MUST READ: A treasure trove of information form the Nuffield Council
[I picked out some of the most interesting items from the recent Nuffield report, the entire document is huge. Incidentally, so much for Monsanto being a giant which controls world agriculture -- with THREE percent of the worlds seed!]
Selected sections from "Nuffield Council on Bioethics Genetically Modified Crops: The Ethical And Social Issues" 27 May 1999
("Organic" food is tiny)
The primitive ancestors of almost all modern food crops are barely recognisable to the lay person; maize ears, for instance, were half an inch long rather than the eight or nine inches of their modern descendants.
(Monsanto the "food giant")
The fact that Monsanto supplies only three percent of the world's seed (10) belies the image of a new industrial revolution sweeping through agriculture under the impetus of a few multinationals. A well-informed consensus on the facts would resolve some of the arguments and reduce some of the public unease.
("Industrial agriculture")
There is a further defence of a morally conservative view of the environment to be considered. It stems from the notoriously difficult philosopher, Heidegger, (18) but its appeal is wide. His idea is that the world possesses a meaning that we can only understand if we approach the world in a receptive mode, in the way the poet, the artist or the traditional peasant does, not in an 'industrial' way. On Heidegger's view, technology is a moral disaster. We become manipulators of things and lose touch with their sense. It does not follow that no use of the natural world is permissible or worthwhile, but many are not. All forms of industrialised agriculture are culturally impoverishing and GM crops would be another step further down an already disastrous road. This may be so, but there seems little justification in banning GM crops on these grounds when the rest of society travels so substantially in the direction Heidegger opposed.
1.50. There is obviously a need to ensure that agriculture follows a sustainable path, so that the immense productivity gains that have been secured in the post-war period in the developed world are not purchased at the cost of loss of agricultural resources for the future. However, this is not the same as saying that it is possible to return to a previous, often highly romanticised, form of agriculture. Industrial methods, in some form or another, are here to stay. Concern for the poor and dispossessed in, say, Russia or sub-Saharan Africa, mean that the developed world must recognise that there are likely to be difficult choices to be made in the less developed world's search for the same productivity gains in agriculture that the developed world now enjoys.
(Insect-resistance genes have been in crops for some time.)
For example, breeders have been using disease- and pest-resistance genes for decades. In effect, the new insect-resistance genes (6) are unlikely to be different from insect-resistance genes already in use, such as the leafhopper resistance used in rice or hessian fly resistance in wheat. 'Natural' tolerance to herbicides was used in maize in the late 1980s, and again, very recently, in Pioneer Hi-bred's 'Smart Canola'. (7) The new GM crops which are tolerant to Roundup (8) are unlikely to be different in their effects on the environment. Thus, although GM crops may pose novel pressures on the environment there is, as yet, no reason to consider GM varieties as qualitatively different from non-GM varieties.
(New species have already been created, Triticale)
2.7. At the current stage of its development, genetically modified or transgenic technology does not offer the means of targeting where transgenes are integrated into the chromosomes; integration into the plant chromosomes appears to be more or less random. However, conventional plant breeding is usually a matter of putting two sets of about 25,000 genes together, allowing them to segregate at random and then selecting the best. Indeed, entirely new species have been manufactured using this approach. An example is Triticale, a synthetic hybrid between wheat and rye grown extensively in Eastern Europe over this century, which is the result of combining 50,000 largely untested genes, 25,000 from each species.
("Untested" technology?)
2.42. During the period from 1986 to 1997, approximately 25,000 transgenic crop field trials were conducted on more than 60 crops with 10 traits in 45 countries. No adverse effects on food safety or the environment have been noted, relative to production in non-GM current varieties. Of this total of 25,000, 15,000 field trials were conducted during the first 10-year period and 10,000 in the last two-year period. Seventy-two per cent of all transgenic field trials were conducted in the US and Canada. By the end of 1997, 48 transgenic crop products, involving 12 crops and six traits, were approved for commercialisation in at least one country by 22 owners of technology, of which 20 were private-sector operators. (23) The crops include soybean, cotton, oilseed rape, potato, maize, tomato and pumpkins, and the traits insect, virus and herbicide tolerance, delayed ripening, male sterility and changes in oil composition (Table 2.1).
(Already life-saving rice developed using biotech, and more)
4.18. Apart from under-nutrition, it could well prove feasible to greatly reduce malnutrition through the development of micronutrient-rich GM crops (such as the Vitamin A-enriched rice developed by the Rockefeller Rice Biotechnology Programme). Vitamin A deficiency affects over 200 million people and over 14 million children have consequent eye damage. Iron deficiency affects some two billion (2100 million) people, impairing physical and mental work and increasing risks in pregnancy. Iodine deficiency affects some 1100–1500 million people, of whom over 600 million are goitrous. (18)
4.29. Despite the small amount of GM research resources devoted to developing-country agriculture, there is ample evidence that GM crops could significantly improve nutrition in developing countries. For example, researchers in Mexico have inserted a gene which enables crop plants to secrete citric acid from their roots. This increases their tolerance to aluminium toxicity, which affects a significant proportion of arable land, and which often reduces yields by over 30%, and sometimes by as much as 80%. In GM rice, inserting genes from two wild rice relatives into the best performing Chinese rice hybrids has raised yields by 20-40%. Research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation has produced a GM rice variety resistant to the tungro virus; very promising GM vitamin A-enriched rice varieties, and a tissue which is giving up to 25% higher yields in China. (32) Other GM crop examples relevant to developing countries include potato varieties bred in Peru with stable multigene resistance to late blight, (33) a wild wheat cross yielding 18 tonnes/ha (34) and virus-resistant sweet potatoes in Kenya, conservatively estimated to raise yields by 15%. (35,36)
Members of the Working Party
Professor Alan Ryan (Chairman) is Warden of New College, University of Oxford
Professor Derek Burke CBE is a former Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia and was Chairman of the Advisory Committee for Novel Foods and Processes (1988-97)
Professor Mike Gale FRS is Director, The John Innes Centre, Norwich
Professor Brian Heap CBE FRS is Master of St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Miss Prue Leith OBE is Vice President of the Royal Society of Arts
Ms Julie Hill is Programme Adviser to the Green Alliance, an environmental charity and is a member of ACRE (Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment) until June 1999
Professor Steve Hughes is the Unilever Research Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Exeter
Professor Michael Lipton is at the Poverty Research Unit, University of Sussex
Mr Derek Osborn CB is Chairman of the UK Round Table on Sustainable Development, Chairman of the European Environment Agency, Chairman of UNED/UK, and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Secretariat
Dr Sandy Thomas (Director)
Dr Rachel Bartlett
Ms Susan Bull
Mrs Julia Fox |
