Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-194)
12 NOVEMBER 2003
MR PETE
RILEY AND
MS EMILY
DIAMAND
Q180 Mr Challen: If the science that
is produced, perhaps by biotech companies if they produce research,
is peer reviewed, would you be happy with that? Would you say
it was free of any taint of manipulation or whatever?
Mr Riley: I think that would be
a step forward in terms of what we have at the moment, which is
un-peer reviewed, badly designed experiments that get through
the regulatory process. In the pesticides approval process, as
far as I know, the bill is picked up by the biotech companies
in terms of getting it through the process, so the dossier of
information which is significant and large would be paid for by
them. I think there are some question marks relating to the peer
reviewing of that material but the principle of them paying is
established in the pesticide approval process.
Q181 Mr Challen: Given that the crops
in these trials have all passed the regulatory hurdles before
these trials started, would you say that the trials provide enough
information for us now to see the full commercialisation of these
crops?
Ms Diamand: They have not passed
all the regulatory hurdles. This is one of our arguments about
why, for a start, the biotech companies should have been paying
for this. The applications have been put into the European Union
but they have not been approved yet. The basic environmental issues
that are standard to all GM crops have not been assessed, the
food safety has not been assessed. What we are actually saying
is that those applications should be rejected on the basis that—
Q182 Mr Thomas: Was that not the
voluntary abeyance of the process by the biotech companies in
order for the field scale evaluations to go ahead?
Ms Diamand: Chardon LL does have
a marketing consent at the European level. They still need to
get seeds or variety approval and they have not been granted that
yet. So, they still could not have planted it commercially. At
the time that the trials started, Monsanto had not even put in
an application for marketing consent for the sugar beet and fodder
beet crops—well, it had not put in an application for the
sugar beet, but it had put in an application for the fodder beet
which had been criticised by the advisory committees and that
had actually been sent back. So, no, they had not passed their
regulatory hurdles and the requirement under the previous 90/220
Directive, in 1998, it was decided at the Council of Environmental
Ministers that the risk assessment was not rigorous enough and,
from then on, they said that these kind of impacts, indirect effects
and so forth, should be considered in advance of new legislation
and that legislation came into force this year. So, the legal
requirement was on the biotech companies to look at indirect effects
but they have not even had approval yet in the case of oilseed
rape and—
Mr Riley: None of these crops
can be sold or grown commercially in the European Union or the
UK at the moment. The maize has a GMO approval but it still needs
a seed approval and it still needs the approval of the Pesticide
Safety Directorate for the use of glufosinate ammonium on it.
So, there are two more regulatory hoops to go through before it
could be sold to farmers and grown commercially.
Q183 Mr Challen: The European Union
has ruled against Austria declaring itself a GM-free zone. What
are the implications of that for decision making in this country
and the implications for, I believe, your policy of encouraging
local authorities to declare themselves GM-free zones?
Mr Riley: The Austrians used the
European Treaty legislation, Article 95 if I remember correctly,
and our approach is using the GMO regulations, Article 19. So,
we are actually using a different regulatory approach. Our approach
is on a crop-by-crop basis. So, if you wanted to remain GM free,
if GM maize came on to the market, you would have to have a condition
put on the consent for that maize that it could not be grown in
area X of the European Community. I think what the Austrians were
looking for is a blanket ban on all GM crops in Austria and it
appears that that is not legally possible at the moment.
Ms Diamand: The Austrians are
actually challenging that now. As far as the UK Government are
concerned, at least in the case of the beet crops and oilseed
rape crops, it can easily use its voting rights within decisions
on marking applications to object to these being given approval.
So, it has the opportunity to do that, at least in these crops.
Q184 Mr Challen: What definition
of GM free would it be using in these circumstances because clearly,
from what I have read, you can sell the stuff with 1% GM content
as GM free. These things now come down to definition and things
have already got out of hand and, in particular, organic farmers
are very worried that they would lose their organic status if
it was found that a very small percentage, perhaps 1%, was discovered
to be, as it were, contaminated by GM.
Mr Riley: I think under the current
way the organic standard has been operated in the UK if any detectable
was found in any organic crop, then the organic status would be
lost and potentially lost from the land where it was grown, so
there would be quite serious economic impacts. I think that impact
goes wider than that because, at the moment, we are told by the
major food retailers that they are largely operating to a threshold
of not detectable at 0.1% and that is the best we can do given
the current technology for analysis. So, anything over that would
potentially put contracts for supplying supermarkets in jeopardy.
However, the legislation on traceability and labelling will require
labelling to only take place if the GM content of any of the ingredients
exceeds 0.9%, so it is possible that 0.5% presence in a Soya-based
product could be passed as non GM. We regret that because we think
that 0.1% is the target we should be going for, for a number of
reasons. One is because that is what we think people really want.
Secondly, there are some environmental implications of having
a higher threshold in that, in crops like oilseed rape, you may
well, over the course of time, build up problems with volunteers
and increase the need for using more herbicides as has happened
in Canada. Thirdly, if you contaminate seed lots to levels of
between 0.1 and 0.9 or 0.7, whatever the level is going to be,
that actually starts making decisions for future generations about
whether they have GM or not. So, we think keeping it tight at
the moment at 0.1% is a sensible precautionary route. It is easier
to relax thresholds than try and claw back genes that have escaped
into the gene pool.
Q185 Chairman: Just on the economic
impacts on, say, organic farming, presumably one of the things
you would like to see and see very soon is a kind of robust legal
framework in order that everybody knows where liability lies.
Presumably also, you would like not to see the taxpayer being
the last resort when things go wrong?
Mr Riley: I think it is entirely
appropriate that if new technology is brought on to the market
of any sort really, that those profiting should carry the liability.
We think that will concentrate the minds of directors of companies,
so that they will really scrutinise the scientific evidence they
have to back up their claims of safety before they start marketing
them and that can only be beneficial and I think that, in the
long term, it will lead to a much better science.
Q186 Chairman: And it would helpful
if that kind of regime were in place before anymore farm trials—
Mr Riley: I would say it is absolutely
essential for it to be in place before anything else takes place.
Q187 Joan Walley: Can I just go back
to the point you were making about labelling and about traceability
and so on and just ask you what you think the implications of
the farm trials are in respect of the ability of organic producers
to carry on being organic producers. To what extent do you feel
that the farm scale trials showed that organic production could
be undermined?
Mr Riley: As you probably know,
during the trials, the Soil Association, who are the leading organic
certifier in the UK, took a very precautionary view and advised
anybody who was growing similar crops, within I think it is up
to six miles depending on the species involved, that they would
be under threat of losing their certification.
Q188 Mr Thomas: That they would lose
the certification?
Mr Riley: If they were contaminated
to a detectable level.
Q189 Mr Thomas: Did anyone become
contaminated?
Mr Riley: Not as far as I know
but I do know a farmer in Lincolnshire who decided not to grow
a crop as a result of an adjacent maize crop near his farm and
that was quite a high-value crop because it was not being grown
for animal feed, it was actually being grown for producing some
sort of cosmetics. I do not know the details of what happens but
it involves some process. It was an organic cosmetic, so potentially
a high-value crop, and he decided not to go ahead and plant that.
We also know that beekeepers were instructed to keep bees six
miles away. We undertook our own research around one of the pilot
studies in a model farm near Watlington and there we did two things.
We monitored pollen in the air coming off this spring oilseed
rape crop in 1999 using the services of the National Pollen Research
Unit and they set up monitoring points around it and downwind
and found that in fact GM pollen was travelling well beyond the
50/200 metre separation in distances. We also employed a former
MAFF bee expert to put pollen traps on the beehives around the
area and we found that the bees were travelling at least four-and-a-half
kilometres to collect pollen from this particular GM crop. We
also subsequently brought pollen in areas where farm scale evaluations
took place and found GM pollen to be present in them. So, there
are real commercial issues here around organic farmers and around
bee keepers, but I think equally importantly around farmers who
are supplying the supermarkets who are looking for a non-detectable
limit and equally farmers who save their own seeds because, although
the perception is that it is in southern countries where farmers
save their own seeds, believe me that there is a significant amount
of seed saving that goes on in UK agriculture because it saves
money and that is what farmers are trying to do at the moment
because of the poor returns on arable crops.
Q190 Sue Doughty: A lot of the time
we have queries about why the Government are going forwards with
this or why they have been so keen and one of the things that
has been generally thought as a reason is that the Government
are under pressure by the trade to get a pay back for the research
that has been done in the 1980s and the 1990s and that this is
a motivation. Do you think that the Government are under this
pressure?
Mr Riley: They were. In the days
when the Government used to answer parliamentary questions about
who they had meetings with, it was pretty obvious that they were
having fairly frequent meetings with the biotechnology companies.
Subsequently, they do not answer those questions any more, so
we do not know the recent history of which ministers met which
biotechnology company. There is a lot of pressure coming on from
the Bush administration who has been increasingly under pressure
from the biotechnology industry in the States as well and of course
we now have a complaint from the US through the WTO about the
de facto moratorium in the European Union. So, I think
that there is a significant amount of political pressure and a
significant amount of commercial pressure on the Government. On
the other hand, there is a significant amount of voter pressure
and a significant amount of commercial pressure coming on them
from the supermarkets as well because they clearly want to do
what their customers are asking for and the introduction of commercial
GM crops in the UK at the present time would make the supermarkets'
lives very difficult indeed.
Q191 Sue Doughty: Would you be happy
if GM-crop cultivation was actually halted in the UK just on the
basis of there being no demand rather than on the basis of the
uncertainties about human health and the environmental impacts?
In other words, rather than looking to all these things that we
have had a very extensive discussion about, just say, "Why
don't you just go away and not bother about them because nobody
wants them?".
Mr Riley: I think that, in terms
of the current generation which bring very little benefit to anybody
apart from the people who sell weedkillers, then, yes, I think
that is the answer. We do not think that it should be left to
the market and it is a political decision and I think that the
Government have an opportunity here, if they want to grasp it,
to actually restore UK agriculture over a period of 10 to 15 years
and bring some solid research in to address all the environmental
problems of agriculture and find out the best way and the most
sustainable way of growing arable crops in this country and the
best way to handle fertilizers etc, etc, and the best way to avoid
using pesticides and herbicides. In 15 years' time, if we did
that, then British agriculture may well be a lot stronger and
a lot fitter.
Q192 Chairman: No more farm scale
trials?
Mr Riley: We see no justification
for any more farm scale trials at the moment until fundamental
problems of co-existence, liability, cross-pollination and food
safety are resolved.
Q193 Chairman: Is there anything
that we have not asked you that you would like to be asked or
anything that you would like to say by way of conclusion?
Mr Riley: I think we are probably
exhausted but, if on the way home we think ah, we should have
said that, could we put a supplementary memorandum in?[30]
Q194 Chairman: You are always welcome
to do that.
Mr Riley: We do have some pictures
of some maize crops that you might find interesting, if we could
submit those as well.[31]
Chairman: Yes. Thank you very much indeed
for giving evidence. It has been a useful session.
30 See supplementary memorandum. Back
31
Not printed. Back
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