Pro-GM man in impromptu debate with protest crowd

By SIMON COLLINS in San Francisco

Nature did not make the world good enough, so we need to genetically modify it to make it better.

That was the awkward position that Canadian Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore was forced to adopt when he single-handedly started a debate with protesters outside the world's biggest biotechnology conference in San Francisco this week.

In an extraordinary two-hour exchange with a well-informed group including British author Luke Anderson and Food First policy analyst Dr Raj Patel, Dr Moore defended genetic modification against many of the key arguments against it.

Despite earlier threats to shut down the Bio 2004 conference, the anti-GM activists heard his arguments and responded respectfully.

The 200 or so protesters unnerved the 20,000 conference delegates with noisy slogans and drew a massive police presence, but never came close to disrupting the event.

Dr Moore, now a consultant with a company called Greenspirit, started the exchange when he saw a man holding a sign saying that scientists spent $500 million developing golden rice, inserting genes from daffodils to increase the rice's vitamin A content to counter malnutrition and blindness in poor countries.

"I know Dr Ingo Potrykus, the inventor of golden rice. He's a friend of mine, and he didn't get anything like $500 million," he said.

The man with the sign had no idea where the figure came from, but Mr Anderson was quickly pushed forward from the crowd and moved the argument on to a wider plane.

Biotech firms had solutions all right, he said, but only to problems which they created. "Of the list of chemicals known by the state of California to produce cancer, Bayer produces most of them," he said.

"Bayer also produces cancer drugs. Then they turn round and say, 'We don't know why you're protesting'."

Dr Patel said manufacturers put trans-fatty acids into food to prolong its shelf-life, and heavily advertised foods that were full of fat and sugar.

Then they wanted to put new genes into crops and animals to reduce the human obesity and diabetes that their owns foods produced.

"The corporations that brought the system to its knees then come in and get the profits," he said.

That was not how it looked to Dr Moore. In fact he said, people were living longer than ever, thanks to new medicines such as genetically engineered insulin and a gradual reduction in pollution.

"Except for lung cancer in women, all the other cancers are going down."

Inserting the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene into plants, or making them resistant to Roundup weedkiller, had enabled a huge reduction in pesticide use on United States crops.

It had also cut soil loss through erosion by 90 per cent, because there was no longer any need to till the soil to get rid of the weeds.

GM crops such as golden rice also lifted production per hectare, reducing the pressure to chop down forests for farmland.

And all this was without any signs of ill effects. No one, he said, has had so much as a stomach ache from GE food.

That was an invitation for an uproar, and it came. Susan Sullivan said people could no longer drink the water back home in Duke County because it was so contaminated by chemicals.

Mr Anderson found a chink in Dr Moore's armour: "Name me a single epidemiological study on people who have eaten GE foods."

Dr Moore had no answer. No long-term study has yet compared the health of people eating GM foods against people who avoid them.

Mr Anderson said more lives in poor countries could be saved by improving water supplies than by spending billions of dollars on drugs.

Patrick Moore

Controversial environmentalist

* 1971: Co-founder of Greenpeace.

* 1984: Quits after almost 10 years at the forefront of high-profile Greenpeace campaigns on whaling and sealing.

* 1991: Founds Greenspirit, a consultancy focusing on environmental policy and communications.

What they say about him

Patrick Moore is an eco Judas.
- David Suzuki, a leading opponent of genetic engineering in Canada who taught Moore genetics at the University of British Columbia.

He's a turncoat who supports many of the things we oppose. We basically try not to have anything to do with Patrick Moore.
- Greenpeace spokesman Craig Culp.

What he says about them

Many of the larger groups, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, WWF etc, have closed ranks around extremist policies that are counter-productive to environmental progress.

The worst aspect is what I describe as the environmental movement has been hijacked by political activists who are using green rhetoric to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-corporatism and class warfare than with ecology or the environment.

Greenspirit

Luke Anderson