Science and Nature

It is both illogical and immoral to oppose genetically modified foods. David Willetts is right to speak out against the European Unions ban June 10 2013 The European Unions opposition to genetically modified foodstuffs was archaic a decade ago. Today it is something closer to bizarre, with a dash of obscenity thrown in. Commercially-grown GM crops flourish in China, North America, South America and parts of Africa. While, in Europe, they are effectively banned. There are two exceptions: a potato used to produce starch for paper, which is legal but no longer grown anywhere, and a pest-resistant maize produced by Monsanto, which is nonetheless locally banned in Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Hungary, and not grown in Britain anyway. Wariness of such things would be admirable if it were based upon prudence backed by science, of the sort that prohibits untested pharmaceuticals. It is not. Europes hostility to genetic modification is the result of powerful and alarmist green lobbies and traditionalist farmers cosseted from reality by the effective protectionism of the Common Agricultural Policy. It is senseless. In the longer term, it is also unsustainable. Speaking at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival yesterday, and in an interview afterwards, David Willetts called for a change. One productive way forward, said the Minister for Universities and Science, is to have this discussion as part of a wider need for Europe to remain innovative rather than a museum of 20th-century technology. Mr Willetts makes a wider case than GM alone. Regulation, he believes, holds back progress in nanotechnology, in stem cell research and even in space exploration. There are, he says, just too many 21st-century technologies that Europe is just being very slow to adopt. More productive crops could help achieve food security in sub-Saharan Africa. China has a huge and growing appetite for beef and dairy products, and Chinese cattle are reared on crops rather than pasture. GM crops could even provide biofuels as a viable alternative to petrol.

Research into GM foods is currently permitted but benefits European farmers not at all, and happens in the face of an officially endorsed public hostility. Only a year ago, police had to prevent protesters from storming Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, where a trial was being conducted for a new strain of wheat that had been modified to release a chemical to repel aphids. It is bad enough that such Luddism exists, let alone that it has official EU sanction. In the face of still extant hostility, Mr Willetts deserves credit for seeking to put Britain on the right side of the argument. Denmark has been proposing an opt-out on the GM ban for nation states since 2010, but in the face of fierce opposition, both ideological and economic, from many other states. For now, Europe probably still grows enough subsidised food to feed itself, should it have to. But the rest of the world does not. There is little reason for our agricultural system alone to lag behind. Earlier this year, one British company announced a GM mosquito which, by breeding with wild mosquitoes and producing non-hatching eggs, could dramatically reduce instances of diseases such as malaria and West Nile virus. Other companies, worldwide, are working on modified farm animals that could grow faster or produce more young and milk, and even on animals with human organs, for transplant. With such cutting-edge technologies, there are obvious ethical and environmental considerations, and a degree of both public and official circumspection is wholly explicable. Crops are a different matter. These things exist elsewhere on a vast scale and without consequence. The genetic modification of foodstuffs is no more against Nature than crop rotation, or the domestication of animals. Europes farms are not museums. It is time for them to start harvesting the future.