Oral evidence

Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee on Wednesday 12 November 2003

Members present:

Mr Peter Ainsworth, in the Chair

Mr Colin Challen

Mr David Chaytor

Sue Doughty

Paul Flynn

Mr Mark Francois

Mr Malcolm Savidge

Mr Simon Thomas

Joan Walley

__________

Memorandum submitted by The Friends of the Earth

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR PETE RILEY, Senior Food and Biotechnology Campaigner, and MS EMILY DIAMOND, Senior Researcher, Food and Biotechnology Team, Friends of the Earth, examined.

 

Q129  Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome. I understand you have a brief opening statement.

Mr Riley: Yes. I am Pete Riley and I am the Senior Food Campaigner at Friends of the Earth and this is Emily Diamond, our Senior Research Officer in the Real Food Campaign. I would like to apologise for the absence of Tony Juniper, who was due to come and give evidence but he is otherwise engaged in the north-east of England at the moment. I will very quickly run through what we consider to be the main points of our evidence. First, we feel that the farm scale evaluations came at the wrong time in terms of scientific assessment. We think there are far more important things that could have been dealt with and more important issues before these farm scale trials were set up. That is one of the reasons we were so opposed to them taking place. The gene flow is an area where we are still learning. Co-existence between crops, which obviously involves cross-pollination in gene flow and other crucial issues such as food safety, we still think requires resolution before we would even consider allowing GM crops into the United Kingdom. We feel that the farm scale trails were far too large, and we have seen no justification for the size of them from the scientific papers to date. We think the arguments are pretty sketchy around those and that this stems from the history of the development of the farm scale trials. It was very much a political decision in the first instance and the science was bolted on at a later stage. If you recall, Ministers were referring to them as "managed development", which is a form of commercialisation in our view and not necessarily much to do with science. One of the justifications for the FSEs being so large was that it was claimed that there was a body of evidence from smaller GM trials which indicated that you would need larger GM trials to look at biodiveristy. In fact, we have assessed all the trials that took place before farm scale evaluations were established, 155 in total, and only four of these had any examination of environmental impact and none of them examined biodiveristy. We just do not think that the claim that the small trials provided evidence that you need a bigger trial stands up. Do the FSEs answer the questions? We think they probably do, but we question whether it as worth £6 million to do it because we think we could have done the same job on a much smaller scale. We are very concerned about the way that yield was handled during the FSEs.

 

Q130  Chairman: If I may interrupt you, you are touching on quite a lot of issues which I think the Committee will want to explore with you this afternoon. Why do we not begin by asking you some question and then, if there is anything you think we have not covered, by all means add it at the end. I was, however, interested to hear you just say that you did not think the trials had much to do with science. That is not a view shared by the scientific community.

Mr Riley: We were talking about the establishment of these in the early days. When Ministers first announced this, they were under extreme pressure from the biotechnology industry to allow them to commercialise GM crops for the first time in 1998. We feel that the size of the trials cannot be justified but they can be justified by keeping the biotechnology industry happy because it could be seen that they were being allowed to go ahead with quite large-scale plantings of GM crops. That was necessary to keep them on board and stop them enforcing commercialisation decisions back in 1998. If you recall, Mr Rooker and Mr Meacher at the European Affairs Select Committee when they made this announcement were talking about managed development, limited commercialisation. It was not an experiment to see what the impacts of these crops would be on biodiveristy.

 

Q131  Chairman: Is it fair to say that you think that the whole enterprise lacked integrity?

Ms Diamond: No, in the sense of the consortium that actually undertook the research; we have never questioned their integrity or their credentials. We think they were very well qualified to do what they did and they obviously did the best job that they could. The question is: when were they brought in? They were brought in after the design of the trials had been formalised. The actual number of trials, the length of time, the size of the trials, even the way it was set out, happened before the consortium were involved. They were just asked to design the monitoring that went with it.

 

Q132  Sue Doughty: Is Friends of the Earth opposed to genetically modified food and crops in principle?

Ms Diamond: No, not in principle, but we are opposed to introducing a technology before we have the ability to test it rigorously. We feel that at the moment there are sufficient uncertainties in the science in terms of even predicting some of the impacts of GM products that make it very difficult to be sure that some of these impacts will not occur. We feel that there are these difficulties both on the food safety side and on the environmental side. We would say that we do not see any benefit from the GM crops that have been proposed, so far anyway, and certainly we would not want to introduce them until we had the procedures in place to be able to test them properly.

Mr Riley: That is one of the reasons why we felt that the FSEs were premature. We feel that the inherent problems of GM technology in the food chain need to be sorted out before we start testing whether the growing of crops commercially will have an impact on biodiveristy.

 

Q133  Sue Doughty: You will probably disagree with the fact that the Government started at the outset and throughout by saying that the GM crops do not themselves present any danger to the environment?

Mr Riley: We do not think that they have enough evidence to support that statement, no. We do not think there is enough evidence that has come from any test sites in the UK prior to farm scale evaluations that would support that statement.

Ms Diamond: Further, at least for sugar beet, the beet crops and oilseed rape, they have not actually been given approval under the European system. They are not legally declared not harmful to the environment or to human health. That has not yet been assessed.

 

Q134  Sue Doughty: We had Michael Meacher in and he told us that he felt that there were inadequate studies and evidence into the health effects of eating GM foods. Are you aware of any evidence or any key studies that there are on the effects on food and human health?

Ms Diamond: One of the key studies was some research that was done by Newcastle University and which was published in July 2002. That showed that bacteria in the human intestine can actually pick up genes from genetically modified food in the stomach. That was done from a single meal that was given to people. We think that that certainly raises concerns about what the effects might be, not just for crops and foods containing antibiotic resistant marker genes but also for the other kinds of genes that are in there, because we do not know how those genes might be used by bacteria in the human intestine. It is very difficult for us to come up with pieces of science that we can pull out and say, "Here is something that proves it is unsafe", largely because that kind of research has not really been done and so we cannot give you that evidence otherwise because no-one is really looking for it.

Mr Riley: It is worth adding that the Newcastle work involved 12 patients and this effect was found in seven out of the 12. Before the experiment took place, this horizontal gene transfer from the food into the gut, the scientific community said bacteria of the GM DNA was extremely rare. We think that seven out of 12 is not extremely rare and is a cause to strengthen our belief that this technology should stay in the lab for much longer so that we can iron out and resolve these unresolved issues on food safety. I think the long-term environmental impacts from gene transfer and cross-pollination are even more difficult to resolve satisfactorily over any period of time at the moment. We do not really seem able to come up with any clear answers about what the long‑term impact of gene transfer of these traits into wild flowers would be.

 

Q135  Chairman: May I ask whether you are both scientists yourselves?

Mr Riley: Yes. I have a degree in ecological science from the University of Edinburgh, a long time ago, alas!

Ms Diamond: I have a science degree from the University of East Anglia and a masters as well.

 

Q136  Mr Thomas: Can I first ask you what your position is as regards the potential for environmental harm and for public health harm? Do you take a view that one is more important than the other? Do you have any policy view on which should be of most concern to legislators such as Members of Parliament?

Mr Riley: I think that we would probably put this down to a score draw really. We would be equally concerned about the uncertainties around food safety, particularly as this technology has the potential for the same crops to be fed to millions of farm animals and potentially billions of people. If we get it wrong, then the public health implications of getting it wrong are very significant. That is all the more reason for being cautious about getting it right before we put things on to the market, which is not of course what the Americans have done. On environmental safety, as I alluded to in a previous answer, the actual designs of the experiments, other than going out into the environment and doing it on a large scale, are really quite difficult, especially as we are still learning about all the aspects of weed ecology and weed genetics, areas where we are gaining knowledge quite rapidly but we are certainly not on top of the subject in terms of making it at all predictive about what outcomes we are likely to see in the long term.

 

Q137  Mr Thomas: I have a couple of questions about the design and your approach to that. I was very interested in the first part of your opening remarks. Two things stood out to me from those remarks. One was that you said that these were at the wrong time; the second one was that you said they were too large. Later on you said that the size was not justified by the science. Surely, looking back now to the position we were in in 1998 and the position we have now from the results of the field scale evaluations, has their size not been justified? After all, a lot of them were attacked and scientifically spoiled. We had evidence from Michael Meacher that in fact it was a nip and tuck thing as to whether these would be scientifically valid experiments, and maybe, on reflection, the size of them was useful for us to have. Secondly, in terms of the wrong time, now that they have reported and we can point to possible environmental harm in at least two of those crops, that chimes in very much with the debate which is going on at the European level. Were you not wrong in taking that approach to these field scale evaluations? Were they not in fact at the right time and probably of about the right size?

Ms Diamond: In terms of the scale, we have never seen good justification for their being that large. One of the issues when you are doing ecological studies of this kind in terms of agricultural crops is that there are problems with organisms that can move between small test sites. If you have lots of blocks next to each other, there is an issue about them starting to move between blocks, and that can muddle the results essentially. That is the only justification that has even been alluded to that I could see as to why they were so big. As I said before, the actual research consortium was brought in after the scale of the crop trials had been put in place already, and so they could not determine what size they would be. The most striking results are to do with weed biomass and those organisms which directly feed upon the weeds that were affected by the herbicides. That could have been studied in smaller sized plots. The organisms which are difficult to study in smaller scale plots also turn out to be difficult to study in very large plots. This is why we are saying that we do not really think that the size was justified by the science. Prior to the design being stated in public, there was no apparent or public discussion or discussion document which said, "And these are the reasons why they need to be this big". Our question is: could you not have done this with smaller scale plots and therefore could we have saved a lot of money?

 

Q138  Mr Thomas: I accept that you are making that point. Would you not accept the position we are in now that, looking back, those FSEs should have gone ahead, even though you might have some questions about the scale and nature of them? We are much better off now, having had them, than we would be if we had not had them. Would you accept that?

Ms Diamond: Yes, in terms of the fact that we do think the results are very useful, but we maintain our view about the problems that we had right at the beginning; we have changed our position on those.

Mr Riley: If we go back and look at the history of how they were developed, the companies which were trying to get early commercialisation of GM crops in the UK had made absolutely no effort whatsoever to study the biodiveristy impacts of this technology and it was really a last minute intervention by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee for the UK, spearheaded by English Nature, that put them on the spot at a point in history when the French Government was almost signing the Part C consent for two spring oilseed rapes to be brought on to the market in the spring of 1998. They were on the cusp of commercialisation. The size of the trials we think reflects the fact that the industry when it went into it extremely reluctantly did not think biodiveristy was an issue; in fact they were pushing the crops at the time as a way of cleaning up the rotation and getting rid of weeds. Since then, they have changed their tune a bit and now they say the technology is going to be used to enhance biodiveristy. At the time the farm scale trials were mooted, it was very much a weed control technology, which would enable farmers to grow crops without any competition at all.

 

Q139  Chairman: On the question of whether size matters here, I want to make sure we understand what you are talking about. Are we talking about the number of fields involved in the trials or the size of the individual fields concerned? What difference does it really make anyway?

Ms Diamond: We are talking about the size of the field.

 

Q140  Chairman: Yes. Why is the size of the field important?

Ms Diamond: It is important because we have always said that having very large fields of GM crops as part of the trials significantly increases the threat to the environment from other things, particularly gene transfer.

 

Q141  Chairman: The risk of cross-pollination is increased if you have a larger field?

Mr Riley: Yes, and the bigger the field, the more likely you are to get cross-pollination.

Ms Diamond: There is good scientific evidence that pollen will go a lot further from a large source than from a small source.

Mr Riley: In considerable quantities, and so you are producting far more pollen from a large field and the amount of pollen drifting across down-wind will be larger.

 

Q142  Mr Savidge: Surely, if the suspicion is that if you have a larger field there will be wider cross-pollination is precisely what the farm scale tests ought to be testing for? I would have thought people could have legitimately said if they had chosen extremely small fields, "Ah, well, look, this was not really reproduced in the circumstances that would occur if we were to adopt GM crops".

Ms Diamond: Firstly, the farm scale evaluations did not formally examine gene transfer anyway, and so in that sense, no, they did not even look at that. The argument, in the end, was about biodiveristy. We are saying that you could have actually measured biodiveristy in small plots. Finally, we think that there are lot of different aspects of the farm scale trials which in no way actually mirrored commercial practice anyway. In that sense, the arguments for having that scale do not really hold up.

Mr Riley: The actual monitoring of the farm scale evaluations took place in the field margins. The furthest they went into the crops was 32 metres. The middle of the crop was not sampled at all.

 

Q143  Mr Thomas: I want to continue with some of the design of this. If I have read the evidence that you have presented to the Committee correctly, you are basically saying that the process was affected by political imperatives, that it was politically motivated, and you reiterated that at the start of this meeting. Could I ask you therefore: in the light of evidence from the previous Environment Minister, Mr Meacher, who confided that the evaluations were used in a sense to allow more time for debate and discussion about possible commercialisation, but he also said that the design of those trials was up to SCIMAC and not up to DEFRA, or MAFF as it was then, who would you say was the political imperative therefore? Would you point your finger at any one individual or set of individuals, either in government or outside government, who was really politically driving this? Are you using the word "political" in terms of political accountability in MAFF or are you using it in a wider sense of political aims and ambitions of certain companies?

Mr Riley: I will take you back to the fact that the companies were on the very edge of getting commercial approval. The intervention of English Nature on the biodiveristy issue was incredibly unwelcome by them because it stopped what appeared to be a snowball that could not really be halted. It did halt it. SCIMAC and biotechnology companies will certainly influence the size of the areas grown. I do not think we have any evidence from our point of view that they influence how the experiment within those fields was designed. I do not thinks we would say that. We certainly think that the companies had far too much influence over the management of those trials, but you may wish to come to that later.

 

Q144  Mr Thomas: We have had some evidence on that. Are you happy with the integrity of the testing?

Mr Riley: We think that, within the available knowledge that we had, the approach that was taken in terms of split fields and the types of monitoring of the indicator groups was probably the best that was available.

 

Q145  Mr Thomas: In reality, could the Government have chosen any other option but to work with the biotechnology companies in this way? If the price to pay, if you like, was to have larger, free-scale evaluations that you would like to have seen, then maybe that was a price worth paying to get the results that we have now got?

Mr Riley: I think the very fact that the biotechnology industry was so closely involved in the management, and the public perception is that they were also involved with the planning of it as well, tainted the trials from day one and this caused quite a few of the problems that the Government experienced during the course of them. They could easily have taken another route. We think it is absolutely correct that the biotechnology companies should have paid £6 million to an independent body to carry out the tests.

Q146  Mr Thomas: You did say it could be done cheaper?

Mr Riley: Yes, but if they want to give us £6 million, we would take it. A sum of money should have been passed to an independent body. What is crucial to the public perception and to our perception is that these trials were not carried out independently. The biotechnology companies had a crucial role to play; first of all, they found the farmers. That could easily have been done by a government agency, or even a body like ADAS could have found them. ADAS could have been paid a contract to go and recruit farmers to carry out the farm scale trials but they were not. This is further evidence that the Government was trying to keep the biotechnology companies happy at the time. The second point is that they had a contract with farmers, which has never been made public. We do not know what the agreement between Monsanto and the beet farmers was and we do not know what the agreement between Bayer and the maize and oilseed rape farmers was; we have no idea. Certainly, there may have been clauses that prevented them talking to us and to the media. I speculate there but it seems highly likely. The third thing they did, which is the biggest mistake, is that they allowed the biotechnology companies to advise the farmers when to apply the weedkiller to the GM half of the field, which is an absolutely crucial part of the experiment. Even if you accept that the biotechnology companies did it absolutely without any bias at all and based on good agronomic assessment, then the mere fact that they had that power tainted the farm scale evaluations from day one. It was a fundamental mistake by the Government and further evidence that these companies were effectively dictating quite a lot of what was going on at the start. We now learn from the Pesticides Safety Directorate, which we have not included in our written evidence, that some of these trials were used as part of the approval process for herbicide and glufosinate ammonium to provide data to give to the PSD so that they could get commercial approval.

 

Q147  Mr Chaytor: May I pursue this particular point about the biotech companies' instructions to the farmers? What else would you expect? In the normal course of events, farmers applying weedkiller would presumably read the instructions on the can. Are you saying that they should not read the instructions on the can and just decide for themselves when and how much to apply?

Ms Diamond: There was a lot more control over the farmers' actions than simply providing them with a datasheet and saying, "These are the intervals during which you can spray". We know that even in the results of the farm scale evaluations there is a comment that they actually took the decisions with the farmers, and so their representatives went on to the farms. We do know anecdotally of farmers who wanted to spray again, for example, and were told not to, or who wanted to spray and were told to wait. In terms of their level of control, they could have advised and they could have said, "These are the kinds of intervals in which you can use these herbicides; now go away and do it to the best of your judgment", but that was not the case.

Mr Riley: There is independent research going on at the moment through NIAB, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, called the Bright Project, which is looking at the optimum use of herbicides on GM crops in the UK. We feel it would have been more sensible to have used their findings to govern how the herbicides were applied. Unfortunately, of course that particular piece of research only ended last year and still has not reported. That would have delayed the farm scale evaluations for another four years. That is exactly what the biotechnology industry did not want.

 

Q148  Chairman: Sue Doughty asked you at the beginning whether you were opposed in principle to genetic modification. Are you opposed in principle to the biotechnology industry?

Mr Riley: We are opposed in principle to companies that try to bring new technology into the market with inadequate testing.

 

Q149  Mr Challen: I want to ask you about paragraph 3.8 in your memorandum and under "The quality of design", you say: "The impression has been given that the trials were an inevitable consequence of a smooth procedure of environmental evaluation. This is simply not true." If we juxtapose the word "impression" with the statement, "This is simply not true", are you going so far as to say that some kind of deception has been worked, or is this merely some narrow kind of factual inaccuracy? If it is a deception, who are you actually fingering? Is it the politicians, the industry. or indeed the scientists themselves?

Ms Diamond: We have outlined why we think the trials were politically motivated at the beginning in the sense that there was enormous pressure from the biotechnology companies. The statement is really about the stage we are at now where the impression is given: "We had to have the farm scale trials. We had the small trials and then we had to have the big trials. They have been assessed for every other environmental and safety issue and therefore we had to look just at bio-safety, and that was the only thing that was left to examine, and we have done that now". We are saying that it was not nearly as straightforward as that. A lot of the testing had not been done, and still has not been done. The GM beet crops still have not been approved for food safety and the environment.

 

Q150  Mr Challen: Who was giving the impression that what you said was the case?

Ms Diamond: It is in terms of the public announcements and the paperwork that is being presented now from Government.

Mr Riley: I think it is both Ministers, the DETR as it was at the time, and the biotechnology industry which were all giving the impression that everything apart from biodiveristy issues was fully under control and everything was safe. We think the evidence base for those statements is not here. Subsequently, as we go on, more and more uncertainty creeps into the key areas of science. For example, on cross-pollination issues, at the time the FSEs were being mooted, we were bring told that 50 metres was a sufficient pollen barrier, and yet we now find, with recently published DEFRA reports - published on 13 October - that they have discovered that in fact new vectors are involved, previously undetected vectors, in moving oilseed rape pollen, namely pollen beetles. The evidence suggests that they are capable of shifting it 26 kilometres, and so new evidence is coming in all the time. We have assessed a lot of the previous risk assessments associated with Part B releases and we find that on a number of occasions issues like cross‑pollination were merely taken from one risk assessment and cut and pasted into the next risk assessment. If you trace them back, there is no scientific basis to them at all.

 

Q151  Mr Challen: I sounds like a dodgy dossier?

Mr Riley: It is probably even more dangerous than the previous dodgy dossier, because this stuff is going to be fed, as I have said, to millions and millions of people.

 

Q152  Joan Walley: Are you aware of any work that has been done elsewhere? I am thinking in particular of Canada, for example, where there has been advice about buffer zones and the distances and so on between them?

Mr Riley: One of the problems with North America as a whole is getting hold of really good, independently assessed data. We have talked to quite a lot of people in North America about the problems, and they certainly exist. If you take some of the seeds that were used in the farm scale evaluations, those were contaminated with other GM traits and they were produced in Canada. The evidence is that the Canadian separation distances for seed production are significantly larger than ours and yet cross-pollination is still occurring, but there is no real systematic publicly‑funded, independent research project from the Canadian prairies which puts all this into a context that we could use to underpin some of our decisions. The anecdotal evidence from Canada, from farmers who have experience in using GM oilseed rape, is that in the first couple of years they were delighted with it but, once cross-pollination began to set in, a lot of the economic advantages that they had in the early days began to disappear because of the problem of controlling Roundup-resistant oilseed rape volunteers in their other crops. That was leading them back into using some of the weed killers, such as Paraquat and 2,4-D, that GM crops were supposed to have banished from the Canadian prairies. A lot of the people who have come over recently to talk to us about this are saying, "This was a mistake. We wish we had had longer time to assess what the environmental and economic impacts are likely to be".

 

Q153  Mr Chaytor: Two weeks ago a letter was sent to the Prime Minister signed by I think 114 scientists, led by the former Vice Chancellor of East Anglia University. Are you familiar with the letter and the drift of their argument? Do you agree with their criticism that the FSEs were largely about weed control and not about the process of genetic modification itself?

Mr Riley: The FSEs would not have taken place if it had not been for the existence of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops. That was the driver for them, and so to separate them from GM crops I think is slightly disingenuous of these 114 scientists. Of course, key, as we mention in our memorandum to you, is that the 2001-18 Directive requirements for risk assessment require that these crops shall have no indirect impact on the environment. That means that their management should not impact on biodiveristy. The evidence from beet and oilseed rape is that it does impact on biodiveristy. The group of scientists should have been taking a much more positive view on where they should be going in science. The results of the farm scale evaluations give us a hell of a lot more information about what lives in these particular crops. Before they started, there were papers saying, "We actually do not know anything about the biodiveristy of oilseed rape crops at all". In that sense, we have gained quite a lot. We need, through strong Government leadership, to develop a programme of sustainable farming research to find out what is the most environmentally friendly way of growing these crops, which minimises the impact on the environment, guarantees a high level of biodiveristy in the countryside, and increasingly provides farmers with an income and a commercial yield. That is where the research should be going. We rather think that the GM part is a bit of a blind alley because if it has benefits, it creates far more disbenefits than it will benefits.

 

Q154  Mr Chaytor: One of the other arguments in their letter, or a sub-text of the letter, was about the way in which the public handles risk or the public is informed about the nature of risk in all matters related to science and technology. They criticise the Government for staying silent and allowing tabloid newspapers to turn to stories on super weeds and Frankenfoods, and so on. What do you think about that argument and what do you think the role of Government and environmental groups is in developing a more mature public understanding of the nature of risk?

Mr Riley: The first reference to Frankenfoods is actually in The Daily Telegraph.

 

Q155  Mr Chaytor: I use the word "tabloid" in a general sense.

Mr Riley: You use it in the loosest sense of the word.

Ms Diamond: Personally, I find those kinds of attitudes from the eminent scientists of this world really quite patronising, the implication being that members of the public are incapable of making risk assessments. All the research that has been done in this field of looking at how people make decisions on risk and how they examine complex and difficult scientific information of this type shows that they do not just leap to conclusions. There have been several studies which actually looked specifically at the issue of GM crops. The GM Nation debate itself did that in part. It took a group of people who were supposed to represent the man in the street stereotype. He was given a bit of information and asked to go away and find some more information. They were more concerned afterwards that that mirrors exactly the same research or very similar research that was done before there was much mention in the press of GM crops. That was done in 1996‑97. They did exactly the same thing; they took people in focus groups. At the beginning, most of them knew very little about GM crops. They gave them various bits of information and allowed them access to different sources of information, but they were more concerned afterwards. There are issues about the way that scientific stories are reported in the press but you cannot have some public opinion about a scientific issue and then complain that they are not coming up with the right answers, which is essentially what is happening at the moment.

Q156  Mr Chaytor: In terms of the impact of genetic modification, the Friends of the Earth's position is that you are not satisfied that the impact on the environment has been sufficiently well examined through the farm scale evaluations. You are uncertain as to the impact on health because, other than the study at Newcastle that you quoted earlier, there is little evidence about health. You sidestepped the Chairman's question earlier about whether you are opposed to genetic modification in principle. When Greenpeace was here the other week, the Greenpeace representative was adamant that there was no objection to the process of genetic modification in principle; the only objection was to any adverse effect on releases into the environment. You seem to have a different view on that and have an "in principle" objection. Your "in principle" objection is to companies which are less than open and honest with the evidence that they have accumulated, but do you have a principled objection to biotechnology itself?

Ms Diamond: No. What I was trying to get over earlier was that we do not have a principal objection to the technology; we have a principal objection to trying to introduce the technology before we have the ability to test whether it is safe or not. We would say that the technological advances in developing the technology are ahead of the technological and scientific advantages needed to tell whether it is safe oar not. We are saying "not yet". In terms of the actual GM crops that are being proposed at the moment, we would say "not these ones" because we do not see any value in them. Herbicide-tolerant crops are of interest to Bayer and Monsanto in terms of increasing the sales of their herbicides but not really for much else.

 

Q157  Mr Chaytor: In terms of your criticisms of the farm scale trials themselves, particularly the issue of the number of sites, because some of the original sites were subsequently changed, did you make any criticism of the design of the trials at the start of the process or have you only criticised them at the end of the process?

Mr Riley: We were not given an opportunity. If I remember correctly, there was one seminar to which people were invited where you were expected to respond on the day to the design of the experiment. Neither Emily nor I were able to attend that meeting, I am afraid, because we were doing other work at the time. There was no real public consultation. I would be very surprised if there were because I think the general attitude of the scientific community is that the public is incapable of commenting on science, and that is one of their big problems really. Things have changed in the last 10 or 15 years, and perhaps longer than that because public disquiet about what is going on in the food chain was demonstrated by the food irradiation campaign in the mid‑Eighties. That pre-dates BSE concerns. I think the public is now saying, "If you are going to change our food, then you have to convince us that it is going to do us some good. If it is just going to provide some extra profits for people up and down the chain and it does not bring us any benefits, then forget it". That is the reality of where we are. The problem with scientists is that at the moment they do not engage very well with people. If they came to public meetings and talked to people, they would find that people have scientific concerns but they also have a whole range of other concerns about the development of rural areas and the control of large corporations on the food chain, none of which have anything to do with science; they are largely political. It is a very complex argument and a lot of people who went to the public meetings of GM Nation and who attended the meetings about the farm scale evaluations have a very sophisticated political understanding of what is going on. It is probably the scientific people who are a bit out of touch with the fact that the public has moved on in terms of wanting to engage in the regulatory system and wanting to engage in what they eat. They demonstrated very clearly in 1998, when they realised what Monsanto was trying to do with GM soya, that they were not prepared to accept it in the shops. They did the only thing they could do, which was to stop buying it.

 

Q158  Mr Chaytor: Leaving aside the lifestyle of the political and the economic issues and to go back to the science, what do you think should happen now in terms of further research into the scientific aspects; i.e. the impacts on the existing environment and the impacts on human health? Presumably you are arguing for yet another programme of research. What shape should that have and who should fund it?

Ms Diamond: Our criticisms of the farm scale evaluations have been largely to do with the fact that they were not over-controlled by the biotechnology companies, but we think that despite that the results are stark enough that there should not be any more research on GM oilseed rape and beet crops. We just do not think that they should be approved and that the evidence is there to show that they are not safe or that they will harm the United Kingdom's biodiveristy.

 

Q159  Mr Thomas: Does that include maize?

Ms Diamond: No. We have a lot of queries about the maize results. We feel that the way that they were set up and the over-control that was given to biotechnology companies has allowed the maize results to be not representative at all of what is likely to happen if it were to be commercialised. We do not accept the results of the maize trials.

Mr Riley: We think they were managed for biodiveristy rather than commercial yield.

 

Q160  Mr Chaytor: You accept the results of the trials if they suit your position but you do not accept the results of the trials if they do not suit your position?

Ms Diamond: No. We are saying that we think that the trials were set up in such a way that they could be manipulated. The opportunity was there. We do not know, we cannot say for certain, what actually happened but, regardless of all those opportunities, the results for oilseed rape and beet crops were so stark that they were much worse than anyone expected.

 

Q161  Mr Chaytor: Are you suggesting that if somebody set this up deliberately so that they could manipulate it, they made a very bad job of doing that?

Ms Diamond: The environmental impacts were so severe that they could not be manipulated away.

Mr Riley: If they had been managed for commercial yield, it is possible - and we cannot prove this - that the results could have been even worse. That is what we are saying.

 

Q162  Mr Francois: To press you a bit further, you are saying on the one hand that you think that the trials were flawed and that you do not approve of the way in which they were conducted, and yet you are saying at the same time that the results of those trials from your point of view are conclusive.

Ms Diamond: We are saying that the way that they were set up, the control that was given over them to the biotechnology companies and some of those aspects to do with the trials, we are not happy with and we never have been happy with that. The other main criticism we have is that they could probably have been done on a smaller scale. We have always said, right from the beginning: "Why are you not measuring yield?" In the end, it is the yield that determines whether the farmers will do what is done in the experiments. We actually have good evidence, we even have photographs, to show that in the maize crops, the GM maize was not yielding at all; it was a very bad crop. No farmer would grow maize for biodiveristy, but when you look at the pictures of the maize crops that were grown, it looks as if that is what was happening.

 

Q163  Mr Francois: Is not the logical consequence of that position then to say: "If these trials were flawed", as you would argue, "and they should have been done in a different way, it logically follows from that that further trials should be run, as it were, on an improved basis and the results of that should be looked at"?

Ms Diamond: We would say that the maize trials, at the very least ---

 

Q164  Mr Francois: Do you see the point I am making? Does that not follow really from where you are currently?

Ms Diamond: We have never criticised the quality of the monitoring that was done or the ability of the scientists who did that work. That is why we are quite happy to take the results from the sugar beet and oilseed rape. We are saying that that was open to manipulation, or there was the possibility of that. It is possible it could have been worse. It also seems quite clear that the environmental impact was so large that it came through anyway. We were not the only people who were surprised at the strength of the results for oilseed rape and sugar beet.

Mr Riley: One of our concerns originally, and we published a report on this before the results came out, was that the power of the experiment to detect important ecological change was not there. It could detect large ecological changes, and that is actually what occurred. If the changes had been smaller than were observed and below 50 per cent, then we would not be able to say whether that was caused by the impact of different herbicide regimes or the experimental error and variation that you would expect in an experiment on a large scale in an outside environment. We were anticipating the results to be far closer and more ambiguous. We were very concerned that in a sense the experiment was not big enough to give us the power to detect important ecological changes, which in some scientific papers suggest a difference of 13 per cent in a particular group could be ecologically significant over time if you were losing that amount of individual numbers every year and over time you would get quite a measured and significant ecological impact, which would be missed by these trials. We were anticipating a much closer result that we got, to be honest.

 

Q165  Paul Flynn: Why should the selection of the farmer be significant to the outcomes?

Mr Riley: It is fair to say, if you read all the minutes of the steering committee, that they had great difficulty in finding farmers who were willing to volunteer. We have absolutely no idea what the process of selection of these farmers was. It is completely and totally opaque. We do not know what the procedures were, whether they were offered advance payments or what. We have not seen the contracts. Had that been carried out by a government agency in a completely transparent way, then the whole public perception of the trials might well have been different. It just seemed to be a stitch-up between Monsanto and the Government and Bayer and the Government.

 

Q166  Paul Flynn: If the farmer was predisposed towards GM crops, how could you have influenced it to change the result? How do you influence the outcome? Are you suggesting that somehow, if you had a farmer who was opposed, the outcome might have been different?

Ms Diamond: We do not know what the individual farmers were thinking, but if you want to change the result in favour of GM crops, then you manage the crop with biodiveristy rather than yield, which is not what would happen in normal commercial practice. This is what we are concerned about, particularly with the maize trials, because we do not think that any commercial farmer would manage a maize crop by biodiveristy.

 

Q167  Paul Flynn: I think we would all agree that no farmer, except an organic farmer, grows for biodiveristy specifically.

Ms Diamond: It appears that that may have been what was happening, at least in some of the ones that we have seen.

 

Q168  Paul Flynn: The whole trial was artificial in growing for biodiveristy, and so you would have to do it on a scientific basis rather than leave the farmer to decide what to do . The farmer wants to increase his yield in the end. Surely, you have to have scientists to tell them how to treat the crop if you are achieving biodiveristy?

Ms Diamond: The scientists who advised on the GM half of the field were employed by Monsanto and Bayer, and they clearly had a vested interest in the outcome of the research.

 

Q169  Paul Flynn: I am still not happy with the point you made earlier that you want to rubbish the maize results, which seem to be very significant, but accept the other results which suited your case beforehand.

Mr Riley: We are saying that because of the way the management of the trials was to a large degree handed over to a biotechnology company, there was capacity for them to delay the application of the herbicides to maximise biodiveristy. The herbicide regimes in the three crops that were trialed are quite different to conventional crops. For maize in particular, the current herbicide regime, or the one that was current and is now banned as of next year, uses atrazine, which is an extremely effective weedkiller and extremely toxic. Friends of the Earth have been campaigning for it to be banned for about 20 years, and so we are quite pleased it has been banned. There was some capacity to persuade the farmers to delay application of the glufosinate ammonium on the maize. If it had been done independently, there would probably have been more biodiveristy in the GM half of the field than the non-GM because atrazine is a very effective weedkiller and not sustainable at all.

 

Q170  Paul Flynn: How do you cope with the fact that there were similar results to those crops where atrazine was not used? It was not used on them all.

Mr Riley: I do not think we have seen those results broken down yet. Those results have not been analysed separately, as far as we know.

 

Q171  Paul Flynn: I understand that they were.

Mr Riley: They are not set out in any scientific papers published by the Royal Society.

 

Q172  Paul Flynn: What do you believe are the most important results, scientifically and from the point of view of environmentalists? Do you think the differences between the GM and non‑­GM crops were as significant and important as the differences between each separate crop? The differences between one crop and another of the same type was about 7 or 8 per cent. Between different crops, whether they were GM or non-GM, there were differences of about 50 per cent in the number of the famous beetle population with 1,700 beetles in one and 1,500 in the other. It went down to about 50 per cent of that level from crop to crop. Was not this new finding of significance to you?

Ms Diamond: The basis of doing the trials on these particular crops was that they were thought to have more biodiveristy in them than the rest of the arable rotation. These are very interesting results. We do not deny that at all. We have been pouring through them like everyone else. I do not think that the fact that there is a difference between the crops is relevant to the discussion at hand, which is: are the GM crops more harmful than the non-GM crops? In the sense of how GM crops are assessed legally, it is always done on that basis: a comparison with a conventional counterpart.

 

Q173  Paul Flynn: It is not a comparison of the biodiveristy of barren crops such as wheat and so on and the significant differences between crops would surely have a major important effect for crop rotation in the future as far as biodiveristy is concerned?

Mr Riley: If there are big biodiveristy differences between different crops and that reflects the different management regimes that go on in them, it points us to the fact that we need to do a lot more studying of a whole range of crop management approaches that maximise biodiveristy to try and enable the Government to hit its biodiveristy targets but at the same time produce high quality products from which farmers can make a profit. If you take maize, then atrazine is just one of the problems with maize. It is a big problem that the Environment Agency has been highlighting for years with regard to soil erosion. That has not been tackled at all during this experiment. We need more broad-based research into how to grow these crops sustainably. That is not what we have from farm scale trials. It is a very narrow piece of research looking just at the biodiveristy impacts. We would like to see how we can reduce nitrate run-off, reduce phosphate run-off, reduce weedkiller run-off and all these issues, which are equally important from our perspective as an environmental campaigning organisation.

 

Q174  Mr Thomas: To follow up on that and expand on a point you have been making, I think it is fair to say that we have had different views and evidence so far on what these field scale evaluations mean for the future. Some would say that this is the pattern by which all individual crops now have to be measured. For example, if GM-type wheat were to come in, then we would have to have a field scale evaluation similar to this on wheat in four or five years, or whatever, before we decided whether to license or not. Others would say, "We have examined three GM crops; we have found measurable differences in biodiveristy in two of them and arguable things in one case". We have had that argument and so I will not go over it again. That means that we now have sufficient reason within European law to say that there is harm to the environment and that we will continue with a moratorium or even a ban on GM crops. Which is your preferred policy option of those two?

Mr Riley: It is pretty clear, if you look at the risk assessment under Directive 2001 -18, that the applicants have to satisfy all the requirements of the risk assessment and, as we quote in our memorandum, there are two which clearly indicate that there should be no indirect effects from the release of the GM matter into the environment.

 

Q175  Mr Thomas: Do you think that these results can be read across to other GM crops or not?

Mr Riley: No.

Ms Diamond: Equally, if someone proposed a GM herbicide or whatever and that there be another set of farm scale evaluations on those crops, we would say that it is a requirement under law that the biotech company, the applicant, provides that information and it should not be paid for by the public. We certainly do not want to see £6 million for GM wheat and £6 million for whatever else paid for by the public. Of course we want to see very detailed research on these issues but we want the applicants to pay for it because they are the ones who will make the profit in the end.

Mr Riley: We would very much want that research to be carried out by independent scientists and for the experiments to be designed by independent scientists. Our experience of experiments designed by the biotechnology industry is not good, I am afraid. Those are flawed. We can give you evidence of infamous studies relating to the approval of this particular maize, T25 maize, where a study looking at the health impacts or the feed value of the maize to chickens was described as of undergraduate standard and that it would not have got into a scientific journal because it was so badly designed. We do want to see some standards set saying, "This is how you carry out this type of experiment". To decide the level of proof that we need we would need an independent set of scientists who are not in the pocket of any company at all. I think that is what the public really supports. One of the problems is that the Government tends to send civil servants to public meetings, but if Ministers had attended some of the meetings that have taken place over the last six years which I have been to and had actually come and listened to what the public was saying, then we might have seen quite a different policy. I think Ministers are shielded by their civil servants from the reality of public opinion.

 

Q176  Mr Savidge: You spoke about the importance of public perceptions and said there have been public concerns back to irradiated foods etc, but I think you would recognise that overwhelmingly probably what has been an influence on public concern was BSE CJD. Would you accept that it is a natural public response but that there is no real logical connection to say that because of the horrors of BSE CJD, that means that therefore there should be a danger in GM and possibly the only thing that we could correctly say is that it must reinforce the precautionary principle very strongly because of course, in the case of BSE CJD, one knows that in fact animal material was fed back to cattle for a period of several decades before we saw the terrible effects of it? Do you think that is a legitimate point?

Ms Diamond: In terms of any direct link, no. There is no link between BSE and GM crops in that direct way. I think the link that is quite clear is that what precipitated BSE, regardless of the various different arguments about what the actual cause was, was a very minor change in existing practice within the food chain to the point where people were saying, "This could never cause any harmful effects." So, in that sense, yes, we need to be much more precautionary because what it taught us was that you cannot just assume that something will be safe because it is not necessarily going to be.

Mr Riley: The other problem is that there is a lack of trust in both politicians and scientists because of errors that have been made in the past in the food chain. I think the public is probably quite right at the moment to be sceptical about the benefits of GM foods. They are not just going to take anything that is chucked at them. If the companies are wise, they will recognise those market signals and come up with something which may not involve GM because molecular biology is not just genetic modification, it involves a whole load of possible ways to plant breed including marcrosystic breeding where you take the plant, look at what genes are there and decide whether that is the gene you are looking for and inform your traditional breeding programmes much better and therefore speed them up. Who knows what the future is going to hold in this. Certainly I think we should be looking for plant breeding companies to be producing varieties that are going to be more suitable for sustainable lower input systems rather than unsustainable high input systems when they are producing new seed varieties and that is the direction in which we should be going -

 

Q177  Chairman: I think we are straying a little far away from the farm.

Mr Riley: I think Defra is to be congratulated because there is now a working group looking at sustainable seeds for sustainable agriculture, so I think it is excellent.

Chairman: I have no doubt that the biotech companies will take close account of the advice you have provided this afternoon.

Q178  Mr Challen: I just want to go back to the question of who pays for this sort of research. I am just wondering if you could say whether there is any kind of normal practice when matters of this kind or similar things are being researched in terms of who pays for it.

Ms Diamond: The Directive actually states that the companies should provide the evidence. We know that, in the past, they have paid for companies to do various bits of research, for example animal testing studies, and there is now a requirement in the 2001/18 which came into force in October that they use peer review studies where possible. So, this is quite clearly laid out and it is very, very unusual and it seems to be completely unique almost that the Government should have paid for such a huge piece of research which was actually required of the companies by law.

 

Q179  Mr Challen: Was it not the right thing to do with such a controversial subject? If the biotech industry had paid for it, you would have possibly said that the science was tainted and therefore the Government should have paid for it anyway.

Mr Riley: If the money had been handed over and used completely independently and that was very transparent ... I think the problem we have with farm scale trials is that things were not transparent. The relationship between the biotech companies and the farmer is completely opaque. We have not seen the contracts and we do not know what advice was offered to them. We do not know what was said to them. Anecdotally, we have been told that some farmers have been told, "Don't spray at the moment" when they wanted to spray.

 

Q180  Mr Challen: If the science that is produced, perhaps by biotech companies if they produce research, is peer reviewed, would you be happy with that? Would you say it was free of any taint of manipulation or whatever?

Mr Riley: I think that would be a step forward in terms of what we have at the moment, which is un-peer reviewed, badly designed experiments that get through the regulatory process. In the pesticides approval process, as far as I know, the bill is picked up by the biotech companies in terms of getting it through the process, so the dossier of information which is significant and large would be paid for by them. I think there are some question marks relating to the peer reviewing of that material but the principle of them paying is established in the pesticide approval process.

 

Q181  Mr Challen: Given that the crops in these trials have all passed the regulatory hurdles before these trials started, would you say that the trials provide enough information for us now to see the full commercialisation of these crops?

Ms Diamond: They have not passed all the regulatory hurdles. This is one of our arguments about why, for a start, the biotech companies should have been paying for this. The applications have been put into the European Union but they have not been approved yet. The basic environmental issues that are standard to all GM crops have not been assessed, the food safety has not been assessed. What we are actually saying is that those applications should be rejected on the basis that -

 

Q182  Mr Thomas: Was that not the voluntary abeyance of the process by the biotech companies in order for the field scale evaluations to go ahead?

Ms Diamond: Chardon LL does have a marketing consent at the European level. They still need to get seeds of variety approval and they have not been granted that yet. So, they still could not have planted it commercially. At the time that the trials started, Monsanto had not even put in an application for marketing consent for the sugar beet and fodder beet crops - well, it had not put in an application for the sugar beet, but it had put in an application for the fodder beet which had been criticised by the advisory committees and that had actually been sent back. So, no, they had not passed their regulatory hurdles and the requirement under the previous 90/222 Directive, in 1998, it was decided at the Council of Environmental Ministers that the risk assessment was not rigorous enough and, from then on, they said that these kind of impacts, indirect effects and so forth, should be considered in advance of new legislation and that legislation came into force this year. So, the legal requirement was on the biotech companies to look at indirect effects but they have not even had approval yet in the case of oilseed rape and -

Mr Riley: None of these crops can be sold or grown commercially in the European Union or the UK at the moment. The maize has a GMO approval but it still needs a seed approval and it still needs the approval of the Pesticide Safety Directorate for the use of glufosinate ammonium on it. So, there are two more regulatory hoops to go through before it could be sold to farmers and grown commercially.

 

Q183  Mr Challen: The European Union has ruled against Austria declaring itself a GM-free zone. What is the implications of that for decision making in this country and the implications for, I believe, your policy of encouraging local authorities to declare themselves GM-free zones?

Mr Riley: The Austrians used the European Treaty legislation, Article 95 if I remember correctly, and our approach is using the GMO regulations, Article 19. So, we are actually using a different regulatory approach. Our approach is on a crop-by-crop basis. So, if you wanted to remain GM free, if GM maize came on to the market, you would have to have a condition put on the consent for that maize that it could not be grown in area X of the European Community. I think what the Austrians were looking for is a blanket ban on all GM crops in Austria and it appears that that is not legally possible at the moment.

Ms Diamond: The Austrians are actually challenging that now. As far as the UK Government are concerned, at least in the case of the beet crops and oilseed rape crops, it can easily use its voting rights within decisions on marking applications to object to these being given approval. So, it has the opportunity to do that, at least in these crops.

 

Q184  Mr Challen: What definition of GM free would it be using in these circumstances because clearly, from what I have read, you can sell the stuff with one per cent GM content as GM free. These things now come down to definition and things have already got out of hand and, in particular, organic farmers are very worried that they would lose their organic status if it was found that a very small percentage, perhaps one per cent, was discovered to be, as it were, contaminated by GM.

Mr Riley: I think under the current way the organic standard has been operated in the UK if any detectable was found in any organic crop, then the organic status would be lost and potentially lost from the land where it was grown, so there would be quite serious economic impacts. I think that impact goes wider than that because, at the moment, we are told by the major food retailers that they are largely operating to a threshold of not detectable at 0.1 per cent and that is the best we can do given the current technology for analysis. So, anything over that would potentially put contracts for supplying supermarkets in jeopardy. However, the legislation on traceability and labelling will require labelling to only take place if the GM content of any of the ingredients exceeds 0.9 per cent, so it is possible that 0.5 per cent presence in a soya-based product could be passed as non GM. We regret that because we think that 0.1 is the target we should be going for for a number of reasons. One is because that is what we think people really want. Secondly, there are some environmental implications of having a higher threshold in that, in crops like oilseed rape, you may well, over the course of time, build up problems with volunteers and increase the need for using more herbicides as has happened in Canada. Thirdly, if you contaminate seed lots to levels of between 0.1 and 0.9 or 0.7, whatever the level is going to be, that actually starts making decisions for future generations about whether they have GM or not. So, we think keeping it tight at the moment at 0.1 per cent is a sensible precautionary route. It is easier to relax thresholds than try and claw back genes that have escaped into the gene pool.

 

Q185  Chairman: Just on the economic impacts on, say, organic farming, presumably one of the things you would like to see and see very soon was a kind of robust legal framework in order that everybody knows where liability lies. Presumably also, you would like not to see the taxpayer being the last resort when things go wrong.

Mr Riley: I think it is entirely appropriate that if new technology is brought on to the market of any sort really, that those profiting should carry the liability. We think that will concentrate the minds of directors of companies, so that they will really scrutinise the scientific evidence they have to back up their claims of safety before they start marketing them and that can only be beneficial and I think that, in the long term, it will lead to a much better science.

 

Q186  Chairman: And it would helpful if that kind of regime were in place before anymore farm trial -

Mr Riley: I would say it is absolutely essential for it to be in place before anything else takes place.

 

Q187  Joan Walley: Can I just go back to the point you were making about labelling and about traceability and so on and just ask you what you think the implications of the farm trials are in respect of the ability of organic producers to carry on being organic producers. To what extent do you feel that the farm scale trials showed that organic production could be undermined?

Mr Riley: As you probably know, during the trials, the sole association, who are the leading organic certifier in the UK, took a very precautionary view and advised anybody who was growing similar crops, within I think it is up to six miles depending on the species involved, that they would be under threat of losing their certification.

 

Q188  Mr Thomas: That they would lose the certification?

Mr Riley: If they were contaminated to a detectable level.

 

Q189  Mr Thomas: Did anyone become contaminated?

Mr Riley: Not as far as I know but I do know a farmer in Lincolnshire who decided not to grow a crop as a result of an adjacent maize crop near his farm and that was quite a high-value crop because it was not being grown for animal feed, it was actually being grown for producing some sort of cosmetics. I do not know the details of what happens but it involves some process. It was an organic cosmetic, so potentially a high-value crop, and he decided not to go ahead and plant that. We also know that beekeepers were instructed to keep bees six miles away. We undertook our own research around one of the pilot studies in a model farm near Watlington and there we did two things. We monitored pollen in the air coming off this spring oilseed rape crop in 1999 using the services of the National Pollen Research Unit and they set up monitoring points around it and downwind and found that in fact GM pollen was travelling well beyond the 50/200 metre separation in distances. We also employed a former MAFF bee expert to put pollen traps on the beehives around the area and we found that the bees were travelling at least four-and-a-half kilometres to collect pollen from this particular GM crop. We also subsequently brought pollen in areas where farm scale evaluations took place and found GM pollen to be present in them. So, there are real commercial issues here around organic farmers and around bee keepers, but I think equally importantly around farmers who are supplying the supermarkets who are looking for a non-detectable limit and equally farmers who save their own seeds because, although the perception is that it is in southern countries where farmers save their own seeds, believe me that there is a significant amount of seed saving that goes on in UK agriculture because it saves money and that is what farmers are trying to do at the moment because of the poor returns on arable crops.

 

Q190  Sue Doughty: A lot of the time we have queries about why the Government are going forwards with this or why they have been so keen and one of the things that has been generally thought as a reason is that the Government are under pressure by the trade to get a pay back for the research that has been done in the 1980s and the 1990s and that this is a motivation. Do you think that the Government are under this pressure?

Mr Riley: They were. In the days when the Government used to answer parliamentary questions about who they had meetings with, it was pretty obvious that they were having fairly frequent meetings with the biotechnology companies. Subsequently, they do not answer those questions any more, so we do not know the recent history of which ministers met which biotechnology company. There is a lot of pressure coming on from the Bush administration who have been increasingly under pressure from the biotechnology industry in the States as well and of course we now have a complaint from the US through the WTO about the de facto moratorium in the European Union. So, I think that there is a significant amount of political pressure and a significant amount of commercial pressure on the Government. On the other hand, there is a significant amount of voter pressure and a significant amount of commercial pressure coming on them from the supermarkets as well because they clearly want to do what their customers are asking for and the introduction of commercial GM crops in the UK at the present time would make the supermarkets' lives very difficult indeed.

 

Q191  Sue Doughty: Would you be happy if GM-crop cultivation was actually halted in the UK just on the basis of there being no demand rather than on the basis of the uncertainties about human health and the environmental impacts? In other words, rather than looking to all these things that we have had a very extensive discussion about, just say, "Why don't you just go away and not bother about them because nobody wants them?".

Mr Riley: I think that, in terms of the current generation which bring very little benefit to anybody apart from the people who sell weedkillers, then, yes, I think that is the answer. We do not think that it should be left to the market and it is a political decision and I think that the Government have an opportunity here, if they want to grasp it, to actually restore UK agriculture over a period of 10 to 15 years and bring some solid research in to address all the environmental problems of agriculture and find out the best way and the most sustainable way of growing arable crops in this country and the best way to handle fertilizers etc, etc, and the best way to avoid using pesticides and herbicides. In 15 years' time, if we did that, then British agriculture may well be a lot stronger and a lot fitter.

 

Q192  Chairman: No more farm scale trials?

Mr Riley: We see no justification for any more farm scale trials at the moment until fundamental problems of co-existence, liability, cross-pollination and food safety are resolved.

 

Q193  Chairman: Is there anything that we have not asked you that you would like to be asked or anything that you would like to say by way of conclusion?

Mr Riley: I think we are probably exhausted but, if on the way home we think ah, we should have said that, could we put a supplementary memorandum in?

 

Q194  Chairman: You are always welcome to do that.

Mr Riley: We do have some pictures of some maize crops that you might find interesting, if we could submit those as well.

Chairman: Yes. Thank you very much indeed for giving evidence. It has been a useful session.