Select Committee on Agriculture Minutes of Evidence



Examination of witness (Questions 280 - 306)

TUESDAY 7 DECEMBER 1999

MR PETER RILEY

  280. If we followed your approach to this we might not have the motor car now?
  (Mr Riley) I think it would have gone down a different development route, put it that way.

  281. You have called for a five-year freeze. Why five years?
  (Mr Riley) It is a minimum of five years. That is our baseline.

  282. Why five?
  (Mr Riley) Because that seemed to us to give enough time to achieve the things we wanted to achieve which is to have a thorough review of where we were in terms of whether we needed GM crops in this country and needed the imports, and again to address some of the scientific uncertainties as we saw them. If at the end of that period there were still uncertainties the freeze could be extended.

  Mr Todd: It is a bit like the statement by one political party that we should not join the euro in this Parliament or the next. It is a defined limit on time but not based on an analysis—

  Chairman: I think that is a contentious comment! I will explain the logic of our position on the euro at a later date!

Mr Todd

  283. When you set a precise time limit such as that, it does not have a clear relationship to a set of tasks which might be completed within that time or an evaluation of what may have happened at the end of that time. I have always been puzzled as to how the five years came about.
  (Mr Riley) We could have said six, we could have said seven.

  Mr Todd: That is exactly my point.

Chairman

  284. It is the highest figure that alliterated.
  (Mr Riley) Yes, it ran off the tongue nicely.

Mr Todd

  285. So it is a slogan rather than a meaningful statement.
  (Mr Riley) It is a statement that we were going far too fast for this technology and we needed to have a complete break from it and reassess.

  286. Someone said five years ago, "That sounds a good statement to make. We will go for that." Okay. What does "freeze" mean?
  (Mr Riley) We would not want to see any commercial growing of GM crops in the United Kingdom in the period of the freeze.

  287. That is largely being complied with. There is no commercial growing of GM crops and the Government has already indicated a variety of steps that will have to be taken before it ever gets to that. It may not have produced a five-year figure but by your own admission five years is a bit of a random statement. So the outcome on that one is broadly as you would have wished.
  (Mr Riley) It depends whether you think commercial growing is going on or not really.

  288. Let's define that one then.
  (Mr Riley) The Government has made no commitment to block any of the regulatory pathways required for a GM crop before it gets to market and we know that, for instance, Agrevo's fodder maize, which last summer took part in farm-scale trials, has already got a part C marketing consent through the EU and the United Kingdom's opinion, when they were asked by the EU, was that it presented no risk to human health or the UK environment which is rather strange when you consider we are now testing it in large fields to see whether it has an impact on bio-diversity. You have to question the whole voluntary agreement as to what exactly it means.

  289. It is not being commercially exploited in this country at the present time?
  (Mr Riley) It is not being sold in this country at this time but within one or two years it is possible it could be before the farm-size trials are completed.

  290. So your definition of what "commercial" is would include farm-scale trials by the sound of it?
  (Mr Riley) Indeed, and any other testing that is commercially orientated. You have to remember that the vast majority of the test sites in the United Kingdom have been entirely driven by commercial interests, not by environmental study.

  291. So your definition of "commercial" is not that the crop may be sold commercially as most people would see the definition of "commercial" as being, but commercial in the sense that the long-term intent of that particular activity is to sell it commercially? Regardless of what you do with that crop, that is your definition of "commercial", is it?
  (Mr Riley) Yes.

  292. So the freeze would be on any testing of any kind of GM material?
  (Mr Riley) Outdoor testing.

  293. Outdoor testing, so indoor laboratory testing is okay?
  (Mr Riley) Yes.

  294. Right, okay. Why? How are we going to find out answers on these technologies if we are not able to test in an outdoor environment?
  (Mr Riley) I think the problem there is that we cannot contain these crops within the field where they are being grown because—

  295. As we have heard in the earlier evidence.
  (Mr Riley) As we have heard, and our view is that the escape of genes in pollen into the wider environment and into other people's crops means that it is very difficult to conceive of a system of growing these crops in the UK where we are not going to run into either economic problems with cross-pollination or long-term environmental problems. The long-term environmental problems through cross-pollination of wild species are quite difficult to call.

  Chairman: This is not exactly central to our inquiry this afternoon.

  Mr Todd: I will let it lie there.

  Chairman: Very interesting. Mr Marsden?

Mr Marsden

  296. Mr Riley, in your memorandum you state that the "segregation of GM foods is essential for the establishment of a reliable labelling system in which the public have confidence." Do you feel segregation is the same as identity preservation?
  (Mr Riley) I think there is some confusion over the two terms. Traditionally, identity preservation has been used to describe the process whereby specialist crops have been tracked into a specialist market. One thinks of soya going into the Japanese tofu market for instance where they want a particular type of bean. That is identity preservation, but in the case of GM and non-GM soya where they are both serving the same market, segregation of the crops from the field, and indeed when it is growing, is essential to achieve an accurate labelling system otherwise we will just get a huge mess with cross-contamination at various points along the chain.

  297. You say that "isolation distances between GM and non-GM crops must be large enough to ensure the integrity of non-GM crops". Are you satisfied with the limit used in SCIMAC guidelines?
  (Mr Riley) No, we are not at all satisfied with those. The ones set out for all the crops where they have currently listed separation distances are nowhere near enough to prevent wind pollination and they are certainly nowhere near sufficient to prevent bees coming into the crop. You have to remember that oilseed rape is an extremely favourite source of pollen for honey bees and also fodder maze could be used as a source of pollen by bees late in the summer, and research has shown that an individual honey bee returning from an oilseed rape field can be covered about 60,000 grains of oilseed rape pollen and it will then rub shoulders with its fellow workers and potentially a certain proportion of those pollen grains will be transferred on to another oilseed rape field in the vicinity which is potentially non-GM. At the moment we are not at all convinced that we can operate GM farms in the United Kingdom alongside conventional farming which is servicing the GM-free market which, as you are aware, has grown enormously in the last 12 months, and also the issue of organic farmers comes in as well. In the case of oilseed rape, the issue is between GM farming and conventional farming and those conventional farmers who choose to be GM-free because they think they can sell their products to companies that are selecting GM-free, then that is going to cause real problems without much much much bigger separation distances and we just do not think that is really going to be workable in the United Kingdom countryside.

  298. Where do you draw the line then? You heard the previous evidence from Professor Gray and Dr Dale and you have agreed that there is no such thing as 100 per cent risk free, so what is acceptable? Are we saying that if one bee actually allows a cross-pollination that is unacceptable?
  (Mr Riley) It certainly would not be one bee because thousands of bees would be getting to one field and bringing pollen back and thousands of other bees would be going to another field from the same hive, so there is potential for quite a large amount of pollen to be shifted. We have to look to see what is happening in the market. Only last week there was a conference[4] where Heinz and other companies were talking confidently about achieving 0.1 per cent as their threshold. With the technology there is we can go right down to 0.001 if we want.

Chairman

  299. Can I pick you up on that because we have been told by many people that even the one per cent target the European Commission set is optimistic in the extreme. So you do not agree with that?
  (Mr Riley) I am going on what I have been told by major companies, that they are meeting—

  300. You get very different answers from different companies.
  (Mr Riley) They are meeting their own standard of 0.1 per cent.

  301. Those lower targets would be at quite a cost to the consumer, would they not?
  (Mr Riley) I do not think it need be a huge cost, no. The evidence is if a company is buying soya from Brazil, for instance, then the additional costs of GM-free (or detection limit as we could call it) are not all that great and maybe less than ten per cent, and if soya is only a minor constituent of a final processed food then the impact on price is going to be very small and even from America, DuPonts have quoted a 54 cent increase per bushel going into Rotterdam which is a ten per cent increase on the GM. In the end where the cost is borne will be decided on who has the biggest sector of the cake. We could end up with a GM commodity trade and a non-GM commodity trade and both working alongside each other.

  302. It is the economics of those issues that are really essential to this inquiry.
  (Mr Riley) Indeed.

  303. You have made an interesting suggestion in your evidence that there should be a levy paid for the segregation and auditing of GM foods. This raised the question of who meets the costs because it looks as if the non-GM consumer and producer are going to bear the cost of introducing GM crops at present. That levy idea is a novel idea. Who should be the collecting authority for that levy?
  (Mr Riley) I think I would have to say we have not developed that idea very fully, but I think the levy should fall upon the GM industry because it is that industry which has disrupted the market.

  304. Who would collect it?
  (Mr Riley) The states where the crops were grown would have to collect it because the obvious place to put the levy would be on the seed before it goes into the ground.

  305. It would require international agreement to get to that kind of position?
  (Mr Riley) I think it would.

  306. The prospect of international agreement is remote. Mind you, you have successfully sabotaged the one in Seattle.
  (Mr Riley) What we want is sustainable international agreements, not unsustainable ones and that is why the WTO agreement was unacceptable.

  Chairman: Mr Riley, I am afraid I am going to have to bring things to a conclusion, which I apologise for. Can I express our deep gratitude to you for coming and giving evidence in the last half an hour. If there are things which you think on reflection, having heard the evidence of previous witnesses, you wished you had said, or things that you had hoped to mention to us today, please let us talk about them in written memoranda and whatever else you can submit in writing at this stage. Thank you very much indeed.


4   Note by Witness: Conference on identity preservation and segregation held in London. Back


 
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