TUESDAY 20 APRIL 1999

SIR ROBERT MAY, MRS H FLEMING and MR T COLES

  160.  Finally a question on labelling. You make the point in your essay, which I read with interest, that GM characteristics of the crop can be lost during the processing. Then we are into a discussion about threshold levels of GM modified material in the final product on the plate and the whole question of labelling. Would you like to give us your view on labelling and threshold levels? I believe in labelling. I think the general public should be given indications as to whether they are buying GM modified food or not. Then we have the whole question of residual levels from storing GM modified crops in the same bins as other crops and so on. Would you like to give us a view on those aspects?
  (Sir Robert May)  First let me say again that I think labelling, although most countries do not do it, but I hope they increasingly will, is hugely important both because it is right and because I see it as the resolution, if there is one, of current apprehensions, people able to make choices will be ultimately, on what timescale I do not know, having to make choices which will involve price as well. That will then motivate people to ask what the experience is, whether there have been any worries as distinct from the somewhat over-hyped, or curiously misrepresented stories as in the case of Pusztai and Rowett. There is both a reason of moral principle to do it and I also think there is a public confidence, public understanding reason to do it. Then you come into the nuts and bolts of doing it. There are some things where what is on sale is a product which has a particular clear genetic modification in it which is still there in the product. It does not worry me but you have a right to be worried and we should label it. There are other things and you go down a continuum; there is no sharp division. You come down to the thing I touched on earlier, different kinds of things such as using an enzyme which is just a chemical and no-one could tell, government chemists could not tell, whether that enzyme came from a calf's gut or whether it had been produced by GM techniques, it is just a chemical. In fact you probably could tell because it will not have the occasional contaminations that it would have from the calf's gut, just like tissue-grown insulin or rabies shots, which are not as bad as they used to be because they are less likely to have other stuff with them, where there is no reason at all to label it, or the refined oil from soya which has no DNA, no protein in it, but then there is a slippery slope. What if you have taken lecithin or something and squashed it all up so you have fragmented the DNA? At what level should you label it? All that against a background that we are all the time exchanging all sorts of stuff in our gut and we have been trying for cystic fibrosis to introduce genes using every technique we know to try to help people and failing. Nonetheless, people have the right to know if it is there, although labelling things where it is meaningless is silly, but where down that slope do you draw the line? I have no simple answer to that and ultimately it is something you would like to be able to consult people widely and have some sense of what the common sense of the customers would like it to be.

  161.  Are we going to be able to give the general public the confidence that the scientific backup for the labelling is there, in other words that we will have a very robust labelling system that the public can believe in?
  (Sir Robert May)  I hope so.

  162.  I hate to go away without questioning you one step further on the "feed the world" line which you have given us this morning because it is a very important aspect of it. In some ways you have set that—I do not want to misrepresent you—as your justification at least for some of what is happening.
  (Sir Robert May)  Sustainably feed the world.

  163.  You understand of course, coming onto public concerns, that many of the public are wary of wonderful solutions. They have had nuclear power which was going to be too cheap to meter and everything else and turned out to be a white elephant rather than a great white hope over the years. I have to tell you that when I met Monsanto they did not claim that their products will feed the world. They do not put that as a claim. When I met them they claimed other things for their products but they do not actually claim that particular attribute. How can you explain that many of the developing countries, including India and others, are actually very opposed to this GM technology? They do not see it as a solution for their countries, they see it as a threat to their indigenous agriculture.
  (Sir Robert May)  Distinguish between the potential of constructing crops which work with nature rather than against it with the aid of unsustainable chemical and other fossil fuels, energy subsidised inputs, which is what I have been talking about, and a move away from traditional cultures which shattered more by the input of large seemingly imperial external other interests, which is what Monsanto represents, paradigmatically, when it is going to sell you seeds which are inviable year to year. There is a distinction between my, you may say, "science fictioney" vision of how the world may be in the year 2200 and the immediate present, of the threat, which even in the First World worries me, of centralisation of particular technology in the hands of an organisation whose interest is in its own financial future not the world's. I am saying one thing. I do not expect them to be interested in that although wiser public relations, which is not what they have been good at, would at least say it. I want us to move to machinery, and frankly I am non specific about it, I am looking longer term, but I want us to be taking the same first steps towards machinery which will put in place international things that help us direct the potential of these technologies into doing the things I want them to do as distinct from being driven purely by what will sell the seed to a farmer.

  164.  Earlier on you spoke at great length about the importance of the climate change convention and the role which the UK had had in that. It seems to me that the difficulties which are there are exactly the same difficulties which apply to your very last sentence, which was all about how on an international basis we can actually have environmental agreements in place which match and dovetail and balance the international trade agreements. It seems to me that is a fundamental issue which we have not really cracked yet and certainly science has not had that input into.
  (Sir Robert May)  Two quick things. Firstly, I am under no delusion that what we have achieved in climate change at Kyoto and since then is anything other than the first slow beginnings of the turning of the wheels as the train begins slowly to move out of the station. Small in some sense though that achievement is, if I may quote Chairman Mao, "the longest journey begins with a single step", and it was hugely important and actually achieved against the odds. It is a beginning and we shall go on from that. The gulf between my hope for the world in the year 2200 and what we are talking about today also begins with small steps. One of those small steps is a recognition that the UK Government's interest in this is first the safety, you could almost say the psychic health, of the population. It is not really about food safety, it is about not being upset all the time. It is not about using this as a metaphor for something. I am not joking. It is partly making sure that we are not merely doing the right things, recognising the world's reality, but we are seen to be doing them and part of that is wanting to be part of an agriculture that is going to come and not be left behind, not create it and then not have its benefits, but part of it is taking a more idealistic view of the future. All that is what I want us to be doing and I have gone on and on about the last bit because other people are not going to talk to you about that and part of my job is indeed to lift sights beyond the immediate horizon.

Chairman:  Thank you very much indeed, that has certainly been a non-grey and very colourful performance and fascinating from our point of view and I hope the audience's. We are grateful to you and your colleague for coming along today. Thank you very much.