27^th June 2003

Speakers: Charles Hendry Local MP (Conservative Party)

Professor Vivian Moses (Chairman, CropGen)

Pete Riley (Senior Campaigner, Friends of the Earth)

Chair: Chris Wilson (Finance Director, Emerson College)

Photo David Jonas

Chairman’s Introduction

CW: Thank you. Now we are just about ready to start. Could I ask you to make sure that your mobile phones are switched off? My name is Chris Wilson and I’m going to be the chairman for this evening’s debate. Now the debate has been organised by a group of local people who are concerned about the issue of genetic modification of foods and the introduction of GM crops in the UK. As part of the process of public consultation that was initiated by the government under the title: GM Nation? there has been a series of government-funded debates and some local government sponsored debates and then a debate like this one, which has been organised by a group of interested people. So we’ve received no funding from either central or local government to stage this debate and I will be asking for contributions towards the costs that we’ve incurred at the end of the evening. Now the structure of the proceedings is that each of our three speakers will take about ten minutes each to present their views and then we’ll open the floor to questions and comments and discussion. But the only way that your views will eventually inform the government’s deliberations into this issue is by completing the feedback form which you will find on your chair. But don’t do it now, please. At the end of the evening I will give some time for everyone to be able to complete a form before you go. We’d like you to do it now, and then we’ll collect them from you, and we’ll post them. That way we have a genuine tangible outcome for the evening. If there isn’t a form you can ask one of the ushers and they will provide you with one. Now we are also recording the meeting so that we can provide a written transcript of what’s been said by everybody. The GM Nation? website has transcripts of the government-sponsored meetings that were held around the country. So we’ll be publishing ours on our website http://there.is/forestrow/GM/ and we’ll be hoping to post this one on the GM Nation? website as well.

Photo David Jonas

So, our three speakers, in the order in which they will be speaking are firstly, Mr Charles Hendry who’s the Conservative MP for Wealden, and he’ll give us some insight into the thinking behind this consultation process and the parliamentary actions to follow, and, some other things he says he is going to surprise us with. Mr Hendry was elected for our constituency in 2001; he’s currently the Shadow Minister for Young People. Before becoming an MP he worked in public relations for Ogilvy & Mather and Burson-Marsteller, who according to the New York Times are working on a pro-GM campaign for Monsanto in the US, but he’s got nothing to do with that. And then I’m going to invite Professor Vivian Moses of Kings College London to speak about the benefits and advantages of GM technology. Now Professor Moses is chairman of CropGen, which describes itself in the following way: ‘A consumer and media information initiative, CropGen’s mission is to make the case for GM crops by helping to achieve a greater measure of realism and better balance in the UK public debate about crop biotechnology’. He is going to be speaking for GM crops. And then lastly Pete Riley from Friends of the Earth will present the case against GM technology. Pete’s a senior campaigner for the Real Food and Farming campaign run by the Friends of the Earth, he’s worked for them since 1977, and has been actively working with environmental and food production issues for many years. Now just before I invite Charles Hendry to speak I’d just like to ask a few questions to get some kind of idea of the make-up of the audience here. So bear with me, I want shows of hands at this point. So first, how many of you are undecided about where you stand on GM technology? Show of hands – not very many. Secondly how many people are prepared to see GM crops grown in this country? Thank you - it only counts as one sir (laughter). How many people have grandchildren under the age of eighteen? Hmm quite a lot, good. That’s a good sign because we have a sense that this sort of issue is a very long term one. How many people consider they understand the science of GM technology? Oh, quite a good representation, excellent. How many of you work in farming? Again quite a few, excellent. (laughter) How many of you would describe yourselves as actively working against the introduction of GM crops? Hmm, that’s a sizeable proportion I think. And how many are actively working for the introduction of GM crops? Laughter (one man puts two hands up) - thank you Sir (laughter) – a brave individual, you can spot him at the back in the check shirt with the blue and…(laughter). And the last question, who here represents the media? Some, a few. Good, well thanks very much. I’ll ask Charles Hendry to speak now.

Speaker 1: Charles Hendry

CH:Thank you very much indeed Chris, and can I start off by thanking those who have organised the meeting, I think its an extremely valuable occasion, I think its something which I would like to see more communities organising. I think its probably no surprise that it happens in Forest Row because Forest row has that sort of eclectic group of people would get a gathering like this together, and I really commend all of you who have been involved for bringing it together and making it happen.

Looking at those hands going up just now I think one of the things which struck me is that there is a thirst for knowledge about the issue of GM. Clearly there’s some of you who have a very detailed knowledge, but there are an awful lot of us – and I include myself in that- who feel we need to know an awful lot more. And in the absence of that information we have an understandable fear of the unknown. And one of the things which I learnt when I was working in PR – and I was very glad that you added that I’d never worked for Monsanto or that side of Burson-Marsteller – is that we’ve moved on from the stage in life where scientists say “trust us, we know best, leave it to us and it will all be alright”. We now live in an age where we want to be certain because of all the things which have gone wrong in science elsewhere, and we actually want to be able to convince ourselves through having assessed the arguments on both sides ourselves, of the rightness of those points. And one of the things which worries me about the GM debate is that I think there is inadequate consultation going on at the moment. Clearly with meetings like this we’re having the chance to have our say, but if you look at the way in which the process is being run by the government, I’m not convinced that this a fully open program. I saw a question in Hansard this week, where a liberal Democrat asked Margaret Beckett what representation she had received regarding the licensing of GM crops for commercial use from farming organisations, supermarkets, other governments and others, and the minister replied “my right honourable friend, the secretary of state and officials regularly receive representations on GM crops from a wide range of stakeholders including farming organisations, supermarkets, other governments and others, no central record is kept of these communications”. And to me that was a horrific bit of information to show that however much you write in, however much I pass on concerns which relate to me, that nobody keeps a note of them, nobody assessing them, nobody uses that to build up the found of human knowledge which is kept within a department who will be so key in terms of making decisions on this subject. And I think also, that many of us have a concern about the integrity of the research. We fear, maybe wrongly, but we fear that decisions may already have been made, that whatever discussions have happened between our Prime Minister and the president of the United States, we don’t know. That information is not available to us. And we nevertheless feel that there is an indication that whilst they are going through the routine of giving people the chance to comment more may have been decided than we will ever be aware of.

Of course there could be potential benefits from going down the GM route. We’re told it leads to greater productivity and that could help with famine relief, but I was also struck by the quote from Matthew Lockwood who’s Action Aids head of policy where he said: “GM does not provide a magic bullet solution to world hunger, what poor people really need is access to land, water, better roads to get their crops to market, education and credit schemes” And to be looking so much on the GM route, I think, is misplaced.

And also if you look in terms of our own county and our own country, I grew up here, I grew up two or three miles away from here, I went to school in this village, and you look at the number of fields which I knew forty years ago, which were stuffed full of animals, stuffed full of farming activity, which are now idle, which have been withdrawn from farming either through set aside or providing nice paddocks for ponies/ And you then think that there is so much more use that we could make of our land without having to go down the route of ever-greater productivity of using a small proportion of that land. (Audience clapping).

We are told that the GM approach will result in less use of pesticides because the crops would be more resistant to pests. But on the other side of the argument you can then see that in order to kill off weeds and other things which have become more resistant we will have to uses ever more powerful pesticides to control them. So its not simply as easy a solution as is being suggested. And there may be proof – I’m not sure there ever can be proof – but that some aspects of genetic modification will be benign. But that does not mean that all aspects of it will be benign. And the decision that our government will be taking in conjunction with other European governments has got to be to say you either allow this wholesale, or you stop it. You cannot say this bits going to be alright but that bit has got to be stopped, and that, so my concern is that, because you cannot have that degree of certainty we have to be incredibly careful how we proceed on this.

I was very sad, I had very few areas where on political principles I would have agreed generally with Michael Meacher, but I think he was a first rate Environment Minister, and I was very sad to see him go. And one of the things that struck me in the article which he wrote with the Ecologist last week was where he said the real problem is whether ten, twenty, thirty years down the track serious and worrying things happen that none of us have ever predicted. We’re not making decisions for this year, the next year, the year after, we are making decisions in this debate for decades and centuries, and that we have to be so careful before we allow ourselves to go down that track.

I think the risks are becoming ever more clear. We’ve seen scientific studies which show that how in the human gut GM DNA has been found. There have been studies showing that in Japanese soya, that where somebody ahs a bleeding gut, that the DNA from the GM gets into their own blood stream and starts to change their own DNA. We are getting into an extremely worrying area of science. And there’s a suggestion too that you can do this in isolation. I find it quite bizarre that a suggestion ahs been made that you shouldn’t have a GM trial less than two hundred metres away from organic food production. We saw this week a pigeon fly across the Atlantic. (Audience laughter). Any body who, didn’t mean to fly across the Atlantic but didn’t stop it getting there, and that’s exactly the same principle; you may say we will contain everything in a neat little field but to suggest that you could do that two hundred metres away from Table Hurst or Plawhatch (local biodynamic/organic farms) and then for their food products, their crops, not to be contaminated I think to most of seems as if it is coming from another world and its completely unreal. (Audience applause).

And the other thing we have to be completely clear about is this is not a decision which we can reverse. Most things which a government does, a successor government can come and say: that was a mistake; we want to change it, if it has the electoral support to do so. This is not one of those products. Once it has been started, once it starts to spread, then there is no way that you can put the genie back in the bottle. I think this is an area - the whole area of food, of additives, of the way in which we run our agriculture, the way in which we run our lives – that we know far too little about. Aside from this subject, I’ve introduced a bill in parliament for the labelling of food additives and colourings because of the effects that those colourings and additives have on the behaviour of some children, particularly on hyperactive children, and we know so little about these subjects, and if we are going to start going down the route of allowing the genetic modification of food, of crops, then we have to accept that there will be things which do not become clear for twenty years, but which by that time will be too late to turn back. Is it an accident that the illnesses derived from food products in the States have doubled in the last seven years? When I was growing up, there was no such thing as hyperactivity, although it might have been known as something different but it wasn’t a widespread issue, but now you look at the growths of so many different things, and you wonder what is the link and there has to be a link between the way food production has changed; between the removal of nutrients from food and some of those aspects, and the way in which the human body has reacted to those things.

And the final point which |I want to make is that these decisions will be very significantly made at the European level. I think its right they are made at a European level, because what happened in this country on this subject is inevitably going to effect countries across the continent and this in an area where I think its absolutely imperative there should be European cooperation. I’m disappointed that it’s our government which appears to be in the lead for taking this debate forward. But one of the issues which they are discussing is how food should be labelled. And I think that it is imperative that food with a GM content should be labelled as such, because parents, because people buying food should know what they are buying, and it shouldn’t be just tucked away in a corner it should be made absolutely clear so that people know. And there there’s a debate going on in Europe about what quantity of GM products there should be in a food before it requires to be labelled as containing it. The British government is saying it shouldn’t be as low as half a percent, some of the other European governments are saying it should be as low as half a percent. I think we have to go for a minimalist approach because if we, we are saying, well either it is GM-free or it is not GM-free and there is not a half way house (loud applause). This is like pregnancy; you can’t be a little bit pregnant. (laughter) So that in terms of where we are, my approach is we have to start with a tremendous amount of scepticism. The emphasis is on the scientist to persuade us that our doubts are misplaced and that we are wrong. But until they can do that, until individually they can persuade us that we have to hold out and to be as sceptical as I think many of us already are. (Audience applause).

CW: Thank you Charles. I’m now going to invite professor Vivian Moses to address us.

Speaker 2: Vivian Moses

Well thank you it’s a pleasure to come here among so many friends and to know that at least one gentleman over at the back (laughter) has not been mislead by these bizarre stories which circulate around this issue. Well in a few minutes clearly there’s a limit to what I can say, but one or two things I think are relevant. The first thing is I think we ought to get clear in our minds about what the nature of this debate is. The government has stated categorically that it’s not a referendum, they are not counting votes, everybody is not being given a vote, they said they would take account of views but they haven’t said how they will take account of views and the public views are clearly going to be one element in a whole series of considerations which they are going to take account of when they make a decision. And I will come back to what nature that decision might be, uh Charles touched upon it when he mentioned the European involvement, but let me come back to that in a few minutes.

What I’d like to start by doing substantively is to discuss a little bit about what experience we have with these technologies, not much in this country although not nothing, and obviously a lot in other countries. So, there are three types of issues which concern people, issues which are potentially resolvable in terms of matters of fact – not matters of opinion, there’s no point in me trying to persuade people who’s opinions are fundamentally opposed for one reason or another, that’s really not the point – I think that all I can do is discuss something about the factual aspects of these things. So, the three aspects that people are interested in which as I say are potentially resolvable in factually terms, the first one is the question of the safety of GM foods. And that’s a very interesting and a very difficult question to answer and in order to do so, I think you might start by asking yourselves, as I’ve done of myself, how do you test the safety of any food? How do we know how safe any of foods actually are/is? We know that we eat foods and sooner or later we get ill and die. But we don’t know the relationship except perhaps in one or two cases between the food we consume and our subsequent health. We know, some people clearly know that if the eat peanuts they go into an aphalactic? Epileptic? shock and they do die, so we know about that sort of situation, and we are told for example that too much red meat and too much cream and butter and so forth can land you up with heart conditions, not necessarily everybody but some people. So we suspect there are dangers there but clearly they don’t effect everybody because some people, and I was very heartened by this - I once read a story of a chap who ate three dozen eggs and died at ninety nine years and I was very encouraged, I like eggs. So it’s very difficult actually to measure. And then we have interesting situations about the nature of the food we eat. I don’t know how many people in this audience are familiar with plant breeding, and realise that many of the common foods that we eat today, wheat and oats and rice and apples and cherries and string beans – I can’t remember all of them – have been made by mutational breeding, that’s to say the seeds are dunked in cancer producing chemicals or exposed to gamma rays from radioactive cobalt and of those seeds that survive, selective examples are chosen for breeding, and that those are not tested, we don’t anything about the genetics of those, they are not tested for food safety, they are put on the market if they behave themselves from the producer point of view. How do we test the safety of those? Nobody bats an eyelid about those. But we eat them all the time and we’re not concerned. So the food safety is a big issue, and the experience we have apart from the endless testing which has gone on which ahs not applied to other foods, almost all of which is available in the public arena although its not terribly easy to find it – I mean I have to agree there – we have the experience of hundreds of millions of people in North and South America eating these foods and of course I totally reject Charles’ quotation from Michael Meacher the other day and where he got his information from about any attempt to relate American standards of food disease with GM technology is simple laughable. There is simply no connection has been established – there may be one – but none ahs been established and simply to claim it in that sort of way is ludicrous. So there is simply no evidence and the American’s have been very alert to this – American’s have good medical services and so do the Canadian’s - and have been very alert to this for years and nothing what so ever has shown up. Nothing, you know that’s quite remarkable in a food which has been on the market now for eight years and nothing has happened. So, maybe nothing ever will, and maybe it will in time we can’t know that because we can’t know the future and that’s true for these foods and for all other foods.

The second thing that people worry about is possible environmental effects. We don’t have much experience of environmental effects in this country because we’ve only grown trial plots – six hundred of them mind you, for three years - and we will get the results on a micro scale, not a macro scale, but on a micro scale analysis will come out later this year, and we know nothing yet because they haven’t released any data. But we have information from other countries and we know that there is low rate of cross pollination to produce troublesome weeds, just as in all forms of agriculture, we know that herbicide resistant crops arise spontaneously quite apart from gene transfer, uh man involved gene transfer, and are dealt with by well understood management procedures, there are all sorts of anecdotal stories of people saying about how the birds have come back to their farms and so on, which you can believe or not, and we have some well organised scare stories which subsequently collapse, which of course the best known is the Monarch butterflies, which was whooped up into an enormous scare in 2000 I think it was and then a couple of years later it was established the whole thing had been a scare, that the Monarch butterflies thank you were alive and well in the American corn belt and that nothing had happened. And those scare stories of course are the product of various sorts of individuals who make it their business to generate scares, the newspapers are interested in headlines and all the usual business of people who work up those sorts of stories for public consumption.

The third point I want to raise – and these are all testable phenomena – the third point is the economic effect. Is it worth it? Does it produce benefit for those who use it? Well I have to tell you and you probably know this, that about sixty million hectares of GM crops are grown worldwide, that’s something more than twice the land area of the United Kingdom, um the British Isles, approaching five percent of the arable land area of the world, growing by something between ten and twenty per cent a year. No other technologies ever grown as fast as this and its now involving something like six million farmers, of whom three quarters are in poor countries. And these farmers grow also by ten to twenty per cent a year, so they are not all stupid, they are not all being conned year after year to spend money on high cost seeds in order to waste money in order to use more pesticide and more herbicide as some people accuse, they do it for the obvious reason that it’s a benefit to them. It seems that some of them don’t make a go of it, and one or two organisations have spent a lot of time hunting them out and they’ve found a dozen or so farmers who have had trouble one way or another, and they’ve produced whole books about this carefully saying we have not bothered to examine the positive outcomes of these activities. So, if you ask the farmers who use it what they think they say they are not going to go back, if you talk to cotton farmers in South Africa, or the Indian cotton farmers who forced their government to allow them to grow GM cotton or Brazilian soya bean farmers who smuggle their seeds in from Argentina so that GM free soya from brazil doesn’t exist anymore, um there is no supply of GM-free commodity soya left in the world, uh, these farmers are clear what they want to do. And you can get details from them, what sort of benefits they get and, I don’t have time to discuss it in detail, but the benefits are real, the farmers receive them and every year they want more.

So where do we stand now in this country? Well the first thing I think we need to understand is that the jurisdiction over these matters now lies in Brussels not in London. Brussels decides as part of the European Community activity, which authorises/approves crops to be grown, and approves food for sale in the European Union. There are, eight foods have been approved for sale, one type of tomato, one of soya bean and three of oil seed rape I think and three of maize are legally saleable in the European Union, and to a degree which I can’t really estimate, are in foods, but its very difficult to find out where they are because the labelling laws are not yet in force, so we don’t actually know where they are. The tomatoes we know about because they were in cans in Sainsbury's and Safeway’s seven years ago and sold very well but they ran out and the mood had changed so they didn’t bother to reproduce them, to produce any more. So the jurisdiction lies with the European Union, and there is at least one crop which is licensed for cultivation in the EU and indeed some countries in Europe, Spain in the EU, and Romania outside it among others are commercially producing GM crops now. So, all of those things go on under the jurisdiction of Brussels and if you, our government of course is part of that discussion, and the situation in Brussels broadly is that there is a, there has been pressure to authorise the use of more of these plants and foods, seven countries have been blocking it – led as you might have guessed by France, and eight countries have been promoting it more or less led by Britain in association if I can remember with Spain, and Portugal, Italy, Holland, Ireland, Germany I think, and Sweden. I not absolutely sure about which side Germany stands, and the others are against. And the situation in the EU is that the Commission has been trying to move forward and the Commission takes the view that with the legislation which is now becoming effective in the EU, the labelling and the trace-ability legislation that this moratorium will come to an end and that Europe will begin to move forward and the governments are in some in state of understanding this. The EU Commission of Agriculture Franz Fischler is very concerned, as indeed is our government - about co-existence, about how is it that we are going to be able to manage to have GM agriculture and other sorts of agriculture in this country at the same time, recognising the rights of all parties to participate in legal activities, so its legal to grow some sorts of Gm foods, just as its legal to undertake other sorts of farming activities, and our government and the EU is concerned with how we do this. And there are all sorts of questions about how you do it, but that’s where the issue is – the issue is not any more with are they safe, that’s for the regulators, the regulators have decided with eight foods that they are safe and future foods are all one at a time – not as Charles said all or nothing – one at a time, each one is judged separately, each crop is judged separately, and there is no blanket approval either sort or given, and so the pressure from various sources is to increase the number of proposals put forward for new foods and new crops to be authorised but it hasn’t yet happened. But the co-existence one is a very major question. It impinges on rights of choice, it impinges of the rights of farmers to choose how to farm, and consumers to chose what to eat. At the moment there is no right of choice for consumers in this country as far as we know, as far as we can easily know, because people who wish to consume Gm food are denied the opportunity by and large (audience laughter). You may laugh, and you may laugh because you think here that you are sitting nice and pretty and because you all think the same way except for my friend up there in the check shirt (laughter0, but nevertheless since I presume that you are moral and ethical people you recognise the rights of other people to think differently from yourselves, and people also have a choice in the matter and the fact that you want to do something does not give you the right to impinge upon the rights of others (audience laughter), so just as supermarkets managed to sell vegetarian food and meat in the same store, or some of them sell Kosher and Halall meats in the same stores as bacon, the fact that some people want to eat GM-free food does not, should not in my view – deny the rights of others to consume what they want. Now you can argue that nobody in this country except me and the chap at the back actually want to do it, but you are wrong. It turns out according to the EU for example, the Euro-barometer measurement of last November that Britain is the least rejectionist of all the EU countries, only thirty per cent of people in this country say over my dead body, whereas in Greece at the other end its twice that number, so you mustn’t assume that other people all think the way you do, and even if most of them do, some of them don’t and those some have rights too and those rights have to be respected just as your rights have to be respected. And that’s the problem our government and the EU is facing: how do we resolve these questions of conflicting rights because, its difficult, nobody wants to give, and everybody is going to have to, everybody is going to have to give some because that’s the way compromise is developed in civilised societies and that’s something we are going to have to learn to do. That’s my view of the situation, if you want to talk nuts and bolts we can do so in the body of the evening, but you know that gets a bit tedious at times.

One last point perhaps, people say they are short of information. The information is there for you to go and get. Almost everything is in the public domain, but I have to say you have to make an effort to get it. People are not going to hand it you, if you want it its in the libraries, its on the web, its everywhere, but you have to make an effort to go and get it. So this excuse of we don’t know and we are not told doesn’t stand up. Thank you. I look forward to an interesting evening. (Audience applause).

CW: So Pete Riley will now give us an alternative view.

Speaker 3: Pete Riley

Well first of all I’d like to start off by congratulating the organisers again because it was very swift of them to pick up that there was a debate going on and quickly get organised because I have to say that the publicity from the national debate hasn’t been the most effective we’ve ever seen. But indeed the actual national debate on GM food dint start on the 3^rd of June it started about six years ago, and I’m pretty sure its going to go on well on beyond the eighteenth of July when this particular part of the debate draws to a close. But it is quite a crucial part of the debate because you do have the chance to fill in the forms and I would urge you to do so at the end, whatever side of the fence you sit.

I think its important that we look at this GM debate in the context of what we want from our food and farming, and look at what the key issues are for those industries at the moment and for us as consumers, and people who like the countryside. So, food safety is very high up on peoples concerns and a lot of effort has been put in the last few years to try and improve food safety after the series of disasters we went through in the eighties and early nineties. People are also looking increasingly for high quality food and fresh food. They also want to know where it comes from so its traceable and indeed the supermarkets have adopted that as a policy. Marks and Spencer’s can tell you which field a lettuce was grown in. And this is the modern trend, to sort out problems quickly, eliminate them if the exist, and in a global food chain that’s very important. The American’s don’t seem to have cottoned on to this yet, they don’t seem to want to adopt any sort of traceability, and that’s a key issue to do with choice and I’ll go onto that in a minute. People also want to see wildlife friendly farming which has a minimal impact on the environment and enhances the landscape – not that the landscape round here needs a lot of enhancing, but in some parts of the country it certainly does. The food also needs to be affordable for everybody to have a proper diet in this country, and there are people in this country who by dint of their wages or their unemployment have, find great difficulties affording the correct diet for their families. And finally and crucially I think, what ever system we have it has to be profitable for farmers. We put three billion pounds a year into British agriculture through the CAP [Common Agricultural Policy] and at the moment very few farmers despite that three billion pounds are in the black, many of them are in the red, and many of them are just breaking even. There is something wrong with the system at the moment that needs far more than CAP reforms to sort out.

Now will GM crops help in achieving this vision of what we are after in terms of the food chain? And I think there are several crucial questions we need to ask as part of the debate, and Vivian has touched on many of them already. First of all food safety. How can we actually devise a system to test foods before it comes onto the market without actually feeding it to millions of people? Which is exactly what’s happened in America. But unfortunately what’s happened in America - nobody knows who’s eaten what, because nothing is labelled, everything is linked together, because the American’s haven’t caught on to traceability and labelling yet as we have in Europe. So, if there was a health scare in America, and if the physicians in America picked it up, they would have no idea which of the many changes that have occurred in the US food chain over the last eight years have caused that health scare because of course there’s been new additives, there’s been additional levels of pesticides, new pesticides, new food colourings etc. etc. So very very difficult indeed, and therefore, we do have to work out a much better system for assessing food safety of GM foods and indeed any other food which has been mucked about with, and I think not many people before this GM debate started were aware that the seed industry of this country were irradiating seeds with gamma radiation and dipping into to carcinogenic chemicals. And, that’s a beneficial thing and we might like to ask some questions about that as well. And these things go on, because the system is not transparent and we are not told what is going on, but we are increasingly being told what’s going on and I think that’s very healthy because we’ll end up with a much better system for public involvement in decision-making.

What are going to be the longer-term environmental impacts of this crop –of these crops? Well we know for certain that they, in Europe, and Europe is different to north America because wee have relatives of these crops in this country, oil seed rape has at least five relatives in the countryside which could cross-pollinate with it, and one that regularly does, and sugar beet has relatives in the countryside including a wheat beet which is a particular problem in sugar beet fields, and we know in Mexico where maize is a native plants there have already been problems with contamination of native land races with GM traits; it will happen and the problem is what are the consequences of that happening? What are the long-term environmental impacts likely to be? Well the experience in Canada is that herbicide tolerance will what is known as “stack up” in plants so you get up to two, up to three herbicide tolerant genes in the same plant, and that’s going to make life difficult for farmers. And indeed it will throw them back onto the old herbicides, the more toxic herbicides that GM is supposed to be getting rid of. Allied to that is the problem of natural resistance developing both in insects to insect resistant crops and in herbicide resistance crops to the weeds. His is happening in America, we have got a weed called horsetail which is becoming an increasing problem, and I’m told that the solution to horsetail which is resistant to Roundup is to spray it with 24-D. Now 24-D is a chemical that most people thought should have been phased out a long time ago, but in fact we may see it coming back in again. So these are, this GM technology may not be the panacea that Monsanto and the companies that have promoted it tell us.

Moving on to choice now, a crucial party of this for future generations and for maintaining choice in this generation - if GM people want to eat GM food that’s fine – but unfortunately because pollen blows everywhere and its carried by insects – it is going to be very very difficult to contain it in the landscape of Europe. Even in America and Canada where there are huge fields it’s proved extremely difficult. And Advanta Seeds UK used to have a substantial seed production capacity in Canada producing non-GM seed for sale to Europe, but because of the advent of GM crops there, contamination has occurred, there were at least two incidents in this country already, and Advanta Seeds have moved their seed production away from Canada so a direct economic impact of Gm crops being grown in Canada already, and they’ve only been there six years and we’ll see what its like in ten years time, because these things take time to evolve, these problems. And people will want I think to avoid GM crops, content in their food, the current proposals for labelling are likely to be that point nine per cent GM content of any ingredient will go unlabelled. Now that’s pretty well close to one soya bean in a hundred. We don’t think that’s a particularly tight threshold and we’d like to see it reduced down to 0.1. - uh, undetectable at 0.1 per cent, that is exactly the threshold that is currently being operated by supermarkets in this country and they tell us – I can’t have a way of proving it - that that’s working and its working well. Vivian mentioned the problem of co-existence, and this is absolutely central to whether those people who don’t want to eat GM food are going to have a choice. If people want GM food, it’s going to be, if we go commercial, believe me you’ll be spoilt for choice because the genes will go everywhere. People’s crops will be contaminated, the seeds will be contaminated, organic farmers who are growing comparable crops will get their crops contaminated as well. Oil seed rape pollen has been known to cross-pollinate at four and a half kilometres, we know that bee’s will travel ate least four kilometres to pick up pollen from the GM rape crop, its an inevitable consequence of going commercial that contamination will take place. The question is how and what legal framework is going to be put in place by the European Commission and our government to allow us to maintain choice. And until that is answered I think the answer to whether we should have GM crops or nor is no, very firmly no.

And then of course there are ethical issues that we need to think about during the debate. Some people take an objection - and I perfectly under stand this – that the crossing of species, the moving of DNA between species is a step too far in ethical terms and they will take a position that they always want to avoid GM food and its derivatives to try and make a personal statement and I think, like vegetarians and vegan's, that their views need to be protected, but unless we can get a co-existence scheme n place that allows people to grow GM-free with no threat then their wishes will be undermined with time, and that I’m afraid is the plan of the biotech industry, to slowly slowly erode these thresholds so we get higher and higher thresholds with time and in the end we just have to put up with it but in ten years time we might begin to see environmental problems, it may take twenty years, because that is the nature of ecological change and evolution. We’ve got experience of exotic plants which took up to fifty years to evolve and develop population dynamics to become invasive weed and we just simply don’t know how that process works and unless we get a really much better understanding of it then it would be a huge risk and a risk, given the benefits at the moment from GM crops, that is not worth taking at the present time.

So, if we take a risk with GM and go ahead with it its not a risk for individuals its actually risk for almost the entire population of the world, because everybody could end up eating GM soya and maize around the world. So if there is something wrong with it the consequences of it going wrong are, quite frankly, enormous. So that brings us back to the question: are the benefits big enough to justify taking such a big route? And if those benefits are not as great as we are lead to believe, and I think the benefits certainly accrue to Monsanto and Bayer rather than farmers and consumers and other people in the food chain (audience applause), we must ask the question: are there better ways of tackling the problems that GM purports to tackle? And the answer is almost certainly yes, in this country and in the southern countries where their needs are absolutely crucial, the fact that we, this government, puts money into all sorts of very interesting projects into sustainable farming, which are actually working, they are delivering the goods to these people, they are making them richer, they are giving them a balanced diet, they are giving them food security. We need to build on that start rather than sending them off down a blind alley of GM which will inevitably be controlled by large corporations and not those people, and in the end it will be the corporations that win out, and not small farmers around the world. We network with small farmers around the world in a network called (Via campasina?) and they are passionately, passionately against GM, because they se it as an erosion of their rights to save seed, and the control they’ve got over their livelihoods and lives and I think we need to listen to those people and not just the spokes people of the GM industry in the South.

Science is going to be very important in making this decision about whether we go GM commercialisation or not, but so are economics, so are social issues, and science is one bit of the jigsaw, and the farm scale trials are a small piece of that jigsaw, so we shouldn’t take those to be the be all and end all of this debate, they are a little piece of information that will help us decide. So, we need to look at the economics, we need to look at the social and ethical issues, very very carefully, as a nation, and we, as a nation, I think are quite capable of doing that, we are extremely well educated, and many of us have got a good grasp of science, and we know instinctively, when we should be holding back and taking another route, and I think that’s the message that we need to send to this government now, a that this is not the time to go GM full blown commercial, in twenty years time, when we know a hell of a lot more about the processes involved, we might have a look at it again, and there maybe, and quite probably are, more sophisticated ways of using our knowledge of molecular biology to enhance the crops that we grow in the countryside without going down the GM route. And providing those are used for public benefit and not for corporate benefit, then those are certainly worth exploring, but at the moment we are faced with corporations monopolising seed production across the planet, and I’ll illustrate the power that they think they’ve got just to finish.

In Pakistan, peasant farmers over the years developed hundreds of different varieties of rice, and a few years ago along came an American corporation and said we claim the ownership of the genes in Basmati rice, which is quite an extraordinary thing to do I think. And unbelievably, because this decision around the world which was made without any public debate whatsoever, patents have been granted for genes so that companies can profit from them. Now that’s what you get if you allow politicians [end of side 1 … lost some] …… tomato puree in the shops, its not because it ran out, as Vivian said, its because people stopped buying it (audience applause) and the supermarkets, like all good businesses, listen to their customers, and they provide people with what they want, not with what they don’t want, the American’s however, take a different point of view: you can have it, as long as it’s GM, whether you are in Zambia, or Europe, so I think we need to send a very strong message to Mr Bush, that we are in the twenty first century, and not as he seems to think in terms of trade, the seventeenth century (audience applause).

CW: Thank you very much. I think we’ve had a lightning tour of most of the issues there and I’m sure its stimulated a lot of thoughts. Now before I open the floor I just want to outline a few groundrules if we could. As we are trying to record everything that is said, if you could wait to speak until the microphone is brought to you, that way everything will be recorded and also people will be able to hear what you are saying. If I invite you to speak, could you give your name and occupation please? If you ask a question of one of the panel then I’ll allow a follow up question from the same question, just one; I’d like to get around as many people as we possibly can. And I’d like to try and encourage some exchange between members of the audience, now that’s going to be a slow process as we only have one microphone, but please, I’d ask you please not to shout out, and to direct everything through the chairman. And lets try and keep our contributions directed towards the issues please. Now I’m not going to be able to invite everybody to speak, so bear with me, and I might ask specific individuals, or I might say could a farmer respond to that or etc. so, we’ll just see how it goes. So, who has the first question, comment?

Betty Day, Homeopath, Edenbridge: Getting down to the nitty gritty, these forms seem really exceptional, and I’m very pleased to see them here, is there any possibility of getting any more because I know several people who would have liked to have come tonight and were unable to?

CW: I’ll be making an announcement about how they can find forms and how they can register their feedback at the end of debate.

BD: thank you.

Vanessa Underwood (Actress): I question the freedom of people to eat what they want whether its GM or not. I feel that if people consume GM foods and then they may leave a small portion of what they’ve eaten on there plates, put it in the pigs swill, and its distributed as compost or given to animals to eat and it comes into the food chain; I think this is threatening my liberty to eat GM-free foods. Thank you.

CW: Thank you. (Audience applause). Next, the gentlemen there Ben with the check shirt.

John Humberstone (Plumber) My question is addressed to Professor Moses. I was on a farm in France, and he’s [the farmer] most concerned - by the translation - that the cereal crops are sterile which means you cannot keep some of them on one side and then utilise them, that crop the next year – as you harvest it you put some on one side and then use it next year, but you have to buy the new crop seeds from the manufacturer and also the fertiliser, is that right, they are sterile?

VM: No they are not sterile, you are right in one respect, but its not that the crops are sterile. There is an agreement with the companies who produce the seeds that they are sold with a technology license, that’s to say you have to pay a license fee to use the seeds, they have to recoup their costs for development – incidentally it costs about five hundred million dollars to develop one of these products so only large companies can do it and they have to recoup their expenditure – and you are not allowed to save the seed, that’s the deal. If you don’t want to do it then don’t do it, nobody forces you to take the deal, but if you do want to do it then that’s what you do and there are two reasons for that. One of them is because many of these crops are hybrids and have to be produced from fresh seed each year anyway, and many crops are already made like this so that people buy seed fresh from seed producers each year, and the second point is because that’s the deal that the companies say. Now, the farmers that undertake to do this, and there are millions of them do it because in their experience it’s worth it. Of course if you don’t think its worth it then stop doing it, there is no legal requirement to do this, other seeds are on sale, you do what you like, that’s what called freedom of choice.

CW: Thank you.

Maris Norton (retired computer systems developer): I want to make a point about the scientific research. Scientific research ought to be objective. I personally fear and mistrust the scientific research over the issue of GM technology because he who pies the piper calls the tune, and the piper is being paid by organisations like Monsanto – greedy international short-termist corporations who have only one interest and that is in making a buck as fast as possible. (Audience applause)

CW: Charles, do you think the government should be doing more to support independent scientific research?

CH: It’s a question – comes down to whether you trust the government to do it either I’m afraid (audience laughter and applause). They’ll probably put together a report that has a twelve year old PhD students report from California (audience laughter) but I think objectivity is very difficult in this debate and that, clearly though if the scientist is in the pay of an international corporation he is either going to come up with findings which they want or they are not going to publish it, and there are millions, hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world and there will always be some who are prepared to work in conjunction with large corporations, I think its very difficult to get pure objectivity.

CW: Thank you

VM: As a scientist can I respond to that. I think you need to distinguish between scientific research and scientific development. Scientific research is done for the most part in the public sector, paid for by government - not necessarily directed by government – but on public funding and that looks at fundamental discoveries and investigation of how the universe works if you like, it is not the function of governments in this country anyway to produce finished goods. Finished goods are all produced by private companies. What private companies then do is to adapt and to use the fundamental research which is in the public domain –published- to use to make products, and that’s of course what all companies do so the car you drive if you drive a car is made by a multinational corporation, and the petrol that you use in it comes from another multinational and blah blah blah, you know all the stories, and the reason why there are so many multinational corporations and a diminishing number of small companies is because the cost of producing new products goes higher and higher and higher and the small companies find it very difficult and so there is this globalisation phenomena. That’s, you may well object to that, and I can well understand that you do, I would point out that Monsanto – I have no brief from Monsanto, Monsanto is actually smaller than Tesco in terms of size you might be interested to know – its not quite the giant that some people think it is but its obviously an important player in this game, and not the only one.

CW: Pete?

PR: I think this is a very interesting and very good point – we could probably debate this for the whole evening – I think the problem we have got at the moment is that too many universities are reliant on corporate money to fund their departments (audience applause) – every scientist that I talk to on these debates actually agrees that we do need to pay a hell of a lot more public money going into, so we get a more independent science base in our university institutions. The second point I think is that if we leave it to the corporations they will inevitably produce products to sell people because that’s what corporations are in business for, and so a whole load of agricultural research which is not based on products – it is actually based on knowledge and techniques which have been passed from farmer to farmer to farmer and through expert people in the field (?) them – that area of agriculture has been seriously neglected, and organic agriculture is one of the, is the example in this country, but there’s a whole load of other example where we are actually just learning to manage the agricultural ecosystem in a different way to prevent pests becoming a problem, to improve the soil etc. etc. And that is what is being neglected at the moment, and that is probably where the sustainable future lies, rather than in a product-led, that’s corporate –led, agriculture.

VM: you might be interested to know that in third world countries, in India and in China and South Africa and in some other countries the GM products are made in the public sector by government sponsorship and in the universities, not by Monsanto. China is one.

CW: Thank you. Just behind you Ben.

Rod Fergus? (??HP? Consultant): Just a question of fact, I hope, uh Professor Moses please, you mentioned the business of pollen going from GM fields into non-GM fields. Does that in fact effect the non-GM crop in the future so that that non-GM crop becomes a GM crop and therefore dies, therefore the farmer who the crop ahs to buy to buy new seeds next year?

VM: No it doesn’t. There is, unless this is done deliberately there is no obligation of course to, not to do what you like with stuff which happens inadvertently and not with your intention. There was a court case in Canada which revolved around that, in which a farmer claimed exactly that, and the court decided that they didn’t see how it could have been accidental because it was all nicely done in rows and ninety five per cent of the stuff was Monsanto’s and so they reckoned that he was wrong and he lost and he lost his case as well. Inevitably with pollen flow (call out from the audience to speak up). I’m sorry is that better, right OK. Inevitably there’s pollen flow I think the big difference that happens in the GM situation is that you can actually measure it. Its very difficult to measure pollen flow between plants in existing ( ?) because all the plants are the same and you can’t spot the pollen from when field when it gets in another one. But of course with the GM pollen because it does have a marker in it which you can actually measure, suddenly people have discovered pollen flow, I mean the popular world has, scientists of course knew about it already, because you can measure it and because Pete and his friends make an issue of it.

CW: Pete?

PR: Well I was talking to a professor of plant genetics in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve got a project where they are actually tracking pollen flow on conventionally bred plants. Because now, because of molecular biology we can identify the genes that make up plants, almost completely, so we can pick out characters and see whether they are moving with pollen to other crops. So it is possible to do these studies without GM now, and we are learning all the time. Only a couple of weeks ago the University of Lille published some information on how pollen is moving about not through the wind but on the tyres of tractors and on peoples Wellington boots, the seeds are being transported around the countryside like that. So, the idea that there is going to be choice, and that we won’t get completely mixed up in the future is a myth, because it will happen, and in the end everything will be GM if we go down this route.

CW: Thanks Pete. The gentleman at the front here …

Marcus Howlan (?) (Nexus magazine publisher) Fifty years ago if we’d been reading the papers we would have seen that nuclear power was such a wonderful thing, it would be too cheap to meter, and therefore we should all have it. DDT of course was the best thing since sliced bread, Thalidomide was a wonderful drug. Science does not get it right all the time. Now, Mr Hendry, as a poacher turned game-keeper (audience laughter) working for Bursen- Marsteller who did represent Monsanto about five years ago in trying to present the case to the public, how would you see the case against GM being best presented now and what lobbying is being done on behalf of the multinationals to government, i.e. yourself and others in government – how is that lobbying done, and how could it be best handled so that they didn’t get the upper hand?

CW: I don’t want to puncture Charles ego, but his party isn’t actually in government at the moment (audience laughter) but please go ahead Charles.

CH: I am very glad you noticed. Just to clarify, I was never the poacher - Bursen Marsteller is the biggest PR company in the world, and I worked on IT companies so that I never got involved in this debate, so I just have to put that on the record. Its intriguing that I can’t think of a single letter which I’ve had from a company like Monsanto over the last two years. So they clearly have decided not really to bother about individual members of parliament, that they are concentrating their efforts I suspect on the government, their concentrating it on the European level, and I get a flood of letters from individual constituents who are concerned about it, I may get one from the gentleman in the check short who thinks it’s a very good idea, but overwhelmingly, without exception, the letters I’ve had so far are from people who are against GM crops and that I will refer this onto ministers, I now know what they do with them, they don’t keep a record of them, but I will at least get a reply which I can send back about where the study is and where its going. But I think what comes through from your question actually is that the companies who want to see this taken forward have given up on individual members of parliament. That may be because the government’s majority is so big that if they require to put it to a vote at the House of Commons they would simply put a three-line whip on it and they would get it through, but as on so many issues at the moment, our voices don’t count a huge amount. A similar issue is the issue which I know concerned many people here about herbal products and herbal medicines and where the voice of the individual backbencher has become completely irrelevant.

CW: Thank you Charles. Just one comment I’d like to make that I agree with Vivian Moses that there is an enormous amount of information on these issues available. When I was asked to chair the debate I started looking in search engines, and finding all sorts of things, and I did find a very interesting article about Burson-Marsteller as a kind of voice of the New World Order, so you might like to find that. Enter Burson-Marsteller into Google and you’ll come across it, it’s about the third one down. Questions. Just behind, the gentleman in the blue tie.

Steve Briault (Organisation consultant) I have a question to professor Moses please. I’d like to understand a bit more fully where you stand on this question of cross-pollination and environmental effects. Are you saying that it is possible to contain GM crops and prevent the spread as Mr Riley has outlined or are you saying that it doesn’t matter that everything gets mixed up? Which case is it that you are making?

VM: For some plants its containable depending on the nature of the plant and whether it’s a self-pollinating plant, for some it wouldn’t be, for some it would inevitably spread a greater or lesser distance. The question then that has to be decided is that what is the seriousness of the spread? And some people would take it more seriously than others. Some people would say I don’t want to see your pollen grain in my field, and are aware of the fact that a single pollen grain might travel a long way and therefore they say its an issue, they say no separation distance is big enough, that’s what some people are saying, they are saying even the?? And other people are saying that the drop out rate of pollen is such that by the time you’ve got fifty metres in the amounts are quite small and it doesn’t matter. But these are matters of judgement and opinion, so I think you have to recognise that in the plant world wind blown pollen in particular and bee-borne insect pollen moves, and although you can plot statistically how far it would move you can’t ever count for the last pollen grain. There was a report published some years ago about somebody found a pollen grain on an insect which had flown four and half kilometres or something like that growing. Its obvious there are billions of pollen grains coming off of fields and you can’t get down to individual pollen grains in that sort of way. So the concept that you can have zero cross-pollination is not possible, in the world anymore, its out in the world and growing fast. So, somebody said early on this evening about a pigeon crossing the Atlantic it probably brought something with it, you know its that sort of situation you have to go XXX??? And so I think that’s exactly the nature of the problem. How can we deal with a situation of that sort that’s with us now, quite apart from what we do here, it’s with us now, when there are some people – I guess some of them here tonight – who would reject that last pollen grain, and other people who say we want it. How do you resolve this conflict of interest, and that’s not easy, that’s where we need your contribution.

CW: Pete?

PR: Part of the co-existence debate that’s going on in Europe at the moment is how you actually maintain seed purity, because obviously if you contaminate your seeds then it becomes very difficult to grow anything like a GM-free crop now or in the future. If you take oil seed rape, the Scientific Committee on Plants for the European union was asked to look at what sort of separation distances you would need to achieve a level of purity of 0.3 per cent in oil seed rape seed, so that’s three seeds in a thousand. They said for the first generation which is known as basic seed, the separation distance would have to be five kilometres to guarantee that level of purity. English Natures view, which has not been widely published, is that0.3 per cent contamination would potentially stack up environmental problems in the long term and they are calling for seeds to be produced with no detectable GM content. So you can see the problems that this technology poses in terms of maintaining choice in the future and we are very much in this position at the moment; we either go down this route now and accept that everything will eventually cross-pollinated and contaminated, or we delay our decision about whether we have GM crops or not, look at other options, and come back to it when we know a hell of a lot more about it. And that’s the decision we’ve got at the moment. And it seems to us as an organisation that the second is the sensible option because there is no huge benefit coming from GM crops at the moment that is going to save anybody on the planet from anything. (Audience applause)

CW: Charles?

CH: I think there is a solution to Vivian’s problem. I have no problem with Tesco’s’ selling packages of GM foods which have been grown in American, packaged in America, and imported sealed into this country, if people want to buy it, then I don’t have a problem with them being able to buy it. I do have a problem about if people in this country do not want to consume products that have a GM element to it, having no choice, because the entire food supply has been contaminated in that way (Audience applause). And I think that we have to protest the right to the consumer who wants GM products, whoever that happens to be, the man in the check shirt

VM: And me

CH: Sorry and you Vivian … to be able to go and buy it imported. But it is different to say that the rights to everybody else who don’t want to consume GM products to have no choice but to do so. (Audience applause)

CW: Thank you Charles.

VM: That’s very interesting. Do I have a right also to eat British food if I want to? You see he wants to condemn me to eating American food and I’m not sure I want to do that. (Gasps and titters from audience).

CW: Thank you Vivian. The gentleman in the check shirt…

Anonymous (Agricultural labourer): I’m in a minority so I’m withholding my name in case I get lynched on the way out (Audience laughter). I can tell professor Moses where his last grain of pollen is – if he’s interested it’s probably in the hive of honeybee and of course no one has mentioned the humble honeybee. But besides that, I wonder if professor Moses could tell me when GM carrot seed is available because I noticed Table Hurst [the local biodynamic farm] aren’t growing any carrots, probably because they are decimated by the carrot root fly.

VM: The short answer is …

CW: Uh is there a good answer to that?

VM: … I’m sorry I don’t know. I don’t know that one. There are lots things actually that I don’t know that I discover, and. But there are so many things being worked upon, you probably saw the thing a couple of weeks ago about the Japanese working on caffeine-free coffee, um for people that want decaff without the nasty taste, its going on, its happening everywhere. And one of the things that our government is very concerned about and quite rightly so is that can we as skills based society stand apart from what’s happening in the rest of the world. That’s part of what you have to think about (Audience murmuring). Well, sure, we always run behind, we are always the catch-up, always miss the bus, and the question is do we want to go back to this never-never land which never existed of, of - I won’t use the magic word [Nature?] - or do we really want to go forward with the rest of the world? (Shock noises from audience)

CW: Or, alternatively how would we feel if we were to remain organic, that’s a GM-free and organic enclave, would people feel good about that? (Audience -loud “yes” and clapping). Because then we could sell our products at a premium to all those poor people who can’t eat organic food. Ben, the lady in the middle there…

Sue (Secretary): I’ve got two young children and I work full time. My question is, over time, weeds and insects change to the environment, that they conquer things that we’ve manufactured, won’t they just change and we will be back to the same problem with the crops … [missed end of question due to microphone feedback] …

PR: [Pete deliberates with Vivian Moses, but Vivian say no, you have a go at it] Sorry, um, undoubtedly nature usually wins when it comes to our witty scientists and farmers. I think with the current generation of crops which are based around resistance to two herbicides, in particular Roundup [Monsanto’s] which is the dominant herbicide selling in the world, there is now – it’s taken a while – but there is now a building body of evidence to say that if you use Roundup over and over and over again, which is what is likely to happen in the GM scenario, and is, you will eventually get weeds that natural evolve the resistance to Roundup. The first case of Roundup resistance, found in Australia, and then resulted from somebody spraying an orchard to keep weeds under control, I think it went on for fifteen years, and eventually they created a Rye grass that was resistant to Roundup by natural evolution and it appears in America that Mares Tails is resistant to Round up, and that is becoming a serious pest to the soya crop at the moment, and some people out there even think that Mares Tail’s may have been resistant to Roundup before Roundup was invented, which is quite ironical (Audience laughter) So its inevitable that insects will get resistance to insecticides and to herbicides and fungal diseases will evolve to be resistant to engineered fungal protection in plants. So I think what we need to be is actually a lot smarter in our research and I’ll just give you one illustration of how we might move in a more sustainable direction. The Chinese have done some very interesting experiments with?? rice, which is reported in Nature in August 2000 I think it was, or 2001, and what they did, instead of growing one variety of rice, the classic monoculture that causes, which the pests come along and think ah food, and then there’s acres and acres and acres of the same plant and they just chomp their way through it and we then have to go and spray them with all sorts of nasty things. What they did is they said right we are going to grow three different varieties of rice in the same field, and the effect of that was that fungal disease in the rice plummeted and hence the use of fungicide plummeted. Now this is exactly the sort of research that isn’t happening because the corporations have got too much power and public money is not being applied. So we need to revise the way we do research and start looking at what the problems are and then look at the range of solutions and evaluate all those solutions- is it not a choice between what we’ve got now and GM, and there are a whole range of choices in between, organic, and variations on organic, and variations on conventional, this is not a simple choice between GM and non-GMs future. We have a range of options which could involve molecular biology, in plant breeding, by looking for certain genes in certain varieties, and bringing them forward – it’s called marker-assisted breeding – the British Government’s already sponsoring some research in West Africa to improve Cassava using exactly this technique, and yet that’s one project and here we have Monsanto pouring billions of ponds into saying GM is the route. They are doing that because that is going to make them most money. It doesn’t mean that is going to bring benefit to the human race, and that is the question that we all have to ask: what is the best solution? So, lets not rush this decision, we are under no pressure whatsoever to make this decision, the only people who are under pressure are the boards of these companies who have invested billions of pounds without doing any market research, and they found that people don’t want to buy it, well tough luck is what I say, if you (Audience applause, “here, here”) … if you produce a pink motorcar and nobody wants to buy a pink motorcar, then everybody says well what bloomin’ idiots, if you produce a GM seed that nobody wants to buy in Europe, then is your – you should go out and ask people first and not try to slip it in under the door.

CW: Vivian?

VM: For the first time this evening there are some points of contact beginning to grow between me and Pete. (Audience laughter)

PR: You always say that to me …

VM: I think he’s certainly right of course when he says that the prime need in agriculture, as in all other things, is one of management. Biological systems of which agriculture is just one, are always dynamic, they never stay the same whatever you do to them they will react and they will react in ways that you can’t always predict. And remember that the whole of agriculture is a man-made activity – nowhere outside our influence do you find crops growing in rows. We put them there. And once you start that sort of thing inevitably there will be consequences. And so it is with the use of herbicide and as you know very well with the use of antibiotics, where we have managed the use of antibiotics badly, in hospitals, particularly in some other countries, with the result that we now have vast numbers of antibiotic resistant organisms everywhere and some in very serious conditions in hospital because we’ve overdone it and we haven’t managed. Now biology is not static, the biological world is not static, its not in a state of equilibrium its in a state of dynamic equilibration, everything is moving and impinging on everything else all the time. Every time you breathe out you have an effect on your local environment. And it’s all like that, and so there is no, there is never ever a static answer for all time. And Pete’s right, there will be, if you use excessive amounts of one herbicide and keep doing it as you say in fifteen years in Australia, inevitably there will be consequences and you have to manage thing is that you do it better than that. And farmers I suspect actually know how to manage things pretty well.

CW: Thank you. The gentleman seated at the back on the other side …

Tim Norris (Right of Way): I’d like to ask Mr Hendry whether he feels that this government is colluding with the World Trade Organisation (WTO), um, colluding with companies like Monsanto, and are going to use their argument to justify the use of GM foods and crops into African countries, Third World countries, to clear Third World debt, and whether or not this is just an easy opt out clause?

CH: I don’t think so. That I’m a fairly cynical person in terms of the way I look at the government but I don’t think it’s gone down the route of collusion in the way that you suggest. I suspect that what is more likely is that there has been discussions between our government and American government at the highest level which we will probably find out about in thirty years time and that’s what’s been the motivation, what’s been the spur for it, but I would be, I still tend to believe that most people that go into politics and are involved in the government now are in it because that they genuinely want to do things which they think are right, and I would be, I’m not prepared to believe that there’s that extent of collusion.

CW: Thank you. Ben, the chap in the red at the side…

Peter Brinch (Plawhatch Farm) [local organic farm]: I just would like to um, as what Vivian Moses was saying just before – as far as I know that GM had developed from the United States, and as one knows there are very big fields in the US and these fields are monoculture, and as you were saying, monoculture is not a natural way where nature, otherwise does things, so that what we do when we cultivate, we cultivate them monoculturally, so therefore you have inbuilt a problem straight away so you have to reduce that problem by having a very small amount of monoculture and I think that is exactly the problem, so I see that GM is actually building on something which is a problem in the first place, and so its started off without solving the problem at all (Audience applause). And I think that also when one looks into the future now, if we look ahead into the next ten or twenty years, I think modern agriculture, modern conventional agriculture, has in a sense made use of agricultural chemicals and pesticides in such a way that I believe that farming has deteriorated the knowledge of how to cultivate, and when to cultivate, has actually gone down hill because you can force the process in which ever way you want to, and I think that I itself is a big problem and, so actually the problem really lies in the husbandry and in the understanding of it, and therefore in a sense, the, you can say GM is a bit like a plaster on something which actually – a plaster which is going to go wrong probably – and so this is a question of education in agriculture and realising that there is a fundamental problem there from the outset. (Audience applause)

CW: Thank you.

VM: OK now. I don’t disagree some of what you say. However we don’t live in a static world as I pointed out before and the world is changing very fast and one of the ways in which it is changing fast is the population is growing very fast and we have enormous problems facing us in the future with our increasing population and problems on our doorstep. Now one of the difficulties we have which has arisen because of the debate and the arguments over the past several years is its now much more difficult than people originally thought it would be to get GM products approved for sale. And as a result, Golden Rice, which as you know is going to assist the cure of blindness in children in South East Asia in particular, is probably about five years away from market. Which means that there are going to be two and half million more blind children than there would otherwise be. And you need to think about things like that as well.

CW: Charles?

CH: I think that Vivian’s suggestion that we’ve come to this position form a position of neutrality and that we are starting with a wonderful position of pure undiluted food and we either improve it with Gm or we start slipping backwards. I think we’ve interfered far too much already in the food chain and that (Audience applause) ... look at the work which David Thomas here in this village has done into the loss of nutrients. Look at the fact of the shelf-life of foods which is wholly unnatural, you buy some fresh food in France and it is going off within a week, you buy food from a supermarket in this country and a month later it looks exactly the same as when you bought it (Audience, agreeing). What has been done to it? Why do carrots from my garden, not withstanding the stuff which you were talking about at the back [GM], taste like carrots whereas the stuff you but from supermarkets doesn’t taste like carrots. We’ve interfered far too much and think we have to start rowing back, its not a question of standing still or going to Gm, its actually saying if we really care about our food products, if we really care what we are putting into our own mouths, into our children’s mouths, we actually have to take a good deal more care about it and we actually have to start with going backwards from where we are now rather than even standing still. (Audience applause)

CW: Thank you.

Norman Tether (Organic farmer) I can’t calls the cow’s home but I’ll use this. I farm with my sons, Copwood Farms, organic farmers, I was standing immediately behind the man with his GM carrot wish and I thought for one moment I hope there’s no cross pollination going on between us tonight (Audience laughter) because we both would find it distasteful I’m sure. But to come to the business, I suppose I farm more acres organically probably than anyone else in East Sussex, we have a large [XX??) herd, we have a large flock of sheep, we exist reasonably well because we sought direct access to the public. We’ve been doing this for fifteen years, my sons both trained in agriculture - I hope this little bit of background will make what I say relevant - but they had twelve years in America, came back in 1988 and said: “Dad, we didn’t like much what w saw”. They saw an awful lot of California, they saw the sprays out all the time, they saw what it did to the poor people there that use the sprays. . So they said did you mind if we switch. I’d milked cows for a living, I had a large family, I had to milk more and more cows to keep them fed, so lets say for sixty years other than time in the army in the Far East, I’ve farmed in Kent and Sussex. Now I shared a meeting with Professor Moses earlier in the year, a rather important one, that was held in London, there were two on the same day, one was at the Royal Society of Arts and Royal Society (?) and I think it’s the first time ever happened discussing this very matter and we were addressed by Michael Meacher who’d been responsible for the environment for some time. I cam home and said to my wife, either Michael Meacher is a consummate liar and I’ve been convinced or he’s going to have a tough time in the government. I think we found out what happened to Michael Meacher. He was full of information and he promised us that as far as he was concerned rigorous trials would happen on what happens when people eat the stuff. If you are in farming your vets tell you all the time, we are animals, you are what you eat. Vets have two more years than doctors finding out what goes wrong or what goes right when you eat, and this is us now, discussing what we eat. Now, following up on what happens with GM crops I think what was said before on how GM crops work and the whole process, there’s the rising up of nanotechnology … [lost as he was not speaking into the microphone] … from the chemical engineering. He was talking about nanotechnology. Unlike GM crops they are not mutating biological entities whose future evolutionary development we cannot predict. Let alone … [microphone again] … I think that is highly relevant Sir, and the fact that the only work that has been done on it would seem, with Dr Pusztai – I probably pronounced his name wrong – on rats, it promptly disappeared because the results seemed fairly unfavourable. And I feel that there’s been a tremendous amount of duplicity in what’s going on, this debate is a bit of a nonsense knowing what trials haven’t been reported in the country and to talk of science when two hundred metres is measured or – anyone who has kept bees know they fly at three miles – is the science …?? … suspect all along the way, and as regards the what ..?? used to be them ..?? we had no experimental farms , completely unbiased by commercial interests any more. I’m very suspicious that all these things happened through commercial ??. I’ll say one more, because the global thing is always mentioned and we are told we are being selfish in this country depriving others of doing it, but at the very meeting that we attended there was an Indian professor there, very charming lady who was saying one countries weeds are another countries food. In certain crops in India at certain times of the year when growths come that aren’t the crop, the ladies go out and weed them, this provides them with a social occasion, small amounts of money, and of what they pick

fifty per cent goes home to feed their families, and the other fifty per cent feeds their animals. We are so arrogant in this part of the world that we don’t realise there’s another world out there. One more thing, the Ford (?) Foundation thought they’d do the Far East a good turn just after the war, with new rice, the unfortunate thing was it did all sorts of things, but nobody wanted to eat it …(Lots of audience applause).

CW: Thank you very much.

Rose Moore (?) (Biodynamic gardener): Earlier on you almost joked about the possibility of having an organic zone, which would be GM-free, but as I understand there are a number of local authorities, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, have declared themselves GM-free and I just wonder if you know exactly what this means and whether it can be a reality, I mean is it endorsable in any way? is it a preference or is it an active policy which could become a reality? (Audience applause)

CW: That’s … Charles? Before I ask Charles to respond to that actually Pete you’ve been involved with working with County Councils on this haven’t you?

PR: Yes that’s correct. In the European directives on GM deliberate releases into the environment, there is a clause – article ninety – which enables areas of the European Union to be designated GM-free zones providing that those areas can provide solid evidence that they are, that that designation is justified in scientific and other terms. This has never been tested in the EU, I think it was, the clause got in without anybody noticing it in a way, but it is there, it’s law, and if and when a decision to allow a GM crops to be grown in the European Union is made, the European commission does have the power under this clause [90] to designate areas of the European Union to be excluded from the area where that crop can be grown, so in theory Sussex could become a GM-free zone by dint of an environmental, or potentially an economic, impact. But this ahs not been tested, nobody knows how the Commissioners are going to react to this, but if the intention of the MEPs that passed this bill was to allow, it appears to be to allow GM-free zones, then it does, it appears to be a useful route to follow and we would be looking for backing from our Minister of Agriculture - Mrs Beckett – to push this through, if areas so chose. And the votes around the country into this particular motion have been unanimous almost, very few Councils have voted against.

VM: Actually the European Commission has pronounced on this, the Commissioner was quite clear that he would not agree to such zones …

PR: What’s the point of the clause then

VM: Well that’s what the Commissioner said, and you might be interested to know that a number of County Councils have rejected the idea.

CH: I’ve actually written to East Sussex this week asking them to consider the idea, and (Audience applause) although I think one of the problems we’ll face is that the European definition of a region doesn’t actually consider it as a County Council method, so in terms of European decision making and the way the government are thinking, the South East is an area that spreads from Dover to Portsmouth and up to Milton Keynes – though I’m not sure I quite consider Buckinghamshire to be in the South east, but there we go, and therefore regional decisions are made on that level rather than on a County Council level, but I will refer back to you chairman the response I get from County Council.

CW: Thank you. We did invite a County Councillor from East Sussex to come tonight but he was unable to attend, well unwilling to attend, I’m sorry, Bill Tidy. The man at the front…

Peter Simon: Thank you. There’s several people worrying about the science and its what they don’t know as I think was said earlier on, its not what we know that makes them dangerous or … its what we don’t know, and a few years ago science came up with this new wonder drug and it was going to help in all sorts of problems and as a result of it we have a lot of Thalidomide children born, and this, and so I think our main concern is … [end of side 2 –lost some] … the result of it we had a lot of …I remember …XX?? … , a few years ago, the local population, were demonstrating, a public publication, against what the oil companies were doing to their land, and because the government was bribed by the oil company the government called out the army and shot the people, instead of kicking the company to clean up the land and this sort of thing that is really troubling, and we see in this country here, this country did not want to go to war with Iraq, and saw no reason for it, but we were over-ridden and white-washed and there’s a lot of this whitewashing going on, and we don’t like that, I’m sorry, even from the (XX?? – speaker tonight? ) (Audience applause)

CW: Thank you.

VM: I think you were looking at me as you were speaking. I don’t know anything about politics and I’m not going to answer questions about Iraq if you don’t mind. Science is a … (audience member shouts something inaudible from floor) …well, you know some other time

CW: Please don’t shout out. We are meant to be talking about GM tonight and not Iraq, thank you.

VM: yes, somewhere between nine and five past we’ll do Iraq. (Audience shouts our ‘Nigeria’) Well yes, Nigeria, I know even less about Nigeria. But, you’re right in some senses. Science is an approach to understanding what goes on and is endlessly testing possibilities and it is always - in theory anyway - prepared to reject existing understanding for new understanding, as new evidence comes forward you have to acknowledge it and do things. The problem is that when a new discovery of value is made, that’s to say something which can produce a technology or whatever it may be that people actually want or can benefit by, what are you going to do in terms of hanging around waiting while you test it, and the pressures are always on, particularly [lost it –nothing on tape for about twenty seconds] … when mobile phones were developed there was a clear demand at least an appreciation of them and we don’t know whether they are safe. So if you look at the GM situation in that light you see that what the seed companies who – Monsanto is a seed company, Monsanto, Syngenta and all the others – what they were doing was developing products for their customers. You are not their customers, their customers are farmers, they produce seeds, you don’t buy seeds, they were producing for the customers and they were American companies-well at least Monsanto is – and they produce for their domestic market, and a big domestic market and big commodity crops – Soy and Maize and Cotton and that’s what they did, very successfully, so much so that in 2001 if I remember the benefit went overwhelmingly to the farmers, not to the companies – companies got some of course – but farmers made a packet. That’s why they did it.

CW: Now I’m proposing to close the debate in about three or four minutes time at about ten to nine. I notice there are already people starting to leave at the back so this is just a note that we are going to be ending soon. Thank you.

Ben Nash (Cartoonist) Oh I have a chance to speak. I think that was a little naive of Professor Moses to say that because the (audience starts clapping) companies are putting so much money into these discoveries we should allow them to make profits out of it. I would propose that a technology which is so special as this simple doesn’t belong in the hands of business men (audience clapping). I think we need in this country, and indeed in the world, some sort of non-governmental, non-commercial enterprise entity that drives the research and drives the application of that technology much as NASA does, I think NASA is quite a good example of how a particular technological field was taken over by a non-profit making organisation. Of course there are bad things about it, they sub-contract their stuff out in the private sector and they make their profit on that, but basically the technology is not in the hands of a commercial entity. And the obscenity of this commercial entity owning property rights in living matter is seen in the situation where genetic material can be taken from an Amazon Indian and patented. Or, where a crop that’s been grown in a part of the world for two million years can be bio-pirated and patented. But its these, its this aspect that really stains the technology, if the technology were in the hands of humanity, I think more people would be prepared to give it a fair hearing. (Loud audience applause).

VM: So that means your in favour of it in China and in India and in South Africa because there it is.

PR: Now come on Vivian, South Africa is dominated by Monsanto’s seeds, you know that, their incredibly active in South Africa, their manipulating the situation down there as they manipulate it everywhere.

VM: And in India?

PR: India, the peasants have revolted against GM crops

VM: They’ve revolted their government, not against GM crops

PR: No, you’re wrong,

VM: You’re wrong, you read the wrong newspapers.

PR: Laughter (Audience laughter) Well I only read the newspapers available, so what’s happened is that the GM cotton crop in India is that it’s proved to be a bit of a disaster actually.

CW: right, a good time for one more contribution. Ben … (audience call out: “farmer”) Farmer, which one, no that farmers spoken, that farmer there, that one there …

Peter Brown (Biodynamic farmer): Well, Yes I’m a farmer from Table Hurst (something said in audience and laughter) You’re lucky you can buy organic carrots wherever you want, and I think that is the point that these things are available, and it does work. My main concern tonight is that - this point of Iraq actually – that whatever we are discussing, its going to be of no consequence as far as the decision that’s going to be made about growing GM crops. And that to me creates great anger, just like it did over Iraq, that the population can have one view and regardless of that the government goes ahead and does something else. And I see this as exactly the same as the GM as well (loud applause from audience).

CW: I think the problem was already mentioned, that we still have the right to vote them out next time, but by the time this technology is out there its too late. Thank you, Mike …

Mike Grenville (organiser of Bare Witness demonstration): Thank you I am very glad to see so many people here, and such a passionate audience, whets interesting is that I think the size of this audience is actually twice what it was at the NEC and some of the other government organised event that have been around the country. When we were going around publishing this event, saying that we were having a GM debate the response I got was: “what GM debate”, its very clear that with a few local exceptions that this is not a debate that is really going on very much in the national media with exceptions such as The Independent, and The Independent on Sunday, and so I invite you to do what we did before to follow on from Peters comment about we did with Iraq, with a very dramatic effect, we bore witness, we used our bodies to spell out the message that we felt so passionately about. I invite you to join me on Sunday morning to spell out ‘No GM Crops’ in the same way. Please join me. Thank you. (Applause)

CW: Thanks very much. That’s all we have time for at this stage and at this point I would just like to ask a question: how many of you have changed your minds as a result of what you’ve heard here tonight? No, no-one. Excellent. Thank you very much. I’d like to thank our speakers for giving up their time, and coming to give their presentations, and participate in our debate this evening (Audience applause).

Now, I’ve got a few points now. So those of you who are seated, have got a feed back form on your chair, those of you standing there are some forms around, I would like everybody to complete a form before they leave and we’ll put them in the post for you. Now there has been a petition in The Seasons (local organic shop) some of you may well have filled that in, but we all know what the fate of petitions is, so even if you filled in the petition, please fill in a form now. Take a few moments to read it and read it very carefully, you cannot simply go through ticking I disagree with every statement because that way you will disagree with questions 2, 4, 8, 11 and 12, please read the questions carefully. Could I just ask for your attention for a few moments longer please? Thank you. If you’d like to receive more information about the activities of the Sussex GM Forum put your contact details on the other piece of paper which should be on your chair, preferably an email address. Now there is also an independent research group based at Norwich University who are conducting some research into this type of event and they’ve produced a pink questionnaire, with a replied paid envelope, and there some of these in the Foyer, if you’d like to complete one of these tomorrow or over the next couple of days, its about the quality and the nature of this event and how involved you felt in that whole process. I f you’d like to do that please take one of the envelopes from the box at the back. As I mentioned at the beginning the staging of the debate was organised and funded by local people and the total costs for things such as room hire, PA, publicity, etc. is around £300-00. So I’d like to invite everybody to make a donation of say at least £3.00 to help cover the costs. If there is any surplus above the incurred costs then that surplus will go towards Friends of the Earth to support their campaigning on this issue, if you could put all your donations in the buckets by the exit. When you’ve completed the forms if you could drop those in the box by the exit, thank you Mike, and if you know anybody else who would like to make their views known, family, friends, people who couldn’t be here etc. the simplest way - providing their on-line- is to go to the GM nation? Website, the address is on the form I believe, am I right – no I’m wrong –so the address is: gmnation.org.uk, and they can complete the feedback form and submit it online. If you want a paper form, phone Ben Nash on 826711.

(Ben Nash: I think, speaking without the microphone – can’t hear. Giving instructions about feedback, contributing to government debate etc., spare forms etc.)

Charles Hendry leaves.

CW: Charles sends his apologies he has to go to a riveting debate on the European Constitution (laughter) whereas we can all go to the Brambletye (laughter). So, thank you all very much. And when you’ve completed the forms you can go. .

End of tape.

http://there.is/forestrow/GM/