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THE BACKLASH BEGINS
"People simply voted with their feet." Robin Grove-White, director, Centre for Environmental Change, Lancaster University.
Within 10 months however, the government was forced, by public opinion, buying pressure and its own conservation agencies, to stop ramming GE foods into the system. Much of this pressure came from business itself.
By May 1999, seven European supermarket chains, including Iceland, Tesco, Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer had side-stepped EU regulations and announced they would not sell GE foods and would eliminate GM soy and maize bases from their in-house brands. (28)
A few months later, US exports of corn to the European Union were reported to have dropped 96% in a year. One giant processor announced it would pay extra for traditional soybeans and the British pharmaceutical/biotech company, AstraZeneca, announced it would not commercialise its own terminator-type technology. (29)
Meanwhile, back in America, Monsanto and other giant life sciences companies came under pressure from their business colleagues. In May 1999 Dan Glickman, the US Agriculture secretary, was warning of "profound consequences" if the GM situation did not improve. He encouraged US firms to label products voluntarily and, in August, said he would investigate whether the agriculture department was too close to companies like Monsanto.
The message was picked up on Wall Street. By September, Monsanto stock had lost 35% of its value in a year, while Wall Street as a whole climbed 30%. (30)
At the same time, a multi-billion dollar antitrust lawsuit over the exploitation of bioengineering techniques to gain a stranglehold on agricultural markets was announced. (31)
Suddenly Monsanto found ways to separate GM and non-GM soy and maize, withdrew its GM tomato paste from UK supermarkets and backed away from its "terminator gene" technology. The company now publicly states "Although we did use a scorpion gene in America, we’ve never used an animal gene [in a plant] here." (32)
Two months later, in November 1999, after a lengthy and considered report from its statutory conservation agency, English Nature, Tony Blair’s Labour government announced a three-year moratorium on commercial GM crops while it conducted a farm-scale controlled test cropping programme designed to assess far-reaching effects of GM crops on plant and wild life.
Despite calls for more rigorous testing for health reasons, the British moratorium probably had more to do with protecting biodiversity and farmland. (33)
The arguments around agricultural risk were compelling – and came from the government’s own conservation arm. Chief Scientist, Keith Duff, talks about how herbicide resistant GM crops will result in a loss of biodiversity (that is, weeds and odd strangers in crops and round the edges) with two knock-on effects – a certain loss of insects and ultimately birds.
Dr Brian Johnson, head of its Biotechnology Advisory Unit, is adamant: "We know what effect herbicide-tolerant crops will have on wildlife and we also know how farmers will use those crops if they’re unregulated."
He pauses, "And government knows that too…Had we not detected toxicity [of DDT and DDT and aldrin-based organochlorine pesticides that showed up the potentially lethal effects of PCBs before toxic levels built up in humans] through monitoring falling bird populations in the past, there would have been a lot of dead human bodies around -- particularly those of children and babies. We abandon this system at our peril…There is overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the use of more effective pesticides (including herbicides) over the past 20 years has been a major factor causing serious declines in farmland birds, arable wild plants and insects."
Champions of food safety in the government camp are less plentiful. Says Robin Grove-White, "there simply aren’t equivalent publicly-respected bodies arguing on the safety side."
Instead scientists, many of whom see genetic modification as the answer to the world’s problems, not to mention an exciting career path, are baffled at the strength of the public reaction.
Says Lord Soulsby, "What you’re doing is inserting a piece of DNA. By the time you get to harvest the plant there’s nothing different – just a message...and even foods that have a message in them and get into the intestinal tract of humans are broken down into amino acids by digestion. The gut acts as a biological gatekeeper."
Professor Parker points out that work with transgentic organisms has been around for 30 years. "This is how you investigate function. It started with bacteria in the ‘70s, then mammals in the ‘80s. Now it’s got to such a stage of hysteria that nobody’s prepared to say anything. I think a whole battery of problems have arisen. We live in an anti-science society despite the fact that it’s a technology society. It’s a cultural problem. Science is not valued in this society and it worries me greatly that mediaeval superstitions have a great following…crystals, new age therapies -- to me this is worrying. It’s a pre-science view of the world. And the same people use mobile phones, jump in cars…In 20 years’ time they’ll think, ‘What problem?’"
Footnotes:
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"One patient was assessed at the scene as being in a minor condition."