TUESDAY 20 APRIL 1999

SIR ROBERT MAY, MRS H FLEMING and MR T COLES

  120.  The careful design of the field trials is critical and you would agree with that.
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes; absolutely, which is not to say there will not be, after you have done all this, as in everything in science, someone who does not agree with it.

  121.  However we carry out those trials, and I would hope too that they are split field trials, I concur with the view of English Nature on that, what do you think we should be measuring and how far should we be making the measurements distant from the actual GM crop?
  (Sir Robert May)  We are coming back to something I said earlier. You have to ask what it is we ultimately want to learn. We want to learn whether there is any risk that out of this will come some novel hybrid which is a nuisance. You can lay down all manner of guidelines, of surrogate questions you will ask, like making sure that you find less and less pollen, or whatever, escaping at further and further distances, testing the viability of the hybrids, testing their fecundity and surrogate measures of "invasibility". At the end of the day, you are going to have to be guided by a mixture of those kinds of multiple measurements, recognising that you are not trying to prove that none of the pollen gets out, because it will, and you are not trying to prove that in every case there are some kinds of things which will not cross, and other things like oilseed rape and wild radish or wild turnip which are probably an escape from an earlier trial, which will cross more easily. You are looking for a mixture of things like that, being alert to the conceivable as it were rhododendron, which as I have said several times earlier is a priori unlikely but for which you need to be continually alert. Or, if you want a one sentence thing, but in some sense this is in rather more general terms, the purpose of the trials is to compare the cultivation of GM crops with their conventional counterparts, just the same as the US thing which I read out to you earlier, to assess their ecological impacts, in particular the diversity and abundance of plants and invertebrates from which predictions will be made about impacts on organisms higher in the food chain, for example birds and mammals, which as you can see would fall far short of what I would ultimately wish us to be using at this time because if I found that they were more friendly than the currently often unfriendly practices to invertebrates it may have shown me that they were going to be an improvement on what we are doing with non-GM crops but it does not make me happy with a lot of what we are doing with non-GM crops anyway.

  122.  May I clarify one of the great current controversial issues? You mentioned the fact that there was a moratorium a couple of decades ago. Would you recommend a halt to the planting of GM crops while these trials are going on?
  (Sir Robert May)  That is a mixture of politics and science. On purely scientific grounds, I do not see why one should do it. First of all, the moratorium would be on a time scale which was arbitrary, whereas I have just said different time scales for different things. Secondly, it is an extraordinary little England view of the world in which an area roughly one and a half times the size of the whole of Britain is currently under commercial cultivation with these things. With our more precautionary approach than most, possibly than anyone—the only reason I do not say we have the tightest regulatory structure in the world, the only reason I do not say that, is because there are some I am not familiar with—I would wish us to remain a player in this industry, both because it is scientifically hugely important and it is going to create a new agriculture for tomorrow and I want us to be part of that, and because I want us to come to the international discussions of this, which I hope we are more productively going to have than we had in Cartagena, from the same position of strength as we brought to global climate change. We would not have done what we did if we had been building on a no-science base.

  123.  Basically you are saying that rather than having some arbitrary time limit you base things on the results from research.
  (Sir Robert May)  I want to look at them case by case and I want to look at them against what is happening elsewhere in the world.

  124.  It is the case, however, that the Government has initiated a number of detailed studies, for instance one on the indirect effects of GM crops on the environment. These are not due to report until 2003. So applying my precautionary principle, which you agreed with earlier on, surely we should wait until these fundamental studies which the Government has set up have reported and been analysed?
  (Sir Robert May)  It is a tricky thing. I think I have answered that syllogism already and it does not run because it is assuming what happens in Britain is the only thing we have to learn from. At the same time, however, I always come back, almost parrot-like, to saying from the scientific viewpoint I will ask the question about what we have learned in other parts of the world. That is what I would do on purely scientific grounds but one has a wider set of considerations to think about here, both from the point of view of the industry and from the point of view of Government, hence the scale on which this particular set of things is happening and the policy we have.

  125.  Are you prepared to see the planting of GM crops in advance of studies which relate to that planting being reported upon? May I just pick up on the point of biodiversity? You say we can learn from elsewhere in the world. Surely one of the arguments put by English Nature, amongst others, is that we are looking at a completely different situation in this country, which is not Little England—and I should like to say I am a Scotsman by birth though I do not sound like one. Is it not the case that in this country in agriculture we have to co-exist? Agriculture co-exists with biodiversity. It does not apply in the United States, therefore it is not relevant to say that what we can learn from America needs to apply here. They have big prairies which are just agriculture over there.
  (Sir Robert May)  You are entirely right and country by country they are different. I meant not what you can learn about the wider indirect effect, but what you can learn from the narrower safety effect.

  126.  So there are things we could learn here and which the Government is studying and reports will be produced in about 2003.
  (Sir Robert May)  That is true. On the other hand, when we go to these wider questions, we are talking often about a different set of issues. We are talking about the effect of agriculture today and tomorrow on wildlife in Britain. My view is that properly handled, GM crops have the potential of being much more wildlife friendly than many of the things we have now and that many of the larger questions about wildlife are not even questions of GM versus non-GM crops, they are questions of reconciling efficient agriculture practice, like winter wheat, with the interests of wildlife. It does not matter whether the winter wheat is GM or not GM, it is going to cause changes in the countryside which are adverse to some of the things we care about. That has nothing to do with moratoria and so on. That is why I have tried to harp on this taxonomy of worrying about safety questions and, iconically, superweeds versus what kind of world we want to live in are often deliberately confused by people who share my view of the kind of world they want to live in, using superweeds as an argument of convenience. I think that is both scientifically unfortunate and I even think it is unhelpful for the countryside. What we really want in the long term is an agriculture which is sustainable and that has to mean an agriculture which works with our understanding of nature as distinct from what we have today, which is an agriculture which works with the brute force of fossil fuel energy inputs in the industrial revolution mode. I am not keen on things which diminish our ability to influence events in that direction.

  127.  No, but you said a moment ago that pollen will get out. Those were your words which I wrote down. Pollen will get out.
  (Sir Robert May)  For GM crops and non-GM crops; it always will.

  128.  The isolation distances which have been applied by the Government are shorter than the distances bees travel for example. Therefore if pollen does get out and is irretrievable, we are taking a risk, a very, very small risk perhaps in your judgement but there is a risk there, which is irretrievable and with consequences which cannot be undone should something go wrong. Is it not also the case, it is certainly the view of Green Peace and others, that if you have a situation whereby GM crops are planted, particularly if you are talking about gene flow from maize and oilseed rape, that that compromises organic agriculture absolutely?
  (Sir Robert May)  That is a different point. If you have a particular set of cultural and religious beliefs and you are, say, the Amish and you live in a big enough country you can set yourself aside in a large part of Pennsylvania and you can live a life and run your culture in that large part of Pennsylvania uninterrupted largely except at the margins by the rest of the world. That is hugely more difficult in Britain and if you are wishing to be an organic farmer, you have problems already. First of all the definition of what we call organic farming is something we could talk endlessly about and best not get started on it. You cannot guarantee that the wind is not going to blow insecticide, herbicide things across your fields to some degree. You certainly cannot guarantee that crops that have been modified by techniques which shuffle much more of the genome than GM crops do is going to get carried or blown onto your field. I have difficulty accepting that using one particular method to put in one or two genes or maybe from further away is in some philosophical sense different from working with a crop where very high technology, increasingly over the last 15 years, has given us techniques for reshuffling about one tenth of the genome to produce new varieties. I do not see that in black and white as some sort of clear mathematical distinction and I just think that is a problem because there are people who feel very strongly about this. I respect their beliefs, I believe this is a niche market I should like to see expand and which will expand, but at the same time it already has problems in a small and crowded island.

  129.  What did you mean a moment ago when you said the technology could be "bent to terrorist aims".
  (Sir Robert May)  That is a different question yet again. As with almost anything we have learned, whether it is from physics in nuclear physics, whether it is from chemistry and various kinds of chemical weapons, or whether it is today and tomorrow from our ability to modify biological organisms, we are talking at the margins about using them for what are wholly good purposes and then we can have all the discussion we are having round the margin. All these things can be used for wholly unequivocally bad purposes. That is quite outside this debate and quite separate from it. If I were worried about things that is the sort of thing I would worry about. I actually worry more about chemical and biological warfare than I do about many other things. That has nothing to do with this.

  130.  We have been discussing field trials, split field trials, comparisons between GMO altered and ordinary organisms. SCIMAC say that there is currently no baseline understanding and inventory of agriculture to assess their long-term ecological and environmental impact. Forget about GMOs for one moment: there is no baseline for ordinary crops. On that basis, can we really start making an evaluation of GM crops without such a baseline or is it possible to do it without it?
  (Sir Robert May)  What you can do and what most of the rules try to do is just draw comparisons between GM and the non-GM. You can do that with various degrees of precision, depending on the question you are asking. Again I have said several times, ultimately the question you are asking of a novel crop, whether it is non-GM or GM, is you are asking of these things whether they are going to be more successful in the natural environment when they get out of the field and that is something where we still have a lot to understand. I have said that several times. It is to be said against the background of something else I have said several times, that we must remember that by and large our crops, by virtue of the things we did to them to make them attractive to us, are pretty wimpy in the rest of the world. If you leave your garden alone, in six months it will not look like your garden.

  131.  As part of your remit, would the development of a baseline for the impact of existing agricultural practice on the environment be desirable and feasible or is that something which in fact is such a vast topic that there is no point even considering it?
  (Sir Robert May)  One of the things I have done both for my own interest and education and also because it was like taking a trip 20 years back in my own life to post-Asilomar Princeton, is spend most of the weekend reading through a stack of stuff, much of it written by friends in America and other places, and I would say in the chaotic and untidy way that science progresses we are moving in that direction.

  132.  It is happening of its own accord without needing to be pushed in that direction.
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes; pushing helps.

  133.  Generally the tenor of the debate which I have picked up and I feel increasingly unhappy about is that it all seems to be something potentially really rather nasty but we are going to have it anyway. I should like to ask whether you can point out one real benefit for the environment of GMOs. We saw English Nature last week and they were at pains to say that even the pesticides arguments, that there would be a reduction in pesticides use, even those did not really hold up. What would you say to that? Would you agree with them or not?
  (Sir Robert May)  The easy way to meet with you would be to come along with a nice sheaf of stuff and read the relevant flag in each case and do a nice cautious Sir Humphrey thing.

  134.  We sometimes get that. We are disapproving of that.
  (Sir Robert May)  There is much to be said for it.

  135.  Not from our point of view.
  (Sir Robert May)  Ultimately I think not from anybody's point of view. I think ultimately what we are talking about is public confidence in science to a degree. We are talking about a dialogue between the many, many publics, which are sometimes called the public and government and how it shapes policy and how policy interacts with public confidence in a topic which is heavily mediated and constrained by scientific realities, not all of them perfectly understood. So I have consistently tried to give you a sense, an honest feeling of things I am broadly happy about, why I am broadly happy about it, but I cannot say with certainty. It is a continuum of people in this debate and if I were a spokesman for a particular lobby group like Friends of the Earth, or if I were a spokesman for Monsanto, which I do tend to see as extremes of the debate, I would see myself as having a responsibility to give you a black or a white view. It is in a sense the difference between someone who in an imperfect way is trying to give you a sense of what somebody who is interested in how the world works and has a vision of the world they would like to live in sees this complicated unfolding scientific story. It is the difference between that and someone who sees himself almost like an advocate for the defence or the prosecution. You can take any topic. You can take any scientific topic and you can take an extreme position and you can cull the evidence to support that. Against that background, here are what I see as the benefits of it in broad terms because time is limited.

  136.  Could you perhaps explore those benefits a little more, on wildlife for example?
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes, in broad terms. I actually have a handout from one of Kathleen Keeler's things, Potential Environmental Use; this is setting aside health benefits and anything else. One general category is reducing our dependence on spraying chemicals all over the place, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Why do you think, incidentally—another question, coming back to what motivates farmers—that GM soya and GM maize has been so rapidly taken up in the United States?

  137.  Lower cost.
  (Sir Robert May)  Lower cost and better yield. Spend less. I have been trying to get actual data on herbicide use but it is argued: less herbicide use, more targeted herbicide use, less long-lasting herbicide effects. In general fewer chemicals in the environment is an environmental benefit. You can torture any one of these if you have a mind to quarrel with it. I shall read you quickly through them. You can improve the nutritional quality of food crops and that has a down side as well because you have people overdosing on certain vitamins. Decrease the dependence on chemical pesticides and so on. Skipping. Then there is a set of things which are not so close to the market: increasing crop yield by manipulating photosynthesis. Here is, if you look at what we do compared to the most efficiently photosynthesising plants, something where there is potential in a friendly way for the same investment of external inputs to simply get more plant. You can produce salt and stress, water, pollen and things. One of the real constraints of the agriculture of the future is that we already use about 30 per cent. of the world's water supplies in growing crops worldwide. The estimate is that by 2020 or 2025 already about half the world's countries will for water reasons alone have to be net importers of food. They will have run out of green water and blue water to try to beat that. Some of these are immediate and short term and some of them are longer term. The ones which impress me most are the ones which are in the direction of growing crops which are more effective for example in fixing their own nitrogen so that we do not have to dump so much. Half the atoms of nitrogen and phosphorous which are incorporated in green material this year round the world will come from the input of fertilisers. That of course is partly because we will sequester something like 40 per cent. of all net terrestrial primary productivity this year for human purposes. If we can build things to give us the ability in a manner which is in general more sustainable and more friendly, less consuming of fossil fuels and other subsidies, that to me is the most important thing though it is not the thing primarily on the table.

  138.  To me the most important element in all this is the safety and benefit of the consumer, as surely we have learnt from the horrors surrounding BSE? In matters such as BSE, coming back to this same thing, people do want certainty. That is not to say we should not explore complexity. We want something to come out of it. May I take you back to your own paper here and quote something which has troubled me and I should like some answers to it if you can. Potential benefits. You say, "The first potential benefit is familiar. There is a huge potential market for new GM `agrifood' in Europe". Right. Cash, is it not? "The agrifood companies are, understandably, motivated by their wish for commercial success" you say a little later. Cash. Then you say, "But there is no guarantee that these economic processes will always act in the long-term interests of consumers" and I say that they must. If you cannot guarantee to me that they do, then I am not happy, I am not satisfied.
  (Sir Robert May)  You may have partly misunderstood it. This is a much, much wider question. I am saying that Adam Smith's invisible hand does not necessarily guarantee that the interests of industry, quite apart from safety issues, are going to be to do what is best for the world as distinct from what is best for them. I have said this several times and I do acknowledge that it is a wider and somewhat more inappropriately idealistic point maybe but to me the major reason why we have to remain a player in this is to try to make sure that these new technologies are indeed harnessed in the direction I just sketched as benefits, which is in a more environmental friendly, less relying on fossil fuel subsidies, more sustainable way to produce the agriculture of the future. Of the many, many things you can do, not all of those have an immediate commercial return, so that is what I mean when I say quite frankly in this document that I do not believe that the commercial motivations of Monsanto or anyone else are the guarantee that they will be developing the things which are most useful for the world as distinct from most profitable for them. This has nothing to do with safety concerns because their economic interest is most assuredly not to violate safety criteria and that is the one potential disaster for them. Look at the way we lost the whole jet industry when Comet went down. That is something where I trust the industry to be ultimately as concerned as we are because that is a real self-destruct for them. I have wider interests. It is not a self-destruct for them to be going for things which make farming cheaper and more efficient in the First World and to hell with the Third World.

  139.  Should there be publicly funded research to balance the agrochemical industry research?
  (Sir Robert May)  With respect, that is a misreading, that is to say I believe the fundamental research which is done here will naturally be done mainly with public money. It is in the nature of it. If you look at the science base more generally it is primarily public money although oddly enough Britain has more than most in private money into blue skies basic research, almost five per cent of it in Britain, which is a quite large amount. It is in the nature of it that it will be done that way. Then, as it moves more towards application it will tend to be a mixture and that is inevitable and the way these things happen. At the same time, may I just get in one word because you have not asked me this question? It is a question of committee memberships and financial interest. One of the early things I did in this job was promulgate, and we have had collective ministerial assent to it, a committee of Ministers which meets regularly to discuss it, we have a first annual report on it, a committee of officials from all different departments to look at how we can do a better job and be seen to be doing a better job on guidelines on science advice on policy making. The central principles of that are openness and wide consultation, which do not always come comfortably in Whitehall. Also the guidelines are concerned to say you want to get the best people, you want to leaven them with some people who are outside the area, make sure you get a wide range of viewpoints and you should not exclude people by virtue of particular interests. Those interests should be clearly identified, but you should not exclude people. To come specifically to something like ACRE, I believe that should be a rich mixture of people who are scientific experts and people who have environmental concerns and it is in the nature of that that all those people bring extra baggage to that. There will be many people whose deep concern for the environment has understandably and praiseworthily expressed itself in being for example organic farming people, which will give them a commercial interest in particular kinds of outcomes. There will be people whose interest in the subject has expressed itself in being scientists who work in a department where there is money of a more general kind because it engages them with the intellectual enterprise from commercial companies. You have to make that plain but I do not see how you get the committees without having that multitude of interests. One of my own graduate students works for Monsanto, one works for the Wilderness Society, one for the Environmental Protection Agency and two work in zoos. That is how it should be.