The dangers of rejecting genetic modification
Lord Dick Taverne
I want to start with two moral tales.
The first is from mediaeval Islam. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, in the golden age of Islam, Arab thinkers led the world in mathematics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine. They preserved for us the civilisation of ancient Greece. They achieved rates of literacy that rivalled those of contemporary Europe. Then sometime in the fourteenth century, religious dogmatism suppressed their spirit of scientific inquiry. Printing presses were banned in case they undermined the word of God as revealed in the Koran and other sacred texts. Science has not yet recovered its place of glory in the Islamic world.
The second is from China. In the early fifteenth century, Chinese technology was probably the most sophisticated in the world. Not only had they invented the compass, printing and gunpowder, but they surpassed all others in the key technology of the time, shipbuilding that gave control of the seas. Hundreds of Chinese ships over 100 metres long, many times the size of the puny ships of Europe, dominated the Indian Ocean and may have travelled far beyond. Then a faction came to power that dismantled shipyards and banned the building of ocean-going ships. China remained isolated from the rest of the world for centuries.
Now I am not suggesting that Europe is about to suffer the fate of medieval Islam of fifteenth century China. But there are some danger signs we ignore at our peril. The basis of our prosperity and indeed, to an important extent, the foundations of our liberal democracies in Europe depend on the development of science and respect for evidence. Yet I shall argue, indeed I have argued in my recent book The March of Unreason, that in the environmental movement, which plays a big role in our politics, there is a strong anti-science streak that rejects much of modern technology and urges us to adopt instead a philosophy of “Back to Nature”.
Let me make it clear: I am a keen environmentalist. Over thirty years ago I gave up owning a car in favour of a bicycle and my favourite form of transport is sail. At one stage I was a member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and I still support several causes they champion. But over the years part of the environmental movement has become a crusade with all the characteristics of a new religion. Faith has displaced regard for evidence; and in some cases the ends have come to justify the means. The most obvious example is the campaign against the genetic modification of crops. It is a campaign that has been hugely successful and with a few isolated exceptions such as the cultivation of GM maize in Spain, has effectively driven a vitally important technology out of Europe. Further, the suspicion towards science and technology that it exemplifies has much wider implications than just for agro-biotechnology.
Why is this technology important? What are its advantages? What is the case against it? And what are the dangers of rejecting it?
Few people in Europe seem to realise how isolated we have become. The genetic modification of plants is a relatively new technology that outside Europe has spread almost as fast as the mobile phone. In ten years of commercialisation, by 2005, approved GM crops were cultivated on 90 million hectares in 21 different countries by over 8.5 million farmers and its global value was some $5.25 billion. The major crops to date are soybean, maize, cotton and rape, but in addition to cotton, we are now beginning to see the cultivation of staple GM crops important to the developing world, such as rice. Indeed in the last few years the biggest increase in GM crops has been in developing countries.
The technology is important because it has an immense contribution to make to reducing hunger, poverty and disease.
First hunger. Greenpeace and its allies claim that there is plenty of food being produced, that we do not need more efficient farming and the only problem is one of distribution. It is a very smug view. Leave aside the fact that distribution is not a minor problem, as we have seen time and again, and that relying on redistribution food aid to places where people do not have enough to eat would ruin local small faming. The fact is that about a billion people are now undernourished and by the middle of the century we will probably have to feed another 3 billion more. Further, many hundreds of millions more people in Asia and elsewhere will achieve middle class living standards, eating more meat and owning millions more pets, not known for their vegetarianism. If you add it all up, we are likely to need to produce three times as much food as we do today. Yet the world is running out of good agricultural land. That is why the Green revolution that saved hundreds of millions from starvation is running out of steam. And we also face a huge problem of a shortage of water for irrigation. We will desperately need more efficient agriculture.
GM crops are a vital part of the solution, because they can provide protection of plants against diseases that now destroy up to half the staple crops in Africa, because GM crops are being developed that can grow in arid or salty regions where no crops grow today and because GM crops hold the promise of higher nutritional quality. It is a technology more precise and targeted than the random trial and error development of new crops on which conventional agriculture relies and will bring great improvements in yields. An enormous variety of new GM crops are in fact being developed, but not in Europe and not even mainly in America, but in China and India. In fact within a few years about half the total research and development in agro-biotechnology in the world will be done in China.
Next poverty. Greenpeace and other opponents of GMOs argue that only multinational corporations benefit. In fact most of the 8.5 million farmers that grow GM crops are small farmers, mainly at present cotton farmers, in China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil. They have substantially increased their incomes by up to 75%, not only because GM cotton produces higher yields by providing protection against pests, but because farmers do not have to spend as much on spraying with pesticides. This has also brought improvements in their health. The economic benefits are spread widely beyond the farming community because in rural areas so many other jobs depend on farming.
Thirdly there is the huge potential contribution GM plants can make to health and reduction of disease in the developing world. The best known example is probably golden rice, or its latest equivalent, orange rice, first developed by Ingo Potrykus and colleagues in Switzerland, that can help avoid vitamin A deficiency. The science is proven and offers a simple, inexpensive and elegant solution to a problem from which millions of children die or go blind. The genes that have been introduced are genes from rice and maize with thousands of years of safe consumption. Yet experts estimate that it will take another 5-6 years before this particular GM rice can benefit Asian children. Why? Because of the heavy burden of regulation which a group of German researchers have recently shown to be almost entirely unnecessary, which have been forced on the authorities by anti-GM activists, GM-phobic Europe and a largely compliant media. At a cost of investing less than a million dollars, up to 40,000 lives a day could be saved in India alone. Greenpeace, by the way, spends some $12 million a year on its anti-GM campaigns.
Great advances have been made, and are being made in so-called “bio-pharming”, the programming of plants to produce pharmaceuticals that can be purified or that can be delivered by eating the plant itself. For example in the Philippines, genes have been introduced into banana plants that express potential vaccine proteins for typhoid fever, rabies and the HIV virus. To standardise the dose, they plan converting the bananas to dried banana chips. Other plant vaccines are being developed to deal with hepatitis-B and diarrhoea. In each case it means you don’t need refrigeration for a vaccine, the storing of needles, the training of staff or any of the other problems that are now so hard to overcome in poor countries. But once again development faces the huge hurdle of over-regulation that is wholly unsuited to their needs.
Since the benefits and potential benefits of GMOs are so great, why the opposition? I regard the delays in the introduction of golden rice, which condemns untold numbers of children to death or blindness as a crime against humanity. What is the basis for the opposition?
One fundamental objection is that we are playing God with nature, that altering the genes of plants is somehow unnatural. But farmers have tampered with nature since we ceased to be hunter-gatherers. We do it all the time. Surely it is unnatural to build aeroplanes, since if God has intended us to fly he would have given us wings. Greens no longer object (though as Hoechst can testify, they did at one time) to the insertion of human genes into a bacterium for the production of human insulin. Why then is it unnatural to use precisely the same technique to transfer a gene from one plant to another? Is medical treatment using genetic modification good, but using it to feed people bad? The objection is patently absurd.
It is constantly argued by Greenpeace and others that GM crops are a danger to our health. Non-governmental organisations persuaded the Zambian government to refuse food aid for its starving people because some of it had a GM content. The Zambian Minister explained that he would rather his people starved than accept toxic food. Yet every authoritative independent scientific body that has examined such claims has found them to be without substance. The National Academies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, as well as the Third World Academy of Sciences, the European Commission and no less than four separate reports from the Royal Society of the UK have stated that there is no evidence that GM crops are harmful to human health. Food with a GM content has been a feature of the average diet of 280 million Americans for nearly ten years, without any evidence of harm to health. What is particularly significant is that there hasn’t even been a law case. If American lawyers cannot find any grounds to sue, something must be right.
It is argued that GM crops will damage the environment and harm bio-diversity. Well, no one can argue that no particular GM crops can ever cause such damage in any place or circumstance. But so far the evidence suggest that they are much more likely to do good than harm. As they have higher yields, they use less land. They could prevent Mexican farmers from destroying rain forests by “slash and burn” methods to find more land. They have also led to a substantial decrease in the use of herbicides and pesticides. Further, in the United States they have substantially reduced the need to plough. No-till or low-till agriculture reduces soil erosion, and stops the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
When the evidence is examined it becomes plain that the objections to GMOs are not really based on reasoned argument or evidence. Opposition has become ideological and is a sign of the fundamentalist nature of part of the environmental movement. In fact the Director of Greenpeace was asked in evidence to a House of Lords committee whether any new research or evidence would change Greenpeace’s opposition. He replied: “It is a permanent and definite and complete opposition”.
This rejection of the evidence-based approach in Europe is not confined to GM crops. You also find it in the growing popularity of homeopathy and various forms of alternative medicine preferably those based on ancient remedies, as if medicine is like a piece of antique furniture whose value increases with age. Most of alternative medicine does little harm and, because the placebo effect often works, may even do good. But then the same can be said of witchcraft.
Another example of contempt for evidence is the huge popularity of organic farming. Some of it is based on the mysticism of Rudolph Steiner, who believed in feeding the soil with cowhorns filled with entrails and in planting according to the phases of the moon. Most of it is based on a scientific howler, namely the belief that synthetic chemicals are bad and natural chemicals are good. In Britain every time the claims made for organic food, that it is more nutritious or tastes better, have been rigorously tested by independent scientific bodies, they have been rejected.
Why, however, do I argue that this mood of suspicion towards science and the rejection of the evidence-based approach is dangerous?
First, let me recall my two opening examples. Europe has largely lost out on agricultural biotechnology, where we had considerable innate strengths. Most research in this field is now done in the United States, China and India. In due course we will all eat GM food, but it will mainly be imported. However, we will have turned our back, for ideological reasons, on an important technology, as the Chinese did with shipbuilding - although fortunately biotechnology is not as central to economic progress as shipbuilding was then. But the anti-science fashion may spread. Perhaps nanotechnology will be the next enemy.
We can see the same anti-science reasoning at work in Europe’s adoption of the Precautionary Principle. Essentially this principle is either meaningless or dangerous. It is more often invoked than defined, although there are some 14 official definitions, none of them helpful or precise. If it means: “When there is clear evidence of risk, be careful”, well who could possibly disagree? More often it is invoked to suggest that, if there is public concern, even in the absence of scientific evidence, we should take no risk. Rumour and scare stories could lead to its application. That makes it the enemy of innovation and the perfect tool for those who dislike a new technology and want to prevent its development. “Stop the world, we want to get off.”: the slogan of the enemies of science.
But I go further. I believe the rejection of the evidence-based approach is dangerous to democracy. The alternative to basing policy on evidence is to base it on ignorance, prejudice, rumour and fear. Racism is based on the rejection of evidence and fact in favour of ignorance, prejudice and fear. So is chauvinism, which is based on ignorance and prejudice about the characteristics of other nations. The suppression of the rights of women until recent times – and in many parts of the world the suppression continues – was and is based on ignorance about the differences between men and women. There are differences, but not, as was commonly supposed, differences of intelligence.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was no accident that modern democracy and modern science were born at the same time during that glorious period of history, the Enlightenment. I believe part of the progress of civilisation has been the gradual replacement of superstition by reason. The current fashion of turning our backs on the values of the Enlightenment will not make our society more civilised.
