TUESDAY 20 APRIL 1999

SIR ROBERT MAY, MRS H FLEMING and MR T COLES

  140.  Given that makeup of ACRE over the years have you seen any evidence of undue influence by the industry in any decisions taken by ACRE?
  (Sir Robert May)  No; I could not in fairness claim any acquaintance with the 160 things they did, but I have not the faintest flicker of an instance of that and the fact that they have approved the whole 160 which were put to them, albeit with many referrals and revisions, is explainable too. It is often said that proves that they have been captured. It equally, however, proves that just as most of these agencies in any country have approved most of the things which come to them, right since the days of Asilomar in the 1970s, I think it proves in a rather interesting way that this is a subject unlike others in science where the community itself from the beginning saw that there would be questions and worries and has from the beginning taken a pretty conservative approach to things. It can alternatively be read, and it is how I read it, that we have a good regulatory structure and people do not bring silly things to it and even when they bring very sensible things to it they are very often referred for further refinement.

  141.  That is a construction on what happened. Some of the public at large would see a football score of 160 to nil as a rather one-sided football game.
  (Sir Robert May)  That is a curious analogy, if I may say so.

  142.  Do you know what the position is with other European countries, other EU countries with the counterparts to ACRE? Have they been turning down applications?
  (Sir Robert May)  I know the US and I am not familiar with Germany and I am not familiar with other European countries.

  143.  Can you explain why Michael Meacher has decided to change the membership of ACRE?
  (Sir Robert May)  Very easily; the Nolan rules. At this point it said that 10 of the 13 were up for change and Michael did other things which I think were wholly exactly what I think is the right thing to do of widening the remit of ACRE.

  144.  Do you think we should have a stakeholder forum as a means of airing discussions about the competing interests in this field?
  (Sir Robert May)  That is part of what is up for discussion on the reconfiguring of things and it would be unhelpful if I gave you my private view.

  145.  May I turn to what kind of strategy we should have in respect of GM food? You mentioned just now that we have to be a player—I think I am quoting you correctly—to make sure that we can harness the benefits of GM for the future. It just seems to me that we have not been very successful in harnessing those benefits, given that we have not been successful in requiring the United States to segregate soya and maize at source. Could you perhaps just comment on that first of all because I am sure that is part of the whole debate about the future strategy we should have.
  (Sir Robert May)  For once I can give you a short answer. I completely agree with you.

  146.  I take that as a yes. Thank you for that. That then raises the issue that if we are going to have a strategy as far as GM food is concerned, we have to do it both at a local level in the UK, at a European level and at the level of world trade so that at each stage, and also because of concerns about international development as well I might add, each bit of our strategy is consistent with every other bit. How do you see the various incompatibilities fitting into that strategy which we should now be devising, given that we are already so out of sync with the strategy in the US where free trade without any regulation whatsoever rules okay?
  (Sir Robert May)  First, I think that our strategy of requiring labelling of food which in a sensible sense can be said to be GM is entirely correct. Nearly all the time we have been talking about what I think the scientific facts are, what the scientific uncertainties are and I have been expressing my opinion. If we had talked about food as such, which we have not, I would have been telling you I do not have worries about that. That is one part of the debate but the other part of the debate is public confidence in this and public confidence in this necessarily involves people being able to have a choice. I think labelling food so that people have a choice is just hugely important. It is something which it is right to do in principle and it is the way forward in a debate which ultimately has to be in a sense about hearts and minds over time. It is made difficult in that we have a much more stringent approach to this than other countries. Then, as we reach out to Europe, and there are still directives—I can never remember the numbers on EC directives—in place, I would hope that we and others would influence people in Europe in that direction. Meaningful labelling mind you. Things where you are back down to the rennets for cheese which are exactly the same biochemical I do not regard as meaningful labelling, in fact it is a good thing. The US in this on the other hand is at the moment an extremely important outlier and one possible way forward is to persuade some of the larger companies that their own longer-term international interests lie in recognising international concerns.

  147.  Would you accept that voluntary regulation of that is not really going to be as effective as having a strategy?
  (Sir Robert May)  There is another huge set of problems. The WTO problems. This is a huge set of problems. The ideal resolution would be to avoid them by having labelling become more of a possibility and failing that one simply has a difficult tension. We have it in other things, not least bananas, but this will make bananas look very small.

  148.  I could not agree with you more. If we are looking at a strategy which is consistent right the way across the board, how then do we address the concerns of biodiversity and environmental issues, given that that is not really the concern of the people concerned with food safety? How do we get a consistency, an integrity about the way in which at every level we are providing a way forward when there are so many public concerns already? Does this not come back as well? You talk a lot about scientists and about the importance of science. Are we not really talking about perhaps one lot of science which is science per se and another lot of science which is perhaps science for the earth?
  (Sir Robert May)  The vision which I have articulated several times with varying degrees of coherence for a Britain—and I take your point that Britain is different—a small and rather floristically and faunistically depopulated place, an entirely hand wrought landscape but a place which is really very cherished by many and how we reconcile an efficient, competitive agriculture in a world which is inevitably changing whatever we do with the preservation of the diversity of the countryside we have, is something which does not, as you say, easily fit into the discussions about regulations and, as it were, labelling. I would hope that just as I believe English Nature has done a lot in the ten years I have been here, if you look at surrogate measures like the rate of interference with or partial destruction of Sites of Special Scientific Interest, the record on the one hand can be read depressingly and on the other hand as one of steady improvement achieved by working with landowners. I recognise that it is waffling, that it does not have the crisp definitiveness of some of the regulatory things which are nice and relatively straightforward. I would hope that out of this we would seize an opportunity to think more deliberately about the social and political questions of the kind of countryside we want and the kinds of things we need to do and the regulations we have to have which on the one hand do not impede the survival of an efficient and competitive agricultural industry but on the other hand are more fully recognising what changes can be made for the better at preserving what we have.

  149.  Would you agree that one of our goals as part of our strategy should be that move towards a sustainable agriculture? Would that not include far more support for organic production as well?
  (Sir Robert May)  I believe the GM thing—as I have said several times for specific reasons—is a step towards more sustainable agriculture. The trouble with organic agriculture is that it is great for us but it is not going to feed the world. Even the much quoted things recently in Nature show that with natural fertiliser you can do okay. You just basically need twice the land to grow anything. It is something I would wish to see encouraged more than it is in Britain, because it is land friendly, but it is not the answer. You could not feed today's population of the world with the agriculture of the past century and you are not going to be able to feed the population of 2050 with today's agriculture.

  150.  There are many, are there not, involved in international development who dispute the facts that it is a matter of less production which is actually causing the food shortages, it is far more the distribution aspects?
  (Sir Robert May)  I said this earlier: today's problem with today's production is a problem of distribution. Today's production is twice that of 30 years ago and that has been achieved quite explicitly with the green revolution which is itself not sustainable. That is a central overarching fact that must not be forgotten. Tomorrow is uncertain whichever way you look at it and I see this as one of the tools, wisely handled, which gives us hope for a sustainable global future. It is a much more idealistic and broader argument with the nuts and bolts things we have been talking about for the UK.

  151.  Moving away from the terms of reference of our debate today, there are many people, for example in India, who are concerned about their relationship with the land and the way in which, because of the whole question about patenting this kind of particular production, it could completely destroy agriculture.
  (Sir Robert May)  I touched on that. The whole terminator question has huge implications for agriculture and there again I want us to be players in persuading companies that these kinds of things are not in their interests. In the perfect world we would have the terminator which terminated the hybrids but not the pure lines. We have had that discussion.

  152.  There has been concern that the present regulatory system does not take adequate account of the wider, the cumulative and the indirect effects of GM crop production, proceeding as it does on a case by case basis. The ACRE has recently made a start on this question. I was wondering whether you think that their sub group is an adequate answer to this and whether you feel that ACRE has the right expertise to assess the influence of GM crops on agricultural practice. Do you feel, given the new remit for ACRE, that there would be an intention to review its previous decisions?
  (Sir Robert May)  The one thing I will say is that the widening of its remit was a thoroughly good thing. At the same time, the wider implications of the question come in. As I have said before, it would not be a good idea for me to give you my private views of what I hope personally—and I do have such hopes—will come out of the review of the committee structure.

  153.  Given the relationship between GM crops and bioscience and both the individual importance of those but the combined effect of those on the wider environment, do you think that there is sufficient coordination at present between ACRE and ACP?
  (Sir Robert May)  I have a superficial answer which says yes. I know more actually about the committees on the health side. One of the things which immediately concerned me, way back, on the health side, when we created the more general Human Genetics Advisory Commission, was the question of how the more expert technically oriented committees interface with the committee which asks larger questions and is constituted more of lay people. There I was thoroughly reassured of the way the chair people got together, of the fact that the whole notion that efficiency means no overlaps as well as no gaps is actually misleading. You want the right amount of overlap. My impression is that those two committees function well, but certainly that is one of the many questions which are feeding into the review.

  154.  English Nature and a number of the other witnesses we have heard, have suggested to us the need for an overarching committee, both to overlay the current present structure but also to give advice on the strategic issues which cross the boundaries of existing committees. Do you think that such a committee would be a sensible solution to that problem?
  (Sir Robert May)  It is very difficult for me not immediately to give my opinionated view of all this which would be reasonably popular apart from anything else but I say again, we shall see what comes out of the review of the committee.

  155.  Dare I perhaps ask whether you could suggest to us, when we are talking about strategic issues, what you think the wider strategic issues are?
  (Sir Robert May)  Many of the things we have been talking about. They ultimately go all the way to the thing I keep wanting to talk about which other people do not seem quite so interested in which is going beyond Britain to think of the future use of these technologies on a global scale. Many of the things which concern us today, whether we are talking the potential dangers of xenotransplantation or what are the regulatory rules about cloning or resistance to antibiotics or all the questions we have been talking about today, are ultimately questions about things where if one country really screws it up, that has done it for all of us in many cases. Xenotransplantation and producing superweeds and so on; maybe cloning is much more purely an ethical thing. Ultimately all those are issues where you want international rules. Certainly antibiotic resistance is one where it makes little sense for one small country to stop feeding antibiotics to farm animals if everybody else is doing it and the action there very appropriately was to press, as we have, with others, for EU-wide legislation and ultimately you want global legislation in this as in many other things. Easier said than done. Many of these issues are things where the ultimate answer has to be a more international approach and that incidentally is where the lobby groups are very helpful because many of these environmental groups are themselves of global reach and coordination in a way which is hugely helpful.

  156.  Given your previous answer you may not want to answer this at present but it has been suggested that the giving of advice and the case by case regulation should really be separate functions. Could the provision of an overarching committee possibly be a help to resolving that problem?
  (Sir Robert May)  I just say the same thing. The only thing I can say is that one of the first things I did was inherit the Human Genetics Advisory Commission which is not exactly the same as anything else, everything is complicated, but it is broadly the same issue. A select committee had recommended it to Government, the Department of Health and others had said they did not really need it and one of the first things I did, working with many other people, with some new Ministers and others, together, was to overturn that decision. It gives you a functional indication of my mindset.

  157.  Can we look at some of the public concerns before we finish? At breakfast time this morning I went to a meeting which lasted for one and a half hours on genetics and the presentation was by Professor Byrne who is Professor of Clinical Genetics from Newcastle University. He talked about the use of genetics in medicine, curing or at least giving people who are marrying or breeding children adequate genetic information on diseases like sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, Hodgkin's disease, and by the end of this presentation all of us were quite amazed and stunned by the advances which had been made on the medical side of genetic engineering. Why is it do you think that they can get away with it with the public on that side and yet this morning you have heard people like Mr Baker and Mrs Brinton, and there would be thousands of other people outside this room, who are very concerned about the same kind of thing going on in food production?
  (Sir Robert May)  I have every sympathy with your colleagues and there are at least two differences. One of them is the circumstances in which we, a very privileged set of people in a very privileged country, find ourselves in that clearly we are all going to die one of these days and we would all like it to be later rather than sooner so we are interested in things which can go in that direction. On the other hand we are perfectly well fed, we can all get by perfectly well, we have food surpluses, we do not need these things. Ultimately this differential concern to my mind reflects the robust common sense of most people, which is: why take a risk, however small or conjectural if you do not need to?

  158.  Quite so.
  (Sir Robert May)  Then there is the second question. Why do we feel that way, why do we feel so apprehensive about some of these food things, echoing in almost the same words a discussion which was held and has passed in the United States 20 years ago when you do not get a flicker there? Part of it is the reason you gave. In the United States it is either a dirty great big national park which you are in or it is prairies and you fly over them. A large part of it is also because we are still scarred by the recent experience of BSE and the way it was handled.

  159.  Do you agree with me that Monsanto, in trying to advertise the campaign for GM crops did more damage that good in this issue?
  (Sir Robert May)  Absolutely; absolutely. It is not for me to go on about this but I think their own purely narrow interests are not being well served by some of their current adverts. The problem is an extremely interesting problem of trying to engage people in a real understanding of what is going on and yet there are those who believe that if everybody knew more about the science there would not be a problem. However, in fact there are other studies which show that in the countries where people know most about science, not just little factoid questions but deeper questions about the nature of the scientific method, in the countries which show best on that—and we show very well in that league, for all the fact that we could all do better; Denmark tends to be first, we come second or third—you ask people whether they are worried about the advances of modern science and the Faustian bargain and the countries where the people know most are the countries where people worry most and I think that is how it should be. It is good. It makes life difficult for people like me but that is how it should be.