Select Committee on Agriculture Minutes of Evidence



Examination of witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

TUESDAY 18 JULY 2000

DR DAVID BUCKERIDGE and MR MIKE RUTHVEN

Chairman

  1. Gentlemen, welcome to the Committee. You will know that we have done an inquiry into some of the technical issues involved in GM foods which was published some months ago. In the light of more recent developments—and, of course, there has been one since, which is the trashing of the crop down in the South West—we wanted to come up to date, and clearly, as you have been in the eye of the storm, we thought it would make sense to have you along to talk to us. I am going to ask you a couple of questions to begin with. For the purposes of the record, would you identify who you are and your position in the company as a preliminary. My first question is: do I deduce from your evidence that you are contemplating legal action against the Ministry of Agriculture? You had contemplated a scheme of buying and exporting the crop. The Minister then gave it as his opinion that it should be ploughed in, and that gave you no alternative but to follow that line and to compensate. Just for clarification, are you contemplating a legal case against the Department?
  (Dr Buckeridge) I am David Buckeridge. I am a director of Advanta Seeds. In response to that question, our whole focus at the moment, Mr Chairman, is to look after the farmers who have inadvertently planted this crop, and to work on the compensation packages that we have proposed and have been supported by the farmers' unions. We have not contemplated any further legal steps at this point in the proceedings.

  2. Have you ruled them out, or does that remain a possibility?
  (Dr Buckeridge) We have not ruled them out at this stage.

  3. Could I refer you to your very helpful and quite forthright submission? You give the history of how the contamination occurred, and in paragraph 2.1 you say: "At a minimum, thresholds for accidental GM impurity need to be set, standard testing methods need to be stipulated and results should be analysed by an approved and consistent statistical method." Could you explain? Your argument seems to be that we are going to get contamination. I am using the word "contamination" because I cannot think of a better word. We are into a world where, because GM is so heavily planted, this is going to happen. You are a conventional seed company, but you have got to deal with this. Have I summarised it correctly? Would you like to tell me how you perceive the problem?
  (Dr Buckeridge) I think you have summed it up very well. We know as a conventional seed company—and we have experience of producing seed for a number of years; the company is over 100 years old—never in the production of seed has any seed company ever striven for 100 per cent purity. All seed production methodologies strive to keep impurities of any type to a minimum level. There are strong regulations around things like weed seed impurities, impurities from other varieties which are entering the crop through the natural course of cross-pollination, which occurs in the open environment where the seeds have to be produced. It is our belief that, with the level of GM plantings on a global basis, and bearing in mind that the seed industry is a global industry, seed companies can adhere to all the regulations which are in place, follow all the purity guidelines, as was the case in this particular incident with the rape, and still find themselves in a situation where, accidentally, very low levels of GM impurities may occur. For all sorts of reasons, for the operation of our business, for farmers' confidence and for public confidence, it is important that there are regulations in place which state what the threshold for that impurity should be, just like we state for all the other seed impurities; that tell companies what method should be used to analyse for impurities, because there are some questions of reliability in the methods; and further, make sure that those impurity tests are subjected to a valid statistical analysis. We do not believe it is any good to come along with one test result for a large batch of seed and say, "This seed is GM-free" because we believe that the testing should be done on a sampling basis and should be statistically valid if people are to have confidence in the results. We believe that should be a matter of regulation, and we believe the need for that regulation is very urgent.

  4. You say, "This incident is proof positive that despite strenuous efforts to maximise seed purity and despite full compliance with seed purity regulations, seed can enter the UK market with trace levels of impurity." You also say, "Trace levels of GM impurities will occur now that various parts of the world have accepted the value and safety of GMOs. This is universally recognised . . ." Are you sure it is universally recognised?
  (Dr Buckeridge) I think that recognition is restricted to the seed industry. I think it is recognised in the seed industry that this is the case. Farmers understand that cross-pollination occurs as a natural phenomenon. Seed crops for production rely on efficient cross-pollination. It has to occur. What the seed company is trying to do is to make sure that cross-pollination is only occurring with pollen which is intended to cross-pollinate. But I think the seed industry universally understands that there will always be trace levels of impurities which will accidentally cross-pollinate, as was the case with this rape seed.
  (Mr Ruthven) Could I add to that, Chairman? Michael Ruthven, General Manager of Advanta Seed UK and a director. This is recognised universally, the word we have used, in the existing seed regulations, because they do not call for 100 per cent purity, either genetically or mechanically.

  5. In 4.1 you state, "From our perspective, the incident also serves to demonstrate that communication of the facts, allowing individuals to make informed decisions, is virtually impossible in our society today. This is especially true where the subject matter is highly technical." We have just had a lot of excitement about the genome. I do not get the impression that it has been impossible to have a sensible debate on the genome. What is special about your sector which makes it so difficult that you should feel obliged to issue this cry of anguish?
  (Dr Buckeridge) Our frustration, Mr Chairman, has been that there were, we believe, important facts about this case that became very difficult to communicate because of the intense media interest which was generated. It is fair to say that when journalists are putting together stories, they need to cut to the chase very quickly to get the facts over through the method of communication they are using, and that is not conducive to explaining all sorts of technical arguments which came out, like the accuracy of the testing, why the testing is unreliable; like the issue of whether the crop was contaminated from mechanical mixing in a factory or whether it was to do with cross-pollination. Those to us were very important facts, but it seemed very difficult to communicate those as a company, and even more difficult for us to communicate with the farmers who were inadvertently affected by this to get clear information to them.

  6. You say, "Advanta believes that a lack of understanding of the basics of agriculture existed in some quarters of the Ministry . . ." Which quarters do you have in mind?
  (Dr Buckeridge) On the specifics, we were surprised at the questions we received on issues like whether the crop was sterile. We were asked for technical follow-up on those issues. We had no problem with providing that, and we did provide it, but it just seemed to us that through the course of events we felt we had given a thorough briefing and that briefing did not always come through in the statements which the Ministry was making. To be fair, everybody was operating in uncharted water on this issue. We have made those comments. We were a little concerned about the technical understanding of some of the issues which we felt were germane to the particular incident that was in hand. But we also concede that we were in uncharted water; it was a unique experience, as far as we know.

  7. The whole thrust of your report is to say, "We have to have a regulatory framework. We have been demanding it, and we must have it. People have been dilatory. We shall have harvested one crop and are about to plant another, and still nothing has happened." Yet in paragraph 4.3 you say, "We doubt whether it will be possible to frame sensible and practical legislation in the wake of this event and strongly suspect that this will lead to a withdrawal of certain products from the UK market . . . yet another blow to the competitiveness of UK agriculture." Either you do want regulation or you do not, and if you do want regulation, why do you say we will not be able to have sensible and practical legislation?
  (Dr Buckeridge) We certainly do want urgent regulation. Our observation is looking at the types of discussion that have been going on on things like thresholds, and those discussions do not appear to be rooted in the facts of the matter. They appear to be rooted in an emotional drive to get to a lower and lower threshold, but without necessarily a technical justification to say why one per cent is better than five per cent, for example. There has been a lot of debate about what thresholds should be, as you know from your investigations into food as well. With this incident, at a very early stage there was a very clear communication from the Ministry to us to say, "We do not perceive a threat to the environment and we do not perceive a threat to health." In that situation, if we are looking at thresholds, we are trying to do those for the protection of people with concerns about this technology. We would like to see thresholds set at sensible levels that can be measured, but we would like them to be set in an unemotional way and a factual way, and we feel that the debate is going down more of an emotional concern about the lowest level one can get to.

Mr Jack

  8. You have mentioned, Dr Buckeridge, your understanding of the sensitivity of this issue. You have talked about purity, you have talked about testing. Why did it take a German laboratory to tell you that there was a problem? Did you not test on a random basis for your own peace of mind the seed that was produced to check if this problem could occur?
  (Dr Buckeridge) The reason we adopted the approach we took was that our Canadian business which produced the seed was aware that there was a sensitivity around GMs in Europe. There were discussions about that, and the strategy it chose to adopt was to use extremely wide separation distances to avoid the risk of cross-pollination. In Canada the regulations stipulate that an 800 metre separation distance should be used for a seed crop. In the case of this crop, it was grown with a 4 km separation distance, so five times the regulatory standard. The reason it went for separation distance as its mode of minimising risk rather than tests was because it was concerned about the reliability of the available tests, particularly in a brassica crop. One of the concerns which had been widely expressed, not just by us but by scientists in general, is that the testing methodology for DNA testing is prone to give false positive results, because it is possible that it will detect contaminants that are not from the seed at all, just dust and other matter.

  9. There are two tests, are there not? In your evidence you talk about the PCR method, but you also talk about another method. Could you not use both?
  (Dr Buckeridge) We decided at that point in time that the best testing method that was available to us to achieve good purity was very wide separation distances. That was the decision that the business made at that point.

  10. In spite of the fact that you knew that the seed would be tested at the other end?
  (Dr Buckeridge) I am sorry. I do not understand the question.

  11. You know the seed business. You have told us you have been in it for 100 years. People test what they receive. You must have known that people would be testing when they bought your product, yet you leave yourselves wide open to a phone call from a German laboratory to alert the world to a failure of the previously described regime.
  (Mr Ruthven) Could I just pick you up on one point? You said that we test. We do not test seed that is coming into the country. It is already certified as pure in accordance with the existing seed regulations when it is received.

  12. I was more concerned about the seed that left, given the sensitivity which your evidence quite clearly established in your mind about this new area of science as applied to agriculture, and the sensitivities already exhibited in the market place to which you were exporting. I find it surprising that nobody bothered to check a sample, irrespective of the regulation, before it left.
  (Dr Buckeridge) We can obviously only report the facts of what happened, and in 1998, which was when this seed was grown, it was the judgement of the Canadian business that the separation distance it had used, which was five times the regulatory standard, would lead to a situation where no impurities would be present. It was not a routine part of its Canadian testing programme to test, and therefore it did not do so on this seed.

  13. Let us move on to the timescale of the reaction. You found out about this on 31 March. On 6 April your evidence tells us that you decided on a precautionary basis to stop the sale of these seeds in the United Kingdom, but it took you until 14 April to get in touch with MAFF about this. Why was there such a long delay? Why did you not pick up the phone straight away and say, "We've got a problem"? Your evidence says that when you rang MAFF everything was cloaked in mystery. You requested a meeting and would not tell MAFF what it was about. Why the cloak and dagger approach?
  (Dr Buckeridge) Yes, we found out about this through a telephone call from an agent which sells the seed for Advanta in Germany. It is not a part of Advanta's business. The agent left us a message to say that a university lab had detected a GM presence in one of the Hyola varieties. This incident involves three different varieties. So at that point we knew that there was a potential issue in one of the varieties. At the same time as receiving that information the manager in the UK contacted the Canadian business on that Friday night. The Canadian business expressed extreme surprise because of the isolation distances that they had used, and also expressed scepticism about the testing method that the German university was using. The agent himself took the initiative early the next week to go to another German laboratory to try and verify the test, again using this DNA testing, this PCR method. The Canadian business at that point, because it was sceptical about the test, early the next week decided that it would instigate a longer term test, looking at whole plants to see whether there was this herbicide resistance in those plants. By the 6th those tests had been initiated. The other practice that we had to set in train was checking through the seed lots which had gone to Germany to see whether they had gone to any other countries. So we were not in possession of information on the 31st that we had a problem in the UK. We were in possession of one sample result from a German laboratory with, in our view, a questionable method. What did we do? We tried to verify that result as quickly as possible using the same method but with a different lab, and that was done by our agent in Germany. We instigated our own tests, the first of which was ordered on 31 March. But those tests were the type of test which took a longer period. We did not feel that we could talk to the DETR before the Ministry of Agriculture with a situation where we did not fully understand the problem. When we checked the seed batches, it came to our attention that there were two other varieties that were grown in close proximity to where the crop with the alleged problem was sitting. We believed that it was worth checking those batches at that point. We did not know there was a problem, but there was enough suspicion to think that there could be. Those were also put on test runs early the next week, somewhere around 4 or 5 April. It was not until those tests came back, which was on the evening of the 12th, that we had enough information. We did not know the level of the impurity but we had enough information to know that it was a very low level because of the tests we had done, and we also felt we had enough to go and talk to the Ministry and say, "We believe there is a genuine issue here." We talked through our trade association because we could not find clarity in the law, and we had taken legal advice at this stage, on the 13th. We were not clear whether this was an issue of environmental law or whether it was an issue of seed purity. To us there seemed to be a gap. We took legal advice, we talked to the trade association to seek their advice, and on the 14th the trade association made contact with the Ministry to set up a meeting. The Ministry reacted very quickly and arranged a meeting for the Monday.

  14. Was the meeting that took place on the 17th a satisfactory meeting?
  (Dr Buckeridge) Maybe it would be best for Mr Ruthven to answer that because he was at the meeting.
  (Mr Ruthven) The Ministry, as Dr Buckeridge said, replied extremely promptly. In hindsight we feel we should have let the officials know what the subject matter was, but we felt the previous week that a telephone contact mentioning part of the subject would be unsatisfactory. Perhaps that was not, in hindsight, the best decision. We met with the Ministry. We made notes of the meeting immediately at the end of the meeting. I will just refer to my notes. The main points which came out of the meeting were as follows. There was agreement between us and the officials that the PCR tests were not the most reliable and that the best results could be obtained from what we call bio-assays, the alternative testing method that Dr Buckeridge just referred to. The officials believed there was no known threat to the environment at this stage. If there was going to be a threat, it would emerge at the flowering stage of the crop. The only guidance available in the absence of any regulation was the one per cent provision in the food regulations. We were advised it would be possible for the UK to form its own regulations and guidelines, and the officials were going to write to the EU in any event. The officials needed to obtain legal advice before they could give us any further advice on this issue. They advised us strongly to stop sales, which of course had already been done. They needed to consult Ministers. We stressed in that meeting the urgent need for a response, because if there was going to be a crop destruction of some sort, this was an opportunity for us to deal with what could be quite serious—

  15. Did the question of crop destruction emerge as a proposal in the course of your early discussions?
  (Mr Ruthven) That was asked for by us during the course of the discussions at that meeting.

  16. You asked the question or you asked for the crops to be destroyed?
  (Mr Ruthven) We did not ask for them to be destroyed. What we said was, if it was going to be necessary, which we did not believe, we would need to know promptly, because that would give farmers the opportunity to re-sow alternative seed and would mitigate the cost problems we would possibly face. That was the reason for the question, and we did ask for an urgent response if there was going to be any need to destroy the crop. Quite rightly, the officials said they needed to consult with their Ministers. We interpreted that meeting as one with no panic. Our feeling quite strongly from that meeting was that, because we were stating that the impurity levels were believed to be below one per cent, there was no cause for real concern. That was the feeling we got from the officials and was our own feeling from the meeting. We believed that there was a tacit understanding that it should not enter the public domain. I know some of these issues have been reported in the press and elsewhere, but at no time have we been asked specifically to suppress any information, but we did feel there was a tacit understanding between us, and as a result of that understanding, when we got back and I reported to my colleagues, we stood down the team that we had had standing by, both to communicate with our customers and if necessary to deal with the media.

  17. You mentioned the question of the destruction of the crop. In your evidence you indicated that you arranged for a scheme to segregate the crop and harvest it for export. Were you taken aback when after all the protestations of safety from MAFF suddenly they hove into view with this proposal that the crop should be destroyed? What was your opinion of that?
  (Mr Ruthven) We went through a process of quite some time in discussions with the Ministry, and we consistently held the view as a business that destruction of the crop would be an over-reaction. We sought with other members of the industry to find means of dealing with the crop when it came to harvest, and as late as 25 May the industry was in consultation with Baroness Hayman. The announcement by Nick Brown on 27 May caught us completely off guard. It was a Saturday. We had no staff available to deal with it. We heard about it on the one o'clock news on the radio, and the first thing we really knew was journalists trying to contact us. That was a complete surprise to us.

  18. What did the Ministry say was the excuse? That was on the 27th, you said. You were trying to get a meeting with Baroness Hayman on the 23rd and suddenly it is cancelled. Did they tell you why?
  (Dr Buckeridge) They just said it was to do with diary pressure.

  19. Any idea what this great pressure was?
  (Mr Ruthven) No. We immediately wrote to Baroness Hayman to express the points that we would have hoped to have raised in the meeting with her.
  (Dr Buckeridge) If I can put it in perspective, Mr Chairman, I think, as we said in the written submission, we were not saying that the idea of segregating the crop to take it out of food use would be easy, but we had excellent cooperation from other members of the food supply chain in trying to achieve that, so it was something of a surprise when the advice was given on the 27th. But I do think it is important to put it in perspective and say we were not proposing some kind of very easy solution that would just take the problem away. It was going to be complicated. It was a tiny area of crop involved. It was very geographically spread around the country. Putting that together in an identity-preserved way to export it for use in countries where there was not the same GM sensitivity would not have been an easy task, but that was the track that we were going down until the 27th. Of course, after the 27th the enthusiasm for that waned fairly quickly.


 
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