The British GMO debate:
80 percent of Britons say NO

GM-Food: Deepest Fears of the British

The largest consumer survey to date about GM-food is heating tempers in England: More than 80 per cent of interviewees reject genetically modified food.

By Tobias Beck

This year, Malcolm Grant had enough to do as it was. The sporty man with grey hair, a moustache and resolute features is Vice Chancellor of the elite university in Cambridge. A full-time job, really. But during this summer Grant, an agricultural economist by training, was given an additional task. The British government wanted to find out how the people on the island felt about genetically modified food. Grant dutifully obeyed the orders, and equipped with 500,000 pounds organised the biggest scientific debate the British public had ever seen.

As many as 650 public functions took place in the past months. Information was given, questions were asked and answers evaluated. The remarkable result: A full 37,000 replies passed over the desks of the committee that had grown rapidly. Under the heading "GM-nation?" - "genetically modified nation?" - the 68-page result finally made its way back to the client last week. And that the opinion expressed by all these answers would be so clear even the most severe critics of GM-food would not have thought: More than 80 per cent of Britons flatly reject genetically manipulated plants.

People have uneasy feelings

Some conclusions, Grant and his co-authors write in the foreword of the study, can be generally drawn from the analysis of the answers. For instance, in nearly all of the interviewees the topic of GM-food brought about an uneasy feeling. "The interviewees feel ill-informed and often unable to express an opinion about questions concerning genetics", one reads.

It is also characteristic of the findings that when people concern themselves more thoroughly with the topic, that tends to strengthen their misgivings rather than reduce them. The majority pleads for caution: "This technology should not be further distributed before new tests and investigations have been carried out, regulations put in place, the usefulness for society (and not only for the companies) demonstrated, and clear and credible answers to unsolved questions such as the consequences for human health and the environment have been found", the authors go on.

Mistrust of government and multi-national companies

The interviewees have also found their scapegoat: the industry and the government, who commissioned the study. In the answers, Malcolm Grant has detected a "widespread mistrust of the government and multi-national companies". A majority of Britons thinks that their government pays too much attention to the interests of the biotechnology industry. And the companies, the authors of the state financed study write, "have the power to disregard globally the interests of the public." According to the survey, the British are only willing to accept "medical uses or advantages for developing countries" as by-products of the genetic manipulation of food. The reasons for the clear "no" are extremely diverse.

Christoph Coupland, a British-born plant scientist and director of the Max-Planck institute for plant breeding research in Cologne, does not want to treat everything alike. "The problem is that there are vastly different arguments, economic ones, medical ones and ecological ones, and they all have different starting points." In spite of the negative results of the survey, Coupland is in favour of giving the public more and better information and presenting the issue in a more discriminating fashion.

Exodus of scientists

Still, he sees a growing frustration among plant scientists. "If you look at the Americans, who eat everything without saying anything, then it is clear that companies in this country become jealous." As a consequence, Coupland has observed, more and more biotech companies move abroad. In England alone four biotech companies have stopped doing research in the past three year. The daily newspaper "The Guardian" even thinks to have detected an exodus of good scientists to foreign countries.

The ranks of the GM-critics feel more confident as a result of the survey. "The public discussion has reached a new level of quality here", says Henning Strodthoff, who concerns himself with the topic of genetic technology at Greenpeace Germany. According to him, a big public debate is also long overdue. Even more so, as politicians are working on an implementation of a European Union guideline for gene technology according to which all goods that contain more than 0.9% of genetically modified ingredients - detectably or not - have to be specially labelled.

A particularly interesting question in the new law could be who will be liable for possible damage caused by gene technology. "As far as coexistence is concerned, that is damage caused by a genetically modified field adjacent to a normal field", Strodthoff says, "most points are still unresolved." In this regard, he hopes for a positive influence of the survey carried out in England. There, too, the government is implementing the EU-guidelines. "The government really should react now", plant scientist Coupland confirms. If and how it will react, though, is rather uncertain. The majority of interviewees is rather pessimistic about a lasting effect of the debate. This is also evident from the conclusions drawn by the government-appointed authors: "There is a widespread suspicion that the survey is only a camouflage and that its results will be ignored."
 

Tobias Beck is science writer in Stuttgart, Germany. The article was translated by Oliver Morsch, Pisa, Italy.

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