Examination of Witness (Questions 236
- 239)
WEDNESDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2002
PROFESSOR JANET
BAINBRIDGE, OBE
Chairman
236. Professor Bainbridge, you have chaired
or sat on a whole series of bodies with absolutely impossibly
long names.
(Professor Bainbridge) Absolutely, yes.
237. And actually not very interesting acronyms.
We are very grateful to you for coming to talk to us today. I
am grateful for your submission which was a very useful and a
very dense summary of what you are going to tell us. Could I begin
by just saying that if you were sitting here ten years from now
and we were asking you to look back ten years and to say what
had been the two or three really important, startling and important
trends in technology which had really transformed the agricultural
scene we would be looking at, and we would be looking at a future
agriculture in 2010 onwards, what do you think would be those
things which you would identify?
(Professor Bainbridge) Before I answer that, could
I just say that I am here as me as opposed to being the voice
of any of the government committees or other agencies that I sit
on.
238. Had you been, you would not have been asked.
(Professor Bainbridge) Thank you. I think in ten years'
time, some of the significant things are that I think we will
see more GM. I do not think it will be the only story, but I think
consumer acceptance will have moved on and I think we will have
got over various issues around segregation, labelling and, most
important of all, public education. I think there will still be
organic and I think there will still be "conventional"
produce, so whereas now you or I could go to the supermarket and
we could buy normal food, which is at the moment branded obviously
as GM free, or we could choose to buy organic, I think there will
be three lines of types of food supply: the standard which may
contain GM; the certified and verified GM free, "GM free"
meaning only 1 per cent GM, which was the way I think it would
be interpreted; and then organic. Obviously the latter two will
be a premium, and I think the greater premium will be for the
certified GM free as opposed to the organic. I think that is one
thing. I think another of the three things that we will see is
our countryside will look very different in the sense that it
will not only be growing crops and used for animal husbandry as
part of the food chain, but we will see far more in the way of
industrial crops. In a sense there will be a blending not of the
sort of industrial sort of scenery and heritage that I am familiar
with in the north-east at all, but in the use of the countryside
to grow raw materials, for instance, biodiesels or biofuels, things
like that. I think the third thing will be possibly another application
of technology and that is very small-scale, what I would call,
bioreactors. They will not look like chemical plant or chemical
reactors, but they will be small sheds and they will be used,
for instance, for integrated processes for treating waste and
generating small-scale local energy or treating particular waste,
bio-remediation of waste streams, things like that. In the context
of what I am talking about today in terms of biotechnology, I
think there will be the three changes. Whether we will see all
those in ten years or whether it will be 20, I would not like
to say.
239. We have been used in the post-war age to
accepting certain things as sort of good things. The international
negotiations for trade, the WTO, we see that now being challenged
by a growing number of people against modernisation. We have assumed
that technology on the whole is a good thing. Do you think we
are actually beginning to see a sort of citizens' revolt, as it
were, against some of these accepted wisdoms and what is happening
right now? Your last answer suggests that if we take care of it,
it may just be a hump, as it were, not an obstacle.
(Professor Bainbridge) I am not so sure that it is
a revolt against particular accepted wisdoms, but I think as a
result in the context of farming and in the context of the food
chain with so many very high-profile problems, consumers are starting
to question more and they are starting to demand information and
just by supplying information and educating the public about the
food chain is not going to make the questions go away. As I know,
being an academic and working with students, the most delightful
students to teach are the brighter students who challenge every
bit of wisdom and I think the more we educate the public, the
more communication there is, which is absolutely the right way
to go, communication through the scientist and the citizen, if
you like, the more questions the citizen will raise and they will
question what perhaps today are accepted wisdoms.
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