SCRI Annual Report 2003/2004 - Scottish Crop Research Institute

Director’s Report
billion hectares) per annum caused by a combination
of urban encroachment and poor agronomic practices
mean that the efficiency of production on the restricted
land area must be raised without further imperilling
natural and semi-natural habitats, ecological refugia
and dispersal corridors for flora and fauna. The very
essence of good agronomic practice, with both conventional
and GM crops, is to reduce risks, e.g. prevention
of gene flow from outcrossing with wild or crop relatives
by the use of herbicides, crop rotations, establishing
minimum distances between crops, harvesting
before flowering, or not growing the crop. Crop pests
and diseases are controlled by the cultivation of resistant
varieties and/or pesticides. Such measures ensure
sustainability of the cropping system, and may require
monitoring by independent authorities, not least in the
European context where there is a sensitised public and
body politic, concerns over agricultural sustainability,
and realisation that a higher proportion of land is
farmed in Europe than in the USA, meaning that what
is deemed to be ‘biodiversity’ must be allowed to thrive
in the farmland area, alongside and within crops. In
many instances, advances in modern agricultural engineering
mean that weed-infested crops can be cleaned
and separated post-harvest, opening up the possibility
of using diverse crop mixtures rather than monocultures.
Biotechnological approaches also allow biodiversity
to be monitored and quantified.
As far as technology-inherent risks are concerned, there
are no demonstrable adverse effects from the cultivation
and consumption of current GM crops, but precautionary
biosafety guidelines and protocols for
assessing risks on a case-by-case (crop-by-crop, geneby-gene)
basis are available from the OECD, UN
Environment Programme, UN Industrial
Development Organisation, the World Bank, and the
EU, offering science-based hazard identification and
risk assessments. Straightforward, non-pejorative regulatory
frameworks will need to be devised with each
new generation of transgenic material, with sunset
clauses operating in these cases where crops and products
have been demonstrated to be of very low risk.
Scientists have difficulty in addressing technologytranscending
risks and ethical issues in the deployment
of transgenic crops, regardless of using such terms as
‘genetically improved’ crops. There is no doubt that
potential food-safety and environment risks have been
grossly and sometimes obscenely over publicised as a
vehicle to draw attention to technology-transcending
and/or ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ issues of concern, and it is
interesting to compare the public treatment of mobile
telephones with that given to GM crops, in respect of
perceived risks, acceptability, and benefits. As in information
technology and computing, the major advances
in biotechnology have been driven by the private sector
which requires various degrees of exclusivity, sometimes
confidentiality, in order to function competitively
in the marketplace. This alone raises particular
challenges for public-sector bodies in MDCs and
LDCs to establish constructive relationships with the
private sector. 1999-2000.
Europe and GM Crops Against a background of concerns
about the spread of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) from the UK to five countries
in mainland Europe (France, Germany, Portugal,
Spain, and Switzerland), and its possible linkage to a
new variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD),
dioxin contamination of poultry in Belgium, continuing
problems of Escherichia coli O157 and other foodpoisoning
microorganisms, a rapidly escalating foot
and mouth disease outbreak, and a mistrust of scientists
and regulators, genetically modified (GM) crops
received bad – often hostile – publicity in Europe.
Regardless of the proven safety of current GM crops in
agriculture, their widespread cultivation outwith
Europe, their potential contribution to wealth-creation
and the quality of life – including their potential benefits
to the environment – various non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) such as Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace and other groups strongly opposed GM
crop cultivation and utilisation in Europe.
Demonstrations, sometimes violent, against GM foods
took place, and meetings on the topic were frequently
discomfited by implacably polarised views, prejudice,
misinformation, inability to understand risks, and outright
intolerance. Religious views on the inviolate separation
of species (taxonomic taboos), attitudes on
“ownership” of genes by species, ingrained suspicions
about multinational corporations based in the USA,
opposition to market-based capitalist economies (antiglobalisation),
anti-Americanism, anti-science tendencies,
unwillingness to accept expert views or the
opinions and actions of regulators, and urban-based
perceptions on the rôle and functioning of agriculture
as a business, all acted against a change in direction to
adopt GM technology even on a gene-by-gene, cropby-crop,
place-by-place basis. Indeed, the actions and
publicity engendered by the anti-GM groups created
concerns about GM organisms (GMOs) in countries
throughout the world.
Pressure was brought to bear on governments in
Europe to retard the development of GM crops, a
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