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Genetically Modified Crops

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Before I call the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo), I must tell the House that Madam Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

4.14 pm

Mr. Tim Yeo (South Suffolk): I beg to move,

That this House deplores the Government's mishandling of the consequences of the presence of GM seeds in a batch of conventional oil seed rape seeds imported to Britain from Canada, which were subsequently planted for commercial purposes; and condemns the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's response which has led to a collapse in public confidence and unnecessary difficulties for the agricultural industry.

The motion is deliberately narrow in its focus. It deals with a subject of deep concern to the public, to all consumers of food and to farmers. Today's debate is not about the merits of genetic modification, although there is a proper and lively discussion about that, even among the highest families in the land. The debate is not about the crop trials, the principle of which we strongly support, although we have reservations about some aspects of their conduct.

I greatly welcome the review of separation distances. We have repeatedly called for those distances to be increased, most recently three weeks ago, when the Minister made his statement to the House. Once again, it has taken a debate in the House organised by the Conservative party to force the Minister to act. I hope that the review will be swift, before yet more damage is done to conventional and organic farmers.

As hon. Members will not have had time to consider the terms of the consultation paper issued today about separation distances, I am sure that the Minister agrees that it would be wrong to try to use this debate to discuss its details, although I hope that the House will have an early opportunity to do so. This debate is about the way in which the Minister ignored warnings that he was given, failed to contact farmers who were innocent victims in the crisis, and failed to advise consumers whose ability to choose GM-free food was threatened. It is about how the Government kept secret information that should have been published; about claims made by the Minister in Parliament that turned out not to be true; about the dithering, confusion and, finally, panic that gripped the Minister; about how individual farmers now face bills running to thousands of pounds that could have been avoided; and about the destruction of public confidence in a potentially valuable technology.

Professor Malcolm Grant--the Government's choice to head the latest advisory body on biotechnology--said this week:

The episode has not been spectacularly well-handled.

To avoid developing a reputation for understatement, he continued:

The public are confused, bemused, underinformed and feel disenfranchised in this whole debate.

After such straight-from-the-shoulder comments, Professor Grant will doubtless soon join the other distinguished experts whom the Government appoint to advisory bodies and then refuse to consult in case their advice is inconvenient or embarrassing.

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Professor Grant was right about the disfranchisement of the public and right too, if his words were accurately reported in The Times, to believe that the public and farmers affected by the contaminated seed should have been told much sooner.

This latest and worst example of ministerial blundering and cover-up over genetically modified crops began seven weeks and three days ago on Monday 17 April, when Advanta Seeds warned the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, that GM-contaminated oilseed rape seeds had been imported to Britain from Canada. At that stage, the company that imported the contaminated seeds, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, were all aware of the facts. The public, of course, were not and neither were the farmers--some of whom at that date had bought seeds but not yet planted them--or the seed merchants whom Advanta had supplied with contaminated seed and who may unwittingly have continued to sell it to their customers.

Under those circumstances, time was of the essence, but the Minister remained silent. No public statement was made for more than four weeks. Then, on 17 May, a junior Minister replied to a planted question that was so innocently worded that nobody could have guessed its true significance. The answer said very little, but it confirmed that genetically modified crops were being grown commercially in Britain--something that Ministers had promised time and again over the past 12 months would not happen until the current programme of crop trials had been completed and analysed.

If Ministers thought that they could get away with sneaking out an important and damaging announcement by making it late in the afternoon, they soon discovered how wrong they were. Such was the outcry that evening that the Minister was forced to come to Parliament the next day and make an oral statement--something that he should have done in the first place.

The Minister's reluctance to come clean on such a sensitive issue may have been due to the flimsy basis of many of the claims that he made in Parliament that day. Let us look at what he said. He said:

We moved quickly to establish the facts.

Just how quickly we shall find out in a moment. Later, in answer to a question of mine, he said:

We established the facts and put them in the public domain.

The truth is that the facts were not put in the public domain for four and a half weeks after MAFF officials first knew of them. No explanation has yet been given for that long delay. We shall examine those four and a half weeks in a moment.

First, let us consider another of the Minister's claims. He said:

In this whole matter, the Government are proceeding on the basis of professional advice provided . . . to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment . . . on the environmental issues.

What the Minister did not say was that that advice was obtained from somewhat limited sources. English Nature, the Government's statutory adviser on nature conservation

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and an independent body funded by the taxpayer, might have been thought to have a view about the matter. However, during the whole four-and-a-half week period of silence from the Minister, English Nature was not consulted. Nobody at MAFF or DETR even bothered to pick up the phone and have a word with one of the highly qualified scientists and environmentalists on the public payroll at English Nature.

Of course, by ignoring English Nature the Minister followed a precedent set by the Prime Minister, whose assertion in Parliament in February last year that the Government were proceeding on genetically modified issues on the basis of sound science was contradicted, within 24 hours, by the chairman of English Nature, herself a recently created Labour peer.

Mrs. Anne Campbell (Cambridge): Can the hon. Gentleman confirm that the genetic modification involved, known as RT73, was approved for food use in crop trials by the previous Government?

Mr. Yeo: The hon. Lady will receive a brownie point from the Whips for reading out the planted brief, but I am happy to confirm that the Conservative Government approved that particular crop for use in crop trials, a part B approval which under the law is fundamentally different from the part C approval that is needed for the commercial growing of that crop. As the hon. Lady might remember, had she been in the House on the day the Minister made his statement, I suggested that the Government could treat all the accidentally planted crops as crop trials, and that would avoid the pressure that subsequently grew for the destruction of the crops.

The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Nick Brown): We could not do that. The crop trials are for genetically modified crops. The problem involved conventional crops with a small degree of GM contamination.

Mr. Yeo: It would still have been possible for the Government to apply the same conditions and monitoring procedures to those crops to prevent an illegal activity from continuing. Let us return to what the Minister said on 18 May. He claimed that the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment--ACRE--had

looked at this specific incident and concluded that there is no risk.

When the Minister made that claim, the incident had not even been discussed at a meeting of ACRE, nor was it on the published agenda for the next meeting of ACRE on 25 May. However, I understand that members of ACRE were contacted individually. A Minister who recognised that public confidence in genetic modification will be restored only if the Government are more open in their decision making might have explained how the ACRE advice was obtained, especially as there was a discrepancy between what DETR told ACRE members and what the Minister told Parliament.

The advice note produced by ACRE on 17 May, without the benefit of any collective discussion, said:

In conclusion, ACRE considers that the risks to human health and to the environment are very low. However, the Committee welcomes the precautionary steps proposed by DETR to verify and monitor independently the situation in the field and report back to the Committee.

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Hon. Members should note that DETR had obviously told ACRE members that the situation was being monitored in the field. However, one day after ACRE issued that advice, the Minister told the House:

The advice that the Government collectively have received is that it is not necessary to trace . . . the crops.--[Official Report, 18 May 2000; Vol. 350, c. 473-75.]

The advice from ACRE contradicts what the Minister said. How could the crops be monitored in the field, as DETR told ACRE members, if they were not even to be traced?

A week later, at Agriculture questions, the Minister made an astonishing claim. He said:

I am not keeping any information secret. I have gone out of my way to be candid with the House.--[Official Report, 25 May 2000; Vol. 350, c. 1101.]

Equally seriously, five and a half weeks after the Minister first learned that GM oilseed rape was being grown commercially in Britain, he still had no advice to offer the farmers on whose land those crops were growing. Another two days passed, during which the French Government ordered their farmers to destroy the equivalent crops in France.

In London, the Minister continued to dither. Finally, on 27 May, advice of a kind was given to farmers. It was pointed out that that GM crop did not have approval to be sold, and the Minister suggested that farmers could destroy the crops now and replant--a suggestion that would have been rather more useful if it had been made five weeks earlier--or they could continue growing the crop up to the harvesting stage. Even then, the Minister shrank from actually advising farmers directly to pull up those crops.

What changed, other than the pressure of public opinion and the usual slide by the Minister from confusion into panic, between 18 May, when the Minister made his first statement to Parliament saying everything was fine, and 27 May, when he pointed out that the crops were unsaleable--a pronouncement that many farmers felt left them with no option but to destroy their crops? What new information became available to the Minister during that time? If the answer is none, the whole five-and-a-half week delay becomes even more puzzling.

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