When the GM food debate flared in Australia last July, I recall Radio National's Robyn Williams interviewing several British GM scientists on The Science Show . The British Medical Association had call- ed shortly before for a moratorium on GM food production. Even now I do not know if the program was one of Williams's Pythonesque spoofs or whether the arrogance and pomposity of those he interviewed was the full Monty. In Australia, commercial partnership can distort scientific candour. Resistance to inserting public health science into the national agenda for gene regulation and policy deliberation about GM foods makes us look silly, ignorant, supine and bought out by big agribiz.
Food production is a massive commercial enterprise with great political power.
This power, exercised from paddock to plate as the producers are fond of saying, combined with the political and economic seductiveness of biotechnology in an era of market fundamentalism, limits the impact of critical voices in the GM debate, even those of all Australian health ministers. Their call for all GM foods to be labelled has been resisted through heavy lobbying further up the political food chain. Yet the Australian Gene Ethics Network was quoted in October as saying that GM crops did not undergo premarket human tests, have no long-term history of safe use and may change nutritional value, safety and acceptability of our foods. An OECD conference in March concluded that no studies had been published that showed eating GM foods was detrimental to health. Nor will there ever be so if it is not possible to tell those who consume GM food from those who don't because GM food is not labelled.