GM CROPS
THE ARGUMENT FOR THEY IMPROVE CROP YIELDS AND REDUCE HERBICIDE USE
Around the world, GM crops already deployed include pest-resistant cotton, maize and canola;h er bic id e-glyp ho sat e resistant soy bean and cotton; and viral-disease-resistant potatoes, papaya and squash. “GM is a useful tool, a bit like keyhole
surgery,” says Dr Jonathon Harrington of the School of Biosciences, University of Cardiff. “Many other techniques [for developing plant traits] are like shuffling a pack of cards and hoping the king and queen will come out together.”
THE BROAD SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS IS THAT GM IS SAFE
“GM feed has been eaten by billions of animals for a
generation without so much as a bellyache,” says Professor Robert Halford at Rothamsted. “Is it safe for nature? There is plenty of evidence that it is – it’s not as though we are wondering what has happened over the past 20 years.”
“It’s a risk and reward scenario,” says Harrington. “Even though eight people die on the roads every day, we still drive to the shops. You can’t promise that no GM crop will ever poison people, but looking over the past 20 years, you can say the emphasis is heavily on the reward side rather than the risk.”
NUTRITIOUS FOOD
GM crops could provide nutritious food to the developing world. Crops in the pipeline include vitamin A-enhanced rice (‘golden rice’) and rice engineered to photosynthesise and grow faster (‘C4 rice’). “Vitamin A deficiency kills hundreds of thousands of people in the developing world and millions lose their eyesight,” says Halford. “It would be interesting to hear NGOs justify why they oppose crops that will benefit people in developing countries.”
“GM is not the whole solution but it is part of it,” says Harrington. “The global population is expanding with more mouths to feed and most will be in developing countries.” GM potatoes in the US with less potential to form acrylamide (a carcinogenic compound) are being marketed.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST GM HAS FAILED TO DELIVER
“GM has had its opportunity but very few traits
have been grown,” says Clare Oxborrow of Friends of the Earth. “It’s just the same commodity crops – maize, oil seed rape and soy – that have been modified for herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. For years, they have talked about traits that could make farming more sustainable and help us in a changing world – salt-tolerant, drought-tolerant crops – but these are hard to do.”
OTHER TECHNOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE
“Marker-assisted selection has sped up the scanning of genomes,” argues Oxborrow. “Camelina strains already exist in nature that are high in omega 3. We don’t need to invent them.”
PUBLIC TRUST
Major food and health scares, such as BSE, means public trust in
food manufacturers and governance is low. For critics, the sinister ‘Frankenfood’ label, coined to describe GM products, and the spectre of the ‘terminator gene’ (see box below) still resonate.
THE ARMS RACE
Critics argue that GM crops lock farmers into an escalating war between herbicides, fungicides and pesticides on one side, and nature on the other.
CROSS-CONTAMINATION DANGER
“GM oilseed rape has very fine pollen that can disperse over wide distances,” says Oxborrow.
WHO CONDUCTS GM RESEARCH?
Rothamsted has argued that if publicly funded research is ended, only big corporations will be able to afford the security precautions required for biotechnology research. This partly explains why only GM cash crops have been developed so far. “Nutritional benefits are harder to sell to farmers than herbicidetolerant or insect-resistant crops,” says Halford.