Genetic modification – where now for Europe?

Citation

Johnson, B. (2003), "Genetic modification – where now for Europe?", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415aab.003

Genetic modification – where now for Europe?

Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson is Senior Adviser on Biotechnology to the British Statutory Nature Conservation Agencies and Head of the Agricultural Technologies Group at English Nature.

Keywords: Genetic modification, Ethics, Biotechnology

Abstract Biotechnology in general, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in particular, are controversial in Europe. Too often, the debate is reduced to simplistic political slogans. Scientific evidence is obscured by the rhetoric of "anti-globalisation" on one side and "inevitable progress" on the other. Public and politicians alike remain confused. Brian Johnson argues that it is time to look more objectively at GMOs. This means facing up to the dangers and ethical dilemmas. But it means recognising as well that biotechnology can be reconciled with ecological conservation and social justice.

For the past ten years the USA has enthusiastically embraced GM crops, where staple foods such as soybean and maize and commodity crops such as cotton are now derived from plants where genes from bacteria and viruses have been inserted using transgenic techniques. Over 40 million hectares of GM crops are now grown in North America, a large proportion of the 52 million hectares grown worldwide.

So why haven't we in Europe taken up this new technology? European consumers and politicians remain deeply sceptical about GMOs, and scientists are divided in their views about issues such as food safety and possible impacts on the environment.

Like many a scientist, I am often frustrated about how society views and exploits science – I delight in discovery but sometimes despair at the unintelligent ways we use scientific and technological progress. From the discovery of nuclear fission to recent advances in genetics and medicine, nations are constantly faced with sudden change; with discoveries that change almost overnight our capacity to control our environment, whether for good or for bad. Politicians and other decision-makers are then forced to make choices based on extrinsic moral values. By that I mean that they consider the possible consequences of taking one particular moral path or another, and if they have doubts about safety and other factors, some form of regulation is introduced. In the process they also of course consider the socio-economic and environmental effects of a particular development and make their initial judgement about whether and how we should use a new technology. That judgement is rarely based on sound and objective information from research, because we cannot always predict how technology will be used and even if we could, commercial imperatives leave insufficient time to carry out research, however much we try to control technologies using regulation.

Politicians and regulatory bodies, especially in the developed countries, rarely make decisions based on intrinsic moral values like religious conviction; they tend to leave such judgements to the individual. For genetically modified food, this may mean introducing compulsory labelling so that vegetarians, for example, can choose not to eat products with animal-derived genes inserted. There have been some important contributions to the GM debate from those who believe that the technology is intrinsically and morally wrong and therefore should not be allowed. Most of us will I hope admit to a deep-seated unease about genetic engineering, probably based on an intrinsic fear of the unknown and, to some extent, of the unknowable. Part of the fear, and I share it, is that genetic engineering could be used to produce terrorist weapons of mass destruction against which there may be no defence. But you can say the same of mechanical and nuclear technologies. These fears are always with us but may lead us to economic and scientific stagnation if they alone are used to drive policy.

The choices regulators and producers select should be those which give overall benefits to society, but the history of scientific and technological discovery is peppered with examples of the opposite. To my mind there is a pattern behind the social use of new discoveries.

First, the discovery is announced and then rapidly and somewhat anarchically incorporated into commercial, civic, medical or military activity, with little democratically accountable regulation. Often, after a number of years, major problems arise. These can be moral or practical, environmental or medical. Slowly and painfully, after years of campaigning by those affected by these problems, an ethical code governing the use of the discovery may emerge. An ethical code is a socially agreed blueprint for acceptable behaviour of both technology producers and users, incorporating moral values and practical experience, and is usually used as a foundation stone for regulation.

Over the past 30 years we have witnessed one of the most profound revolutions in human discovery. The ability to understand and manipulate the genomes of individual organisms presents new moral and ethical dilemmas with no precedent in human history. The speed of discovery and the relentless commercial pressure to market new organisms and their derivative products leaves little time for decision-makers to acquire the information needed to formulate ethical codes dealing with food and environmental issues. Without such codes we are in the realms of a heady "anything goes" culture, especially in industry and research institutions, where huge effort and funds are being invested into new products which must then be brought to market as quickly as possible to recover investment costs.

We must not underestimate the power of genetic engineering. Within the next 30 years I predict that almost every major crop we grow and every farm animal we use will have a genetically modified alternative in use somewhere in the world. Besides food plants and animals, there may be many other new organisms on offer, making it possible to grow raw materials for engineering, the plastics industry, medicine, and energy production. This is not just an extension of conventional selective breeding; we are looking at radical transformations, incorporating genes from several different phyla into another and synthesising completely new "designer" gene sequences, possibly even completely new organisms. These developments will offer choices of either intensifying agriculture and food production or moving towards a more sustainable future. I will focus on agriculture because it is in this area that the debate is currently centred.

Genetic modification could change forever the relationship between crops and the land. Farmers may no longer need to adapt land to suit the limited range of crops available now: seed companies will be able to adapt crops to soils, climate, pest and disease pressures, and perhaps crops will be able to fix their own nitrogen from the air. But who drives this effort? Industry presently controls which crops are produced. Because of the power of this technology and the risks involved, global society is developing new regulatory and political mechanisms to ensure that such crops are safe to eat and that farmland continues to support wildlife, and that agriculture does not further damage critical resources such as soil and water. We cannot reasonably expect industry to do this regulatory task for us – they have neither the purpose nor the knowledge.

To many people agricultural biotechnology may sound very alarming, but should it be? After all, what are we doing to our environment with so-called "conventional" crops and the industrial processes we use to grow them? The answer in many parts of Europe is simple – for the past 60 years we have been using unsustainable and grossly polluting agricultural and industrial technologies that rely on finite resources, especially on fossil fuels, and increasingly scarce raw materials like phosphate fertilisers, to maximise production at the expense of degraded soils and dwindling water resources. This process has been repeated in many other parts of the world. Global biodiversity has been dramatically reduced by land take, pollution by pesticides and fertilisers, and, in the developed world, diversion of almost all biomass on farms to production, leaving very little for farmland wildlife. So far as I know there has never been ethical scrutiny and precious little regulation of the use of new agricultural products and processes, with the exception of some pesticides. I am sure I am not alone when I find the current state of global agriculture rather alarming, and I can see no "organic" alternative which would give the outputs the four billion of us need to be able to live in a civilised, peaceful and comfortable way, let alone the outputs needed to raise the living standards of the two billion living in poverty. As I said, we spend much time and most resources adapting land to suit crops. Surely it would be better if we adapted crops to suit the land and to defend themselves from pests and diseases? And it would certainly be better if we obtained some of our energy from biologically renewable systems rather than from coal, oil and gas, but there are severe thermodynamic constraints on how far we can take such systems. Genetic engineering could be one way to give us more sustainable methods of producing our food and timber, could reduce the need to use pesticides and fertilisers, and clean up existing pollution. But will it?

At the moment we are in the very early stages of a major technological advance. Most GM crops coming to global markets require broad spectrum herbicides for their cultivation, not only making profits from both seed and herbicide, but also locking farmers into a system controlled by large companies. Preliminary research has shown that growing these herbicide tolerant crops using spraying over the crop in the peak growing season may make weed control so efficient that farmland biodiversity is damaged even more than by using conventional weed control methods. Other than the field scale trials in the UK, very little research is being done to look at how this system might affect the environment if such crops are grown commercially, and in Europe little account has been taken of how farmers might in reality exploit the options offered by these new plant varieties. Waiting on the other side of the Atlantic and in countries such as China and India, we now have a plethora of insect resistant crops, crops modified for food quality and those containing industrial and pharmaceutical molecules. How do these crops arrive at the doors of regulatory committees and competent authorities in Europe, and why is it taking years to decide whether or not they should be used here?

Perhaps the answer is that regulation works the wrong way round! Our committees sit passively waiting for applications to arrive, and then consider the human and environmental safety of GM products on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps instead they should be developing scientifically and ethically based codes to set the framework for their own decision-making processes, and then send clear signals to the biotechnology industry and public plant and animal breeders about which developments are likely to be welcomed and which are not. In other words they could be more proactive. The UK has begun that process by issuing guidance to biotechnology companies about what should and what should not be incorporated into genetically engineered organisms. I recommend that you read the document published by the UK Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE): Guidance on Principles of Best Practice in the Design of Genetically Modified Plants. It is a world first and on its Web site (www.defra.gov.uk/environment/acre/index.htm).

To plan the general path of research and development in agricultural technology we also need a clear view of where we want farming to be in 20 years' time, so we can begin designing the cropping and grazing systems that can deliver that vision. We need a generally agreed vision of European agriculture and then to move towards an agreed path of research and development aimed at providing the cropping and grazing systems that enable more sustainable farming to take place. We also need ethical codes to frame that effort if we are to move forward safely and surely. At a meeting with a leading biotechnology company I was told that they have internal ethical scrutiny of all potential new products, which is very commendable, but when I asked where their ethics came from they replied "from within our own team"! In the current climate of public scepticism about GM crops and other new developments in agriculture this is hardly reassuring. But it shows that industrialists recognise a need for ethical standards to underpin biotechnological development and regulation. Perhaps they need to codify these so that the public can see they exist and help to develop them further.

To develop such codes government and industry need access to moral and ethical "sounding boards"; people who can explain genetic engineering in plain language to different sectors of the population; people who can clearly explain the risks, safety issues, benefits and disbenefits, and those who can stimulate informed public debate about the acceptability or otherwise of new genetic transformations. I welcome the recent announcement by the UK government that they are keen on being fully engaged in the public debate on genetic technology. I hope that this renewed effort will move the debate away from being focused solely on the risks from the technology itself, which in Europe are tightly controlled, but ask what do we want to do with it and how can products be developed as safely as possible? I hope that the UK public debate stimulates a deeper and more informed debate throughout Europe.

We must not forget that ethical codes cannot be developed properly without high quality information, some of it scientific, to inform debate. Like many scientists, I feel strongly that quality information has been lacking from the GMO debate in general. There are yawning chasms in our research and information about the effects on our environment of growing GM crops. Only last month, in the journal Nature Biotechnology, several authors called for more public investment in research on the environmental impact of GMOs. I couldn't agree more. Research brings new and important information to ethical debates. Ethical codes cannot and should not be static entities; they must be constantly reviewed and revisited in the light of new knowledge.

Trawling society for moral standards, ethical views and good, solid information that leads to informed debate is not a new process; we do it all the time in, for example, the areas of medical genetics and animal welfare, and there are clear ethical codes coming out of these debates. Why should agriculture be different? Why should the agrochemical and biotechnology companies have the potentially dangerous luxury of a laissez-faire atmosphere in research and development? Pharmaceutical companies do not operate in such a culture, yet are highly successful. The dangers of an "anything-goes" approach are all too obvious in recent disasters in the agricultural and food sectors. It was not only a lack of effective regulation that caused the economic, social and personal devastation of the BSE and salmonella crises, but also the lack of ethical consideration about the wisdom of feeding herbivores their own proteins, and giving chickens food known to be contaminated with potentially pathogenic bacteria.

I am making a case for more enlightened regulation of all farming methods, aimed at making them safer and more environmentally sustainable. The GM debate has highlighted this need because of the special nature of transgenic crops, but we will be seeing more radical developments in all areas of plant and animal breeding, and in agricultural systems, not just GM. These will give us more options for producing food and other commodities in Europe, but they will never be risk-free. We need to understand the risks more clearly and identify the ethical implications as soon as we can. But we also need to make decisions about which products of these new technologies we want to use. The search for a more sustainable agriculture will not be helped by indecision and poor regulatory systems. In particular, Europe needs to decide whether transgenic technology itself can be a valid approach to the key issue of agricultural sustainability. In European medical research and practice the technology is now routine and so far has proven to be safe and effective. Let us move the public debate on agricultural biotechnology towards discussing the safety and environmental impacts of each crop and animal, not simply rule them out because of how they were produced.