore be argued that Europe has hindered development of the GM technology. Nor has it been shown that GM has more than a marginal role to play in reducing world hunger, the causes of which derive from wholly different factors � mal-distribution of land, corrupt governance, trade discrimination against developing countries, amongst others.

The US, of course, has other motives � trying to bully other countries to fall into line with the interests of its biotech companies. Because Europe is not going to give up its rights to self-determination over such a fundamental issue as the food it eats, this WTO challenge is likely to backfire badly, reinforcing the resentment and resistance already felt so strongly by consumers in Europe.

However, having said that, I believe an outright ban on cultivation and import of GM through the EU is unlikely to pass muster. I believe a better strategy would be to advance three alternative routes.

• Specify in detail a systematic programme of research into environmental impacts of GM crops and into health impacts of GM foods which need to be carried out before it can be plausibly demonstrated that GM crops and food are �safe', and which will have to be carried out before any further GM products are approved by EU authorities.



• Extend criteria under EU Directive 2001/18 for non-approval of novel foods and products, not only to include cases of adverse environmental and human health impacts, but also to include cases which would damage or undermine sustainability in agriculture. At present, we have a free-wheeling doctrine of unfettered trade and production unless it can be shown they bring about certain specific short-term, localised instances of harm. But that takes no account of long term impacts and gradual erosion of eco-systems. Sustainability in agriculture must now be written into the rules.



• The EU should take the lead to change international biodiversity rules in order to prohibit patenting of life forms because this is an artificial and harmful constraint on the enormous diversity of our common inheritance and it is a limitation on local farmers having open access to biodiversity which their ancestors have freely enjoyed for millennia. Also, for practical reasons, because genes are not fixed elements, but constantly changing in structure and role (Mae-wan Fluid Syndrome), and patenting is simply not appropriate to such a dynamic and un-definable thing for ethical reasons, as it amounts to privatisation of nature.

On the third issue of promoting a new direction for science in favour of sustainable agriculture, we should never lose sight of the fact that transgenics is only one by-product of genetic research. A quiet revolution is also happening in gene mapping � genomics � which could have far greater impact on agriculture.

Genomic research has potential to define the total extent of genetic variation for simple and complex characters within our crop plants. This will allow plant-breeders to use high-through-put molecular marking systems and can also make an important contribution to world food security through development of varieties much more resistant to pest and diseases both in major crops, and in �orphan' crops of the less developing world through comparative approaches.

Genomics � holistic study of complete genomes � clearly has an important contribution to make to both medicine and agriculture. In medicine, scientists believe that many complex diseases develop, not because genes encoding important proteins are broken, but because instructions on how to use those genes are scrambled. With crop performance, genomics opens up development of advanced breeding technologies, including marker-assisted selection and tissue culture, without any of the massive downsides of GM.

This is where the future lies, and this is what we must now place firmly at the top of the political agenda for agriculture and world food security.

Michael Meacher