Examination of witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
TUESDAY 18 JULY 2000
DR DAVID
BUCKERIDGE and MR
MIKE RUTHVEN
Mr Mitchell
20. I am in danger of what the press do really,
cutting to the chase before we establish the facts. Can I come
back to the basic issue of the particular crop? Have you established
why there was contamination in Hyola 38, 330 and 401? Was it the
same batch?
(Dr Buckeridge) I cannot categorically say to you
we are 100 per cent sure, but all the technical evidence points
to the fact that these crops received very small levels of pollen
which had originated from a commercially grown GM crop in Canada
and has somehow travelled across these wide isolation distances.
Would you like me to explain why we think that is the case?
21. Yes, please.
(Dr Buckeridge) If you look in the appendices, there
are some diagrams illustrating sterility. Appendix 4 is the easiest
one to turn to. In those diagrams it shows how this crop is produced.
Basically you have a hybrid crop. There are rows in the field.
Some are what we call male plants, which produce the pollen, and
next to them are rows of female plants or, as they are described
here, male sterile plants, which receive the pollen and the seed
is produced from those plants. In a hybrid production field what
you have to do is make sure that your female plants are not capable
of producing any pollen at all, so that all the pollen they receive
comes from the male plants in the row next door. When that transition
is made, the other thing that happens is that pollen coming across
restores the fertility of the seed that you are going to harvest,
so you know that if the pollen has not come from those male plants
in the production field, the seed that you harvest will not be
fertile. There was a lot of discussion about this and a lot of
confusion about it, but basically, to get successful hybrid production
you have to get 100 per cent cross pollination. The male plant
has to provide the pollen; the female plant has to receive the
pollen and then produce the seed. That is how you get hybrid vigour.
You hear about hybrid vigour in your roses in the garden, bigger
plants, which is what farmers want. If a bit of pollen comes in
from outside the seed production field, it is highly likely that
it will not have the ability to restore the fertility of the seed
that you are going to harvest. So what you have to look for in
these contaminants we found in this seed in Germany is plants
which are not producing any pollen. If the pollen in the seed
field has come from the outside, the seed that you plant in the
UK or in Germany, the contaminant, will not produce any pollen.
If the pollen has come from inside the seed field, it will be
fully fertile. So what we did was we took these contaminant plants—what
we call "off types" in the seed industry, things that
should not have been there—and we grew them on in the laboratory
in Canada to see if they would produce pollen. If they produced
pollen, we knew that they were most likely to have come from a
plant that had received the correct pollen. If they did not, we
thought it would have come from pollen that came from the outside.
All of those plants in the lab showed severely compromised pollen
production. They produced levels of pollen which were a fraction
of the normal that you would expect in a crop. They also produced
deformed parts where the pollen comes from. In a flower you have
things called anthers in the flower inside the petals and they
fill up with yellow pollen. You see bees going in there and rubbing
themselves on the pollen. In these plants, those bits were severely
reduced and were not capable of producing any pollen. That told
us that in the seed field they had been fertilised by plants which
did not bring this gene which restored fertility. That is the
evidence that we believe leads us to say that any contaminants,
albeit at the low level they are in these fields in the UK, will
firstly produce massively reduced levels of pollen, if any at
all, and secondly, it is quite likely that the pollen they produce
will not be able to fertilise something else because it has been
produced on a structure which is very deformed. What you see in
the pictures are actual photographs of those plants. If you look
at the picture of the plant on the right-hand side at the top,
you will see it has short, stubby bits on it compared to the one
on the left-hand side, which has long fully formed ones. Those
are the male parts of the plant. The one on the right is not capable
of producing pollen; the one on the left can. When those two cross
together, that is how you make hybrid seed. If you look at the
picture on Appendix 4, in the second picture at the bottom it
says "Contaminant Seed" and you will see those same
physically deformed structures. That is a photograph of what we
grew on in the lab in Canada. It shows us that that plant is not
going to be capable of producing any pollen.
22. That is very interesting. It is also very
sexy. I am surprised at the virility of the male sterile plant.
(Dr Buckeridge) The analogies are all there, but I
have tried to steer clear of them.
23. You are satisfied with that explanation,
are you? What had been grown in those fields the year before?
(Dr Buckeridge) All the fields where we produced the
seed had never grown a GM crop. That is part of our protocol within
the company. As well as wide isolation distances, we always use
fields which have never grown a GM crop. If you look at what we
did the next year for seed production, we faced a situation in
Canada where 55 per cent of the crop is now GM, and in our judgment
it was not possible to find fields where we could either achieve
the isolation distance we wanted or guarantee that a GM crop had
not been grown before. If you think about rotation of crops, it
is very likely that, as GMs have been in Canada since 1996, by
the year 1999 some fields will be re-used for growing—
24. So where are you shifting it to?
(Dr Buckeridge) Currently we are doing production
in New Zealand, we are doing some production in eastern Canada—because
this is all prairie Canada where this production was done, so
we are probably thousands of kilometres away—and we did
some production in Montana in 1999. All of those batches were
checked as a precaution when we checked the 1998 seed, and we
did not detect GM in any of them.
25. Given the spread of GM production in North
America, and indeed, given the more relaxed attitude towards it
than prevails here, should you not have tested this stuff as it
came in? Could you test it as it came in?
(Dr Buckeridge) If I can go back to the answer I gave
to Mr Jack, in our opinion the testing that was available to us
was somewhat unreliable.
26. Is it not routinely tested in the industry?
(Dr Buckeridge) For GM content?
27. Yes.
(Dr Buckeridge) No, it is not routinely tested.
28. So no section of the industry, you included,
routinely tests?
(Dr Buckeridge) All seed companies now are thinking
about this issue. If you take our company, for example, we have
just been through a thorough appraisal of what we should do going
into next year. I think we will have routine testing as a part
of our protocols for next year. We are struggling at the moment
to work out what that testing should be so that we can give a
reliable assurance around these sorts of issues, bearing in mind
that we know we cannot guarantee 100 per cent seed purity. So
we are in a dilemma now. This is why I think regulation is so
important. It needs to be prescribed for the industry what the
level is that should be allowed for accidental contamination,
and what method should be used to detect that. I could easily
do a test and show you no GM, but that would not necessarily give
me as a consumer confidence that there was no GM there.
29. Given those definitional problems of the
level and the test, is it possible for measures to be put in place
to ensure this does not happen again?
(Dr Buckeridge) I believe it is possible to put methods
in place which can give a high degree of statistical probability
that seed batches are GM-free. I think it is impossible to put
measures in place to say that seed batches are completely GM-free
or 100 per cent GM-free.
30. Have you an estimate of what the cost of
all this is to you?
(Dr Buckeridge) That is the process that we are going
through at the moment. We are looking at external labs that are
charging in the order of £100 a test for this type of test.
31. I meant the cost of the incident and the
compensation.
(Dr Buckeridge) The compensation has been agreed,
and the farmers' unions have recommended that to their members.
If you are north of a line from Newcastle to Carlisle, it will
be £370 a hectare, and if you are south of that line it will
be £337. That is to do with the yield potential of the crops.
There are something like 5,200 hectares involved. So a simple
calculation gives you a range of what those costs will be. That
is obviously the compensation itself. There are other costs which
I could not give you an estimate of at the moment to do with us
having had to handle this issue over the last few months, the
time it has taken and the business disruption that has been caused.
But the pure compensation costs are 5,200 hectares times somewhere
between £370 and £337 per hectare, depending on the
distribution of the crop.
32. One last question. This is a fairly combative
memo. It is marvellous to see in our quiet, bucolic, little idyll
in this Committee you and MAFF slugging it out in this way, but
I get the impression that you feel aggrieved. The memo says you
have warned several times and the issue has not been adequately
addressed by the regulatory authorities. It was then stirred by
panic over GM, and even now, after all the fracas, there are still
no regulations at either a national or EU level, and even though
the oilseed rape planting begins in August there is still no regulatory
guidance on that issue. My conclusion is that you feel aggrieved
about the whole business.
(Dr Buckeridge) I think it is fair to say we feel
aggrieved. The thing that concerns us most of all is that we need
to get the regulations in place. It is not just a UK issue. It
has got to be an international issue. The seed industry was consulting
with the Commission in October 1999 about this issue. I think
someone has to make a move to get these regulations in place.
What we do not want is the sort of regulation that says "You
are required to check." What we need is something which says
the threshold, the method of testing, and what statistical analyses
should be applied to the results. That is no different to other
seed purity regulations. The seed purity regulations are very
clear, and they are well followed by the industry. The industry
has a very good track record of following them. If we have clear,
specific regulations, we can follow them to the best of our ability
as an industry. Our frustration—and perhaps that comes through
in the memo—is that we feel we have been saying this for
quite a long time, and we are now in a situation where it is proof
positive that the situation can occur, but as a company, we are
just about to market the winter oilseed rape seed, which will
have to go in the ground, as I am sure many of you know, at the
beginning of August, and we do not have a set of regulations to
guide us. So once again as a company we have now to work out a
system of compliance. We think there is a gap in the law here
and we think it needs to be plugged. That is our strong message.
We think the plugging of that gap is very urgent.
Mr Opik
33. Your explanation of how the pollen came
across and so on reminds me of when the dinosaurs get pregnant
in Jurassic Park. I am sure the process is completely different
and you will probably accuse me of misrepresenting the facts.
(Dr Buckeridge) I have never seen the film.
34. It will just get you worried. In paragraph
4.1 you say, "Advanta believes that a lack of understanding
of the basics of agriculture existed in some quarters of the Ministry
and most quarters of the media." In 4.2 you go on to say,
"After the government published the issue, it was impossible
to communicate effectively with customers" and "journalists
posing as farmers plagued our free information phone service,
blocking the lines for genuine callers. In addition, pressure
groups deliberately sought to distort the facts in order to boost
their position against GM." That is strong, fighting talk.
It sounds to me from that that you blame MAFF for creating this
miscommunication, and then you blame the media for making it worse.
To give you the chance to set the record straight, are you satisfied
that you have traced all the seed that you have sold?
(Dr Buckeridge) We can probably give you specific
statistics on where we are with that.
(Mr Ruthven) Yes. We believe we are very close to
tracing. First, can I just explain that the way we sell our seed
is to merchants and distributors, so we are not directly in contact
with farmers. As you will know, agriculture is going through quite
a difficult period, and the industry is working on a "just
in time" basis, so our customers ask us to ship very often
directly to farmers. When our information desk was set up on 22
May a number of our customers wanted to jealously guard the names
and addresses of their own farmer customers. One of the reasons
was that farmers are very reluctant that people should find out
who they are and where they are, because there is a genuine fear
among many of them that has come through in the registration process
that there will be damage caused to their property and their crops
by activists. We sold 2,359 bags, which are two-hectare packs.
I cannot tell you the number of bags we have accounted for, but
we are trying to account for the number of bags. What I can tell
you is that those bags should have sown 4,718 hectares. We have
accounted for 5,393 hectares. The reason for that is some of the
farmers have mixed the seed with the unaffected Hyola. Some of
them have used it to patch up holes in their crop of winter rape.
Some of them have sown a bit of seed that they had saved on the
farm carried over from the previous year. We believe there are
about 6-8 farmers left to register with us. During July we are
running an advertising campaign in trade journals, two advertisements
in each of the three selected trade journals. We hope very much
that by the end of the month we will be able to assure everybody
that we have collected as much as we can. I do not know whether
we will actually get 100 per cent like the contamination itself,
but we are going to be extremely close to tracing all the crop.
35. You are describing some of the difficulties
in terms of tracing. Those sound rather insuperable to me, because
in order to find all the seed, you have to know where the patches
were and everything else.
(Mr Ruthven) It is not quite as difficult as that,
because the seed regulations require the people who are distributing
seed to maintain a system of traceability. The difficulty for
us would be if seed was sold to one merchant, who then sold it
to another, who then sold it to another and it finally left that
merchant to go to a farmer, but we believe that if we can account
for the total number of bags, effectively we will have accounted
for all of the sowings of the seed.
36. In the context of that, you say that you
have devised a segregation process. How would that have worked,
in brief terms?
(Mr Ruthven) We would have acted to keep all of the
crops, including the saved seed, the patch seed, identified, and
those would have been dealt with by the oil crushing industry
as identified chain crops. The position at 27 May, when Nick Brown
made his statement, appeared to introduce a new factor, which
was that the farmers might not be able to sell the crop. I do
not fully understand this. This could be perhaps a question of
another release. If Nick Brown could have given us that advice
much earlier in the proceedings, it may be that we could have
recalled some of the seed or mitigated the costs further. We cannot
really understand why that fact emerged as late as the 27th, and
perhaps that is one of the reasons our frustration shows in the
notes we have submitted to the Committee.
37. You said yourself that destruction of the
crop would have been an over-reaction, which makes me feel you
are probably more relaxed about this. It is a judgment. Obviously
you are in the business of GM crops, so what would you say to
those who say you are likely to be a bit slack about the stuff
because you do not think it is an environmental problem anyway?
(Mr Ruthven) We certainly have not been slack about
tracking it. We have done everything in the power of the business
to track everything. We have dealt with it in advertising in journals,
we have communicated through our merchants, we have written through
our merchants direct to all our farmer customers, and we wrote,
we believe, to all the customers who had sold not only the Hyola
which was contaminated, but to the customers who sowed the unaffected
Hyola to reassure them through the merchants. We had 248 registrations
last week on our own registration system. Customers have registered
a further 75. So we have had 323 registrations and I heard this
morning we have had a few more. We believe we are down to five
or six farmers.
38. Finally, you say in 10.6, "At no time
did Advanta Inc have any reasonable grounds to suspect that accidental
contamination of its hybrid crops might have occurred." It
clearly did happen. Do we draw from this basically that since
there are no reasonable grounds in that circumstance, as Greenpeace
and Friends of the Earth have said, once seeds are released into
the environment, we will never have non-GM crops again?
(Dr Buckeridge) It depends on what you are talking
about in terms of definition. As I said earlier, we know from
a seed purity point of view that 100 per cent purity is not possible.
I do not believe that GM impurities will behave any differently
to other impurities. After all, what they are is other varieties,
and there are impurities of non-GM varieties which get into crops
as well. Our view is that it is not right to classify a crop as
GM because it has a trace level of impurity. I think the Greenpeace
and Friends of the Earth view would be that it is a GM crop even
when it has one part per billion in it. Our sense is that a GM
crop is a crop which is specifically grown and 100 per cent or
95 per cent of the seeds in the field are GM.
39. So you would accept it is not realistic
to think that there will ever be crops without a trace of GM in
them?
(Dr Buckeridge) I think if there are crops where there
is already GM incorporated into some of the germ plasm, it is
not realistic to expect non-GM crops to be 100 per cent pure with
respect to GM impurities.
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