UK Guardian 17th Dec 1998
BAD TASTE
It is consumers, not scientists Blair should be
listening to on the subject of genetically engineered
food
By Peter Melchett
Thursday December 17, 1998
At a seminar on science this week, Tony Blair,
Peter
Mandelson and David Blunkett (Prime Minister and other senior
ministers)were told that genetic engineering represents
"opportunities to be seized" and that
they should beware of "bio-fundamentalists". As the
only
"bio-fundamentalist" present, I said that industry and
UK
government scientists were not trusted by the public - and
for good reason. In crucial areas such as food - from
pesticides to mad cow disease - they've simply got it
wrong. Chatham House rules prevent other comments being
attributed.
Throughout the last 50 years, the Government
has poured
millions of pounds into intensive, industrialised food
production. The problems that Rachel Carson highlighted in
her book, Silent Spring, should have forewarned us of the
disasters to follow - the stripping of nature from the face of
our countryside, the revolting cruelty of industrialised
livestock farming, culminating in the catastrophe of mad
cow disease.
At the seminar, it was clear that, 20 years
later, nothing has
fundamentally changed. The agenda of official British
science is still dominated by the old-fashioned mindset that
big is best, and that the more intense our manipulation or
interference with nature through science, the better the
outcome will be.
Environmentalists are enthusiasts for science,
which plays a
crucial role in identifying environmental problems like
damage to the ozone layer and climate change. But scientific
policy advice given to politicians comes from a tightly drawn
"inner circle". Although knowledgeable in their fields,
these
"experts" have often proved to be incapable of
appreciating
how the real world works (as with BSE), and equally
incapable of taking seriously issues that matter to the public
(cows shouldn't eat cows).
In the UK, there is a strong presumption that
the
comfortable smoking-room consensus among elite
decision-makers is automatically right. They even fail to ask
the right questions, let alone provide sensible answers.
The seminar was dominated by genetic
engineering. This
new technology involves even greater conflict with natural
systems than the industrialised agriculture it builds on. It is
now the dominant force in British science. Most of the
scientists seemed to want the Government to treat
applications of genetic engineering in food and in medicine
in the same way. The public see them quite differently.
Buying food for your family and getting a prescription from
your doctor are not the same, whatever the genetic
engineering enthusiasts may say. Someone who is ill, and
voluntarily takes something to make them better, chooses to
take a risk explained to them, for a clear, hoped-for,
personal benefit. None of this applies to genetically
engineered food.
The Prime Minister was given some very
unscientific
speculation, for example, that genetic engineering is needed
to feed the world's growing population. There is no
evidence for this, and a study, just reported in Nature,
found that the positive alternatives of organic agriculture can
"produce equivalent crop yields to conventional
methods".
Science has a role to play in decisions about
food
production. But as a Government Research Council group
of scientists said of the arguments about dumping the Brent
Spar: "Any decision to proceed, or not to proceed, with
such activities involves social, economic, ethical and
aesthetic considerations which are outside the competence
of the group, and judgments in which the technical
assessment of the environmental impacts is only one factor,
and not necessarily the most important one." The decision
on whether to proceed with genetically engineered food
also involves social, economic, ethical and aesthetic
considerations - and questions about need, who benefits,
who runs the inevitable risk, and questions about the
unpredictable and the unknowable. Above all, if it is to
represent the public interest, Government must listen to
environmentalists, non-establishment scientists and the
public, who just do not want it at all. In saying some of this
to Tony Blair, I was accused of exaggerating to make a
point. But my overwhelming impression was that the Prime
Minister and his colleagues, like their predecessors over the
last 50 years, were being presented with a cosy consensus,
which ignored overwhelming public concerns, and
establishment science's record of failure, not success.
Lord Melchett is executive director of Greenpeace UK