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Mr. Drew: My right hon. Friend did valuable work on this when he was Environment Minister. Does he agree that the most worrying aspect is that the companies are in a win-win situation, because as they supply the pesticides, they have a monopoly not only on the seeds but on the support that goes with them?

Mr. Meacher: I am entirely aware of why the companies are in favour of GM. If one can monopolise the supply of seeds every year, as well as the pesticides that the seed is genetically engineered to resist, one has made it and the potential for an unprecedented bonanza opens up. However, I am talking about a completely different matter, namely the Government.
 
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The only answer to my question appears to be this: Ministers say that under EU law they cannot reject a crop unless it can be shown that it constitutes a risk to the environment or to human health, and the line is that that has not been demonstrated. In my view, that is the heart of the current contention over GM policy. Relatively little evidence is available to promote the conclusions because it has deliberately not been sought. However, even the little that exists is damning.

The farm-scale evaluations, even with their narrow remit, for which I do not apologise, show that GM oilseed rape and beet are worse for the environment. I submit that the same would probably be true of maize if a less toxic herbicide than atrazine had been used on conventional maize. That will have to happen in future because of the EU ban. Of course, we now have the time—because GM crops will not be planted in this country for several years—to find out by replicating the trials.

It is known from the chief scientific adviser's review panel report that, after GM crops have been sown, soil pollution can persist for up to 16 years before it is safe to plant conventional or organic crops. It is known that super-weeds and gene stacking generate huge and potentially long-term insuperable problems in north America. It is known that if farmers sought to maximise commercial yields, which they do in the real world by spraying more often or using stronger mixes, it would be bound to create substantial harm to the environment. Let us be frank: it is known that co-existence is impossible because no one can state a separation distance that guarantees the protection of conventional or organic crops from cross-contamination.

If the Government were genuinely so minded, there is no doubt, at least in my mind, that the reasons that I have outlined are sufficient and consistent with EU and international law to reject GM crops because of their proven adverse impact on the environment. Those arguments could also be used in the case of the World Trade Organisation.

The evidence for the impact on human health is slowly accumulating. In my view, there is already more than sufficient to argue the case on the precautionary principle, which is written into EU food law, that GM food should not be allowed to enter the human food chain until significant further research is done. My hon. Friend the Minister and the hon. Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford (Mr. Whittingdale) said that there was no evidence of adverse effects on human health from eating GM foods. The reason for that is that no one has looked for them. I repeat the well known phrase that the absence of evidence does not represent evidence of absence. It is incredible but true that no peer-reviewed publications of clinical studies exist on the human health effects of GM food.

However, we know that DNA recombination technology is inherently unstable and leads to substantial scrambling of foreign and host DNA at the sites of integration, with attendant unpredictable risks. We know that the much used cauliflower mosaic virus CaMV 35S promoter was widely incorporated into GM crops before its unsafe properties became known. It not only possesses a recombination hot spot, but it is
 
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promiscuously active in making genes over-express in species throughout the living world, including human cells.

It is clear that the doctrine of substantial equivalence, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford eloquently referred and which was based on a highly prejudicial decision by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1994 and used thereafter as a device to circumvent direct trials of the effects of GM foods on human health, is—I do not mince my words—a scam. It should be dropped if any public trust in the process is to be secured.

We also know that in the very few cases involving human or animal tests in which the results were seriously disturbing, the research was closed down and no further action was taken. My hon. Friend referred to some of those cases. In the Newcastle study, in which a sample was fed a single meal of GM soya, the GM DNA survived almost intact and transferred to the gut bacteria, which could compromise antibiotic resistance. The Pusztai study found that GM potatoes with snowdrop lectin damaged every organ system of rats, resulting especially in a thickening of the stomach lining, which could be—I say only "could be"—a precursor of cancer. My hon. Friend also referred to the case in which a dozen dairy cows died on a farm in Hesse in north Germany after eating Syngenta's Bt 176 maize. Syngenta paid the farmer compensation, which might be taken as admitting liability.

The most worrying thing is that, in all those cases, the results were simply rubbished by the scientific establishment as flawed, and none was ever followed up—as normally happens in the scientific world—with further tests to confirm or refute the original findings. In other words, there was a preference for personality vilification rather than genuine scientific inquiry, and I greatly deplore that. All that that succeeds in doing is giving the impression that there is something to hide. I have to say to my hon. Friend the Minister that the Government have given that impression through their handling of the Chardon LL maize research at Reading university.

What we do know is that GM maize from the FSE trials was removed secretly at night two years ago, to be used as cattle feed and to test the effects on the cows. We were told at the time that the results would be published, peer reviewed and presented to the regulatory authorities. Two years on, none of that has happened. Why? The strong suspicion is that the results were so unpalatable to the GM industry that they were suppressed. When are the Government going to give us the results of those tests and get them peer reviewed—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman's time is up. I call Mr. Peter Ainsworth.

6.52 pm

Mr. Peter Ainsworth (East Surrey) (Con): It is a great privilege and a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher), who knows more about these things than anyone in the House. He was good enough to give evidence to our Select Committee and he was, of course, intimately involved in setting up the farm-scale trials in the first place.
 
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The Minister was very interested in the report of the Environmental Audit Committee—not only the one that we published in March but the one that we attached to the Government's response to that report—and he spoke at length about it. I hope that the House will forgive me if I risk creating a rather anoraky and dislocated debate by replying to some of the points that he raised, and by focusing on the Committee's work, rather than dealing with some of the other very important issues, such as those raised by the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) on human health. I want to do that not because I am interested in rehearsing old arguments; I want to make new arguments. I should make it clear, however, that I stand by every word of the Committee's report.

I want to engage in this debate because I believe that the dispute—and it is a dispute—that our Select Committee has with the Government over this issue sheds some interesting light on the Government's whole approach to GM crops. Their attitude towards this issue is very curious, even perverse. It has already been pointed out today that the statement made by the Secretary of State on 9 March about GM maize flew in the face of public opinion. It was contentious and unpopular. I am all in favour of the Government making contentious and unpopular statements, and they are getting rather experienced at doing so, but I do not understand a Secretary of State making such a statement when there is no need to do so. As the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton said, there is no market for these GM crops, and there was no need to make that statement at the time that it was made. The subsequent action by Bayer CropScience suggested that that was certainly the case. So we now have a ludicrous situation in which the Government appear to be more keen on GM crops than the GM industry itself. It is a preposterous state of affairs.

I accept that the Government went to great lengths to set up a rational process for evaluating the benefits or otherwise of GM crops. I commend them on that. The farm-scale evaluations were just one of a series of measures to which the Minister referred earlier, including the science review, the cost-benefit review, the report on co-existence and liability, and the "GM Nation?" debate. The problem is that the science review highlighted gaps in the science and public concerns about the technology, the cost-benefit review indicated no significant economic benefit to UK agriculture, the co-existence and liability review did not resolve the issues of co-existence and liability, as we have heard this afternoon, and the "GM Nation?" debate resulted in an overwhelmingly negative response from the British people. The farm-scale trials were, in the opinion of the Environmental Audit Committee, equivocal and flawed in their outcome and very narrow in their scope.

The Minister seemed to be implying this afternoon that the Committee was hostile to the science. We are not hostile to the science or critical of the work that the scientists did. We merely differ from the Government in interpreting the results of that science. Put simply, as a result of the problems with atrazine, we still do not know whether GMHT maize, if grown
 
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commercially in the UK, would be better or worse for biodiversity than conventional maize. That is the situation in a nutshell.

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