The real GM food scandal – answers to step 1 in context.

The cover story published in Prospect magazine in November 2007 was called ‘the real GM food scandal’. In it Dick Taverne maintained that GM foods are safe, healthy and essential if we ever want to achieve decent living standards ¹ for the world’s growing population, and that an irrational fear of gene technology and misplaced moralising about GM foods in the west are costing millions of lives ² in poor countries.
EU regulations, based on the principle of being extremely precautionary, provide safeguards against the "contamination" of organic farms by GM crops; they require any produce containing more than 0.9 per cent GM content to be labelled as such, with the clear implication ³ that it needs a health warning and should be avoided⁴.
This causes a major conflict over GM soya beans imported from America. Some GM crops are taking root in some European countries, but in most they are in effect banned. The public is led to believe ⁵ that GM technology is not only unsafe but harmful to the environment, and that it only serves to profit big agricultural companies.

Public discussion ⁶ of GM food in the British media, and throughout Europe, reflects a persistent suspicion of GM crops. Supermarkets display notices that their products are "GM-free." Sales of organic food, promoted as a natural alternative to the products of modern scientific farming, are increasing by about 20 per cent a year.
Seldom has public perception ⁷ been more out of line with the facts. The public in Britain and Europe seems unaware of the astonishing success of GM crops in the rest of the world. No new agricultural technology in recent times has spread faster and more widely. Only a decade after their commercial introduction, GM crops are now cultivated in 22 countries on over 100m hectares (an area more than four times the size of Britain) by over 10m farmers, of whom 9m are resource-poor farmers in developing countries, mainly India and China. Most of these small-scale ⁸ farmers grow pest-resistant GM cotton. In India alone, production tripled in 2006 to over 3.6m hectares. This cotton benefits farmers because it reduces the need for insecticides, thereby increasing their income and also improving their health. While it is true that the promised development of staple GM food crops for the developing world has been delayed, this is not because of technical flaws. It is principally because GM crops, unlike conventional crops, must overcome costly, time-consuming and unnecessary regulatory obstacles before they can be licensed.

The fact is that there is not a shred of any evidence of risk to human health ⁹ from GM crops. Every academy of science, representing the views of the world’s leading experts — the Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, French and American academies as well as the Royal Society, which has published four separate reports on the issue — has confirmed this. Independent inquiries have found that the risk from GM crops is no greater than that from conventionally grown crops that do not have to undergo such testing. In 2001, the research directorate of the EU commission released a summary of 81 scientific studies ¹⁰ financed by the EU itself — not by private industry — conducted over a 15-year period, to determine whether GM products were unsafe or insufficiently tested: none found evidence of harm to humans or to the environment.

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