Consider the events of last week. First Royal Society scientists dismissed the work of Dr Arpad Pusztai with its claim that rats were grievously harmed when fed GM potatoes. Then the British Medical Association warned that such food and crops might have a cumulative and irreversible effect on the environment and the food chain. That was followed by the disclosure that the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Robert May, agreed with those lobby groups which have demanded that the GM crops now being tested should not be approved for commercial use until at least 2003. Critics, like the BMA, said that the moves were not robust enough, while countryside lobbyists said that previous voluntary codes have proved ineffectual.
Vested interests lurk behind so much here.
The multinationals, even those with no interest in genetic modification, are determined to oppose calls that sovereign governments, rather than companies, should determine whether the import of GM foods and seeds be restricted. Such a shift would undermine the new freedoms they have acquired at the World Trade Organisation - thanks to international agreements which give free trade primacy over all other considerations. Ambiguities lie behind the claims and counterclaims. It is true that GM technology offers plants with new resistance to pests, so fewer chemicals will be needed. But in the case of GM soya, US farmers now use increased volumes of even more toxic chemicals than before, because the crop is resistant to them and everything else is not, boosting yields enormously.