Europe treading a cautious route on GM

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

Jean-Yves Le Deaut is the French equivalent of New Zealand's Royal Commission on Genetic Modification.

The former scientist is a long-serving MP or deputy in France's National Assembly - the country's lower house and like our Parliament.

He is also a member and "rapporteur" of the Parliamentary Office for Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Options, or OPECST.

Set up in 1983, OPECST's role is to help Parliament make decisions on science and technology by using rapporteurs, assisted by officials and experts, to gather information from as wide a range of sources as possible, including public hearings.

Le Deaut's brief has been genetic modification. His first report in 1998 examined the risk of GM to human health and the environment, its economic impact, research issues and informing the public.

His second report, released in February, examined issues arising from field experimentation.

The nub of Le Deaut's findings were very similar to our commission's recommendation to "proceed with caution".

He found no major risks to human health from GM organisms (GMOs). Environmental risks were higher from some plant species than others.

For instance, GM maize had no wild equivalent to contaminate, while GM rape seed could cross with wild mustard.

The economic risks lay mainly in the prospect of larger firms cornering the market, because they could afford the research, he said.

In Paris last month he told the Business Herald that GM research should be done, including field trials.

If France did nothing, it would hand the advantage to the well-advanced United States and Canada.

"We have to be cautious, but we can't refuse the technology for agriculture which is demanded by the public for health [in pharmaceuticals]," said Le Deaut.

He believed his views were ahead of public opinion, but that an informed public would eventually see it his way.



Unlike New Zealand, field research trials have been widespread in Europe. Between 1986 and April last year, permission had been granted for 1603 trials.

Spain is the only country to have grown a commercial GM crop - 30,000 hectares of Bt maize last year.

Legislation on GMOs has been in place in the EU since the early 1990s when a European Commission directive established the authorisation procedure for the deliberate release into the environment, or field trial, of GM products, including crops.

The law was updated last April and member states had until October this year to implement the changes.

Last July, the commission published a new package designed to complement and consolidate the existing legislation with proposals for safety assessment and authorisation for GM food and feed, including provisions for labelling and traceability of products.

That package, which got broad acceptance in the European Parliament last week, should pave the way for more GM products on European shelves and allow authorisations for commercial release which have been on hold since 1998.

Sceptics, however, suggest a workable system is unlikely to result until all EU member states have the political will to make it happen.

Since the first directive in October 1991, the commission has authorised 18 GMOs for commercial release, although two were blocked by member states.

Two GM plants, a variety of soybean and a variety of maize, have been authorised to be on the European market for use in food, and two GM seed varieties have also been cleared to be on the market.

Since 1997 it has been mandatory to indicate the presence of GMOs on product labels, but the rules have been confusing, a situation the commission hopes to resolve with its new proposals.

A technical counsellor to the French Agriculture Minister, Gisele Rossat-Mignod, told the Business Herald the suspension of the commercial release authorisation process was only ever regarded as a temporary measure.

There was no intention of permanently stopping crops being grown, but time was needed for member states to inform consumers what was in their food and make reporting processes transparent, she said.

In Germany, one-time anti-GM Greenpeace activist Benedikt Haerlin, a former Green Party member of the European Parliament, is now a spokesman for the privately funded Berlin-based Foundation for Future Fund Agriculture.

One of its main projects is to research, breed and encourage the use among Germany's few organic farmers of conventional seeds which already have the benefits claimed for some GM seeds like pest resistance and drought tolerance.

Haerlin believes GM promoters have cynically exploited the possibility of health and nutrition benefits from GM crops.

But he said Germans were relaxed about GM "because they are not in the fields or the environment. They have bigger things to worry about like unemployment and safety on the streets".

A similar view arose from an unlikely quarter - agricultural engineer and molecular biologist Dr Joachim Bendiek of the Robert Koch Institute, the research organisation which evaluates the risks of GM field trials in Germany.

It has never turned down an application. Germany's 109 authorised field trials sometimes cover multiple sites. They ranged in size from 1.5 square metres to 10 hectares and included sugar beet, oil seed rape, maize and potatoes.

The Robert Koch Institute does not believe herbicide-resistant plants pose a danger to the environment or human health "because the trait doesn't give a selection advantage", Bendiek said.

In other words, a herbicide-resistant plant growing in the wild would be no "super-weed" because it could simply be mown down, or killed off with a different herbicide.

Bendiek said it was hard for him to see the advantages of herbicide-resistant crops when there was so much over-production in Europe.

But GM technology "might have some options" when it came to problems of pests, viruses and bacteria.

Bendiek said public interest in field trials ranged from none to proposals attracting more than 1000 submissions.

It also became clear, though, that people's interest depended on whether they became aware of a proposed trial, not that some proposals concerned them more than others.

At the Max Planck Institute for the molecular physiology of plants, a purpose-built science park near Berlin, research co-ordinator Dr Rainer Hoefgen was enthusiastic about the possibilities of genetically modified plants.

But he admitted to feeling embattled by a lack of public understanding of agriculture and science.

The biggest problem was that "there are simply no products on the shelves for people to buy and try".

People on both sides of the GM divide in Europe said the debate had not advanced in 10 years. Positions were entrenched and the same arguments were simply recycled.

At the world's largest agricultural research institute, INRA, in Paris, the director of plant breeding and genetic research, Dr Guy Riba, hoped his department had come up with a plan to move the debate forward.

Research was stymied, scientists were leaving Europe and the technological advantage was being handed to the US, even though research indicated the public was not against GMOs, he said.

"They just can't see any advantage and don't have any confidence in scientists," Riba said.

INRA's new plan was to involve people, including opposition groups like Greenpeace, in research before a single microscope was focused.

The first issue being discussed is whether GM could help solve a serious problem afflicting the dozen French grape varieties.

Doubtless it is a subject close to the heart of every French person. Will this be the GMO subject with the power to change minds?

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