Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
29 OCTOBER 2003
RT HON
MICHAEL MEACHER
MP
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank
you very much for coming. You are no stranger to this Committee
and we are grateful to you for once again coming and giving us
your time. Could I kick off with a question about your own approach
to this? Since leaving Government you have been an outspoken critic
of the whole GM process. Is it true to say that you devised the
farm scale trials as a way of buying time for those who wanted
to make the case against GM crops?
Mr Meacher: In 1998-99, which
is when the farm scale evaluation trials were being mooted, it
is the case of course that there was very considerable unrest.
I can certainly remember it was virtually impossible to open the
newspapers without finding half a page of concern being expressed
about this and clearly it was a matter which the Government, having
to make a decision about whether or not to allow commercialisation
because the industry would be pressing for this, had to take a
decision as to how to deal with this. The decision was taken,
not directly by me, that perhaps the best way out of this was
to give more time for consideration. You used a particular phrase,
to buy time, and that is one way of expressing it but to use that
time to undertake some serious, thoughtful research, which is
probably a world first in this area, to examine an area of concern,
namely the impact on the environment, which had never systematically
been discussed. That, I think, is the origin of it.
Q2 Chairman: Was it your suggestion?
Mr Meacher: No, it was not my
suggestion but it was an idea which I rapidly concurred with.
I have to remember exactly what did happen four years ago and
there was a regular discussion. If you ask me—which is probably
your next question—who did think of it, I do not actually
know the answer to that. It emerged in discussions which I had
with my officials but I do not think it was directly my idea.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you. The Defra
website currently says that there is no cultivation of GM crops
in the UK other than those planted under licence for experimental
purposes. Do you regard that as true?
Mr Meacher: Well, unless you have
evidence, which your question might suggest you possibly have,
as far as I know it is true. It is certainly intended to be true.
We had a voluntary moratorium with the industry from the start
of the trials, ie that the industry would not plant any GM crop
outside of those three which were being examined within the trials
and would not plant any of those three crops until the results
of the trials were known, which is in effect spring of next year.
We have had, of course, the results being provisionally announced—I
say provisionally, they are pretty final but the results of the
last sowing still remain to be examined, but there is no reason
to suppose that that will be any different from what went before.
Q4 Chairman: You are not concerned?
There were 14 cases, were there not, where GM oilseed rape was
being found to be grown on an unauthorised basis?
Mr Meacher: Ah, you are referring
to that. Yes. That, of course, should not have happened. It was
not a deliberate sowing. From my recollection what happened—and
I think there were 25 fields where this happened, 14 in one case
and 11 in another, in batches—they were all separate fields
but in the case of 14 there was some examination made of what
had happened. The other 11 were ploughed up before the Department
was able to make an examination. It was actually 25 but 14 examined
and what happened here is that there was a new GM product in the
seed which had not been suspected, which should not have been
there, which was not licensed and it was an illegal or inappropriate
growing of a partially GM crop, that is true. But that is not
where the Government had agreed that there should be—
Q5 Chairman: No, I appreciate that,
but you do not think there is any change, that there is anything
out there now that Defra is not aware of?
Mr Meacher: Well, as far as I
know, no.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Q6 Mr Challen: Good afternoon. Could
I ask you, how did you decide which questions these trials should
attempt to answer?
Mr Meacher: That was not decided
by me. It was decided, as far as I can recollect, by SCIMAC, which
is the extraordinary name of Supply Chain Initiative on Modified
Agricultural Crops. If you wanted to have an unsexy acronym I
suppose that it is, but it is the plant breeders and the biotech
industry. Having taken the political decision that this was the
way to proceed—which I was involved in, I did give my consent
to that and I still think that was the right decision to take
at the time—the actual scope, structuring and design of
the trials was left basically to SCIMAC, though no doubt with
considerable discussion with key members of my staff, by which
I mean my officials in CB division.
Q7 Mr Challen: During that process
did you have a particularly hands-on kind of engagement or was
it simply receiving reports from them? What I am trying to ask
is, do you think the list of questions really was long enough?
Were they extensive enough or was it a minimalist approach which
had been recommended?
Mr Meacher: That of course is
a very relevant question because I was not involved in the design
of the trials, as I have indicated, and it is certainly true that
the trials were based on a very narrow remit, namely, as everyone
now knows, an examination of the effects of differential herbicide
management. That did not include, for example, an examination
of the impact on soil bacteria, soil residues. It did not include
an examination of gene flow, trans-gene flow, although I did raise
that with the Department. I pressed it very strongly. I wanted
it included but the view was taken that there was enough material
already known from other studies. That is, I think, true but I
still think it would have been helpful if it had been validated
in this study. It did not include, for example, an enumeration
of bird populations, which we were very concerned about because
the number of farmland birds has plummeted in the last couple
of decades, although it did include looking at a proxy, which
is the availability of food which birds eat as an indication of
the impact on bird population. It did not include—and this
is a very crucial point—an examination of commercial yields
as opposed to environmental impacts because for farmers in the
field there is a tension between those two. These trials were
about environmental impacts and maybe as our discussion proceeds
I can say a little bit more about the way in which it was, in
my view, very much oriented towards minimising environmental impact
in a way which is not real because that is not how farmers would
behave in the field where their prime concern, understandably,
would be about commercial yields. I therefore think to a degree
these farm scale trials, in the way they were devised by SCIMAC,
did not realistically assess what would actually happen in the
field.
Q8 Mr Challen: Were critical voices
about that raised within Defra at the time?
Mr Meacher: I have to say, and
this is probably a failing on my part, I did not raise the latter
point. I did raise two particular points where I wanted the trials
to be done differently. One, as I have already indicated, is over
gene flow. The other was over making a comparison with organic.
The comparison has been made with conventional crops, which of
course should be done, but I also wanted included in this a subset
in terms of the impact on organic and that whatever the criteria
there should be an evaluation of GM on the one side and organic
on the other. I regret that that was not done.
Q9 Mr Challen: Just looking at the
composition of the Scientific Steering Committee, I think that
some NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace complained
that they were excluded from membership of that. How was that
decided upon?
Mr Meacher: Again, it was not
decided by me, but I am not sure that is wholly a fair criticism
because I think Brian Johnson from English Nature was a member
of that. In answer to your first question, Chairman, it immediately
comes to mind that I think with him probably more than any other
single person was where the idea of the trials originated. Obviously
there was discussion but I certainly think he was pressing strongly.
He is from English Nature, he has got a very good track record,
a very good environmental track record and he is on the Scientific
Steering Committee, as also is a representative from RSPB, who
I think is Mark Avery. I think there were six members. This is
not to be decided on the basis of counting heads or votes but
there were two representatives who I think could reasonably be
expected to look at it from an environmental point of view.
Q10 Mr Challen: Who actually did
appoint that committee?
Mr Meacher: As always, the list
of names would be drawn up by officials. I have no complaint about
that because Ministers' knowledge of the range of relevant persons
in the field is almost certainly less than the officials. It may
well have been put to me, I honestly cannot remember, but if it
were—it was chaired by Professor Pollock, I certainly knew
that and I knew these two other names—my view is that it
was a reasonably balanced committee and I was satisfied with it.
Q11 Mr Thomas: If I could just follow
up on a couple of points there which the Chairman also raised.
As we know, the agreement was a voluntary agreement between the
Government and the SCIMAC Committee to more or less postpone any
commercialisation of GM planting until we knew the results of
those farm scale trials. You made the point that we will not really
know the results until next spring though we have very strong
indications of where that is going. What now is to stop the industry
actually pressing ahead either in terms of a legal challenge or
in any other way with the commercialisation of any GM crop in
the United Kingdom? Is there anything stopping that, in your opinion?
Mr Meacher: There is nothing to
stop the industry proceeding with the sowing of GM crops once
we reach the final end of the voluntary moratorium, which I think
is the spring of next year, nothing legally to prevent them. However,
the legal process has to be gone through and that legal process
requires that permission be obtained through Brussels for the
growing of a GM product. It must not only pass the approval of
the UK competent authority, which is the Advisory Committee on
Releases to the Environment together with my ex-department Defra,
but whatever that decision is, it is then passed to Brussels,
who communicate to all the other 14 Member States both the nature
of the application and all the supporting data and the decision
(in the UK case if we are the country that the biotech company
has approached the first time) of that country's competent authority.
That is passed to all the others. They then have 60 days within
which to decide whether or not to agree it. If everyone agrees
it, it goes through. If they do not agree it then the Commission
has to decide whether or not the ground on which disagreement
is made is valid under the relevant EU legislation, which is Directive
2001-18, and they would decide whether it is justified or not.
Normally that is an argument about the validity of a claim under
Article 16, which is, as Austria has used in the past, that this
is a risk to human health or the environment. That is the process.
I might also make it clear that there are four particular tests
which have to be passed, not just one, under different items of
legislation, which includes pesticides and seeds directives as
well as the releases to the environment. All of those four items
of approval have to be passed by every Member State. If at the
conclusion of spring 2004 the industry decided to press for any
of these it could do so. The only constraints, I would then say,
are two. One is that there is still in place, as far as I know,
a de facto moratorium so that this process would be aborted
by the refusal of 8 Member States to process those applications.
Secondly, of course, arising out of the FSEs the view (which the
industry will hold just as well as anyone else) that the environment
(I use that in the wider sense) is not entirely appropriate for
proceeding with this. There would be intense public resistance.
But that is the legal process as I have spelt it out.
Mr Thomas: Thank you for that clarification.
It is useful.
Q12 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Just before we move on, going back to the points which Mr Challen
was raising, you were satisfied in the end, were you, that the
whole process was fair and above board? You have referred to the
pressure on Ministers' careers, the intensity of enthusiasm in
certain parts of Government and you are even quoted as saying,
"Corruption is a very strong word but there is no doubt that
scientists are influenced."
Mr Meacher: I am not sure where
that quote comes from or what it exactly refers to because I am
not suggesting that the Scientific Steering Committee were in
any way influenced to reach other than the results they did.
Q13 Chairman: Or that the questions
were framed in such a way as to reach certain conclusions?
Mr Meacher: No, I do not think
that. As I say, I am not exactly sure, Chairman, of the reference
you are referring to but what I was saying was that in this area
(namely biotechnology), as in other areas like the chemical industry,
the nuclear industry, the motor car industry, there are very powerful
vested interests and the advisory committees which have been set
up by Government to give what purports to be independent advice
to Government about difficult current problems and how they might
be dealt with I think are committees where we need to be extremely
careful that the people we appoint are not subject to influences
which could affect that judgment. I think that either current
or recent financial or industrial links are one area, if that
is known, where however elevated the individual is that person
should be excluded.
Q14 Chairman: But you are satisfied
that in this case the process was fair?
Mr Meacher: In this case I do
not think it applies. I am being given the exact quote. Perhaps
I could just see that. This is Midland Independent Newspapers,
the Birmingham Post, Simon Baker. Yes, I do recognise that now.
I was talking about the position of scientists in general, I was
not talking specifically about the Farm Scale Evaluations.
Q15 Chairman: So you were taken out
of context?
Mr Meacher: Well, if it is applied
to the Farm Scale Evaluations it is taking it out of context.
I was asked a generalised question. It may have been, for example,
to do with the Science Review Panel, which was set up by the Government,
chaired by Sir David King, where there were two members, Andrew
Stirling and Carlo Liefert, who notoriously were pressured into
resigning or felt obliged to resign and the reasons behind that
were because they felt that their funding would be cut off or
their careers damaged if they persisted. It was that kind of influence
that I was referring to, but I in no way believe that that affected
the result of the trials.
Chairman: I am delighted that we have
managed to clear that up.
Q16 Mrs Clark: If we could come back
to the sort of rather narrow remit which Mr Challen referred to
earlier about the farm scale trials, in addition to that they
were actually set up to answer some very definite and specific
questions about the effects of very definite and specific crops.
Could we actually apply the findings and results of these to other
GM crops or are we going to have to look at it as a trial on a
crop by crop process?
Mr Meacher: I think it has to
be specific to these crops and indeed I think that is accepted
by everyone. Officials here and in other countries I visited,
for example New Zealand, who were contemplating exactly the same
situation, lifting the moratorium, were all agreed that it has
to be on a case by case basis.
Q17 Mrs Clark: Therefore, accepting
that, we could have years and years of these trials on individual
crops going on ad infinitum before reaching a decision
or taking a decision on a crop by crop basis?
Mr Meacher: Yes. In the case of
each crop, as far as I know the industry accepts and certainly
the Government takes the view that there would have to be a decision
on a crop by crop basis and indeed what I think is very significant
and which has had hardly any attention is that if you read the
small print of these Farm Scale Evaluation trial results they
are very interesting because they do show massive differences
in biodiversity impacts between different crops. If I could just
give one example of that, beetles, I quote, "An average of
1,707 beetles over a year were collected"—this is in
these trials—"in conventional beet fields marginally
ahead of the 1,576 found in GM beet fields." But the key
point and the reason I mention this is that that is more than
double the number of beetles found in GM or conventional maize
and 50-60% more than the number found in oilseed rape. That is
not a result which anyone expected. I do not think the scientists
expected it and I think it is a very interesting result because
it does show that there is an awful lot of knowledge that we do
not yet have and before we take a decision which is potentially
irreversible we should collect that information. But that does
mean that it specifically must be on a crop by crop basis.
Q18 Mrs Clark: So if we then go back
to the voluntary arrangement, as we have agreed, the SCIMAC arrangement
and agreement with Government, would this hold or would it in
fact collapse if Government were to very properly, as you suggested,
insist on specific farm scale trials for each crop? What do you
think?
Mr Meacher: I am saying that that
is the necessary process. Whether that actually happens of course
depends on industry deciding to press the matter. Of course it
is entirely a matter for them but it would seem to me, in the
light of these latest results, that it would be very surprising
if the industry were to come forward with new applications because
the environmental testing has been totally unexpected—I
do not think the Government expected it, I do not think the industry
expected it and I certainly did not expect it—and if we
had further trials I think we are open to a great deal of uncertainty,
together with the fact that public opinion, if anything (and there
is evidence again if you look at the trials and the GM nation
debate), over the last four or five years has hardened against
GM rather than softened, contrary to what many people expected.
Q19 Mrs Clark: If we did have any
further trials, if it was decided to do so, who in fact would
pick up the cost?
Mr Meacher: Well, in my opinion
the answer to that should clearly be the industry. The Government
paid for the research costs of this trial because the Government
initiated it for their own purposes to find out the environmental
impacts. I think that is reasonable. The cost was something like
£5.5 million, which is quite a lot of money but I think it
had a result which is well worth the money expended, but I do
not think the Government should continue to do this and if industry
wished to press the matter with other crops then I think they
pay, either on the basis of an industry levy or, it seems to me
much more likely, on the basis that each industrial applicant
pays for its own research. There are other parallels for that
in industry in other areas, for example chemicals.
Mrs Clark: Thank you.
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