Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-36)
17 MAY 2004
DR SUE
MAYER, DR
DOUG PARR
AND LORD
MELCHETT
Q20 Chairman: Have you undertaken any
independent modelling of this? Obviously, you have not done any
research on the distances, but have you looked at modelling to
see the implications for different crops?
Dr Mayer: Do you mean in terms
of the distances?
Q21 Chairman: Yes, to look at some form
of scientific rationale, which you could then present to the Government
and say, "according to our projections, you are way within
the zone of practicable contamination".
Dr Mayer: We have not done that
specifically to set distances at the moment. We certainly would
agree with the Soil Association that oilseed rape, for a variety
of reasons, is a foolish GM crop to grow commercially, not just
because of the co-existence problems. We think that is a really
difficult one to handle. We would definitely want to go much higher
than the 100 metres that have been suggested at the moment, and
we would have to think about a kilometre as the very minimum.
With sugar and fodder beet, again we have a 6-metre separation
distance at the moment, but we would need to go wider than that.
We have to think of the other measures that have to be in place
as well, not just separation distances.
Lord Melchett: There have been
plenty of scientific studies, and we quote some of them in our
evidence, paragraphs 19-24. There is plenty of work being done,
which tends to show quite variable results, which is why I said
you cannot under-estimate the influence of topography and geography,
the relationship between different fields, the flight patterns
of honey bees, the presence or absence of bees, and the numbers
of wild bees as well as honey bees—all sorts of complex
variables in the countryside, which always mess up neat scientific
or bureaucratic views about what you should and should not do.
Dr Mayer: Underlying the need
for that precautionary period of introduction, AEBC state, and
we would endorse, that because of these uncertainties, it is incredibly
difficult to say, "this distance will work"; it may
or may not. A precautionary period with monitoring is vital.
Q22 Mr Jack: Lord Melchett, people buying
organic produce at the present time, putting aside GM for one
moment, would not like to think that it was contaminated by anything,
because they are buying organic. Are there other types of contaminant
that you monitored which give some clue as to practical answers
and guidance in relation to GM—either chemical or, in the
case of non-GM seed invading GM crops? What does non-GM contamination
tell us about this problem in the real world?
Lord Melchett: Only a limited
amount, but there is some monitoring. As mentioned, we monitor
pesticide presence in organic food ourselves, as part of our certification
role. When a farmer is converting to organic, one of the requirements
of the certifying body would be to look at the likely susceptibility
of spray drift from neighbours who are not organic, and to require
measures to be taken—buffer zones, hedges to be planted
and things of that sort.
Q23 Mr Jack: In the case of crops, other
than contamination through spray drift, if you had contamination
by seed from adjoining fields, what clues would that give as far
as dealing with the problem the Government of the day would have
if we were in a regime where the approved GM crop was going to
be planted? I do not disagree with your analysis that in the countryside
it does not work in neat packages, with micro-climates, et
cetera, which could all influence that, but in terms of existing
crops and their contamination, and movement of seed, what lessons
does that teach us? There must be parallels with that. I presume
GM seed and GM pollen is not different from any other.
Dr Mayer: The main lessons come
from seed purity, because that is an important standard for the
industry to maintain. It has some usefulness and has been important
in thinking about separation distances. Its limitation comes because
when you look at seed purity, you are not looking at genetic purity;
you are usually looking at what the crop looks like. That does
not necessarily look dramatically different from when you introduce
a gene for herbicide tolerance or insect resistance. So you can
have a crop that broadly looks the same but may have had more
genetic contamination than you might imagine. There are data that
are useful, but they are not always directly applicable.
Lord Melchett: The other difference
that has concerned us is the risk with a crop like oilseed rape,
and in a more limited way sugar beet, is of the genetic engineering,
the DNA, spreading to a wild relative. This is a living thing.
It is not like a spray or a particular seed coated with some chemical
that is not used in organic agriculture. A wheat seed can be conventional
or organic; the only difference is whether there is some chemical
treatment on the seed, which you cannot use in organic. It is
nothing about the wheat plant or the stuff inside the seed that
makes it not organic and it is perfectly usable. A GM wheat seed
would have altered DNA, which would make it unacceptable for organic,
and there is nothing you could do about that. You could not just
coat it with something and it would be all right. If that then
spreads to plants that grow wild on a farm, that is a huge risk
to organic status because then you have GM material growing on
the farm. So there is not a lot to learn from—
Q24 Mr Jack: I have one question about
the real world practicalities. If it came to pass that a GM crop
eventually were planted in this country, the Government would
try to define the basis of the regime and the separation distance
would be decided. Assuming a situation where ringed round the
organic crop, at the appropriate separation distances, is a complete
circle of GM crops, and a contamination situation occurred, if
you are using identical seed by what means would you determine
who the contaminator was?
Lord Melchett: You would not need
to ring the poor old organic farmer with GM crops. If there were
a couple within six miles, he would not know who to sue. Our legal
advice is that he would have no basis to take legal action unless
you have a liability regime which put liability on the consent-holder,
the company that has consent to release the GM. From our point
of view, as a farming organisation, this would have the huge advantage
that you would not have farmers trying to sue other farmers, which
has happened to some extent in the United States and Canada; there
has been that risk. We think that if there is one thing you should
avoid, it is that. Liability should be on the consent-holder,
the chemical company with permission, with the seed company with
permission to release that product into the environment; and then
you do not need to worry about which of your neighbours might
or might not have been to blame. It could have been all of them
if you were ringed by them.
Chairman: We are going to look at that
in more detail in a minute, but before we get to product liability
let us look at the idea of GM-free zones.
Q25 Joan Ruddock: You have concentrated
a great deal on organic, and let us bear in mind that the vast
majority of consumers want non-GM, albeit they are happy with
conventional. Many people want to campaign to have GM-free zones,
but the Government has said it would be inconsistent with European
law to put such zones on a statutory basis; but they say there
should be the possibility of having them on a voluntary basis.
Do you think there is any chance that European law might be varied
so that statutory provision could be made, and, if so, what would
be the changes required to European law to produce a statutory
regime for GM-free zones?
Dr Mayer: It should not be left
for national jurisdictions to put in their own rules, and it should
be done on a Europe-wide basis. There are other countries across
Europe that would agree with that. That would be the logical place
for the facility for GM-free zones—the piece of European
law where that should sit.
Lord Melchett: We would welcome
GM-free zones, and a lot of the pressure for this has come from
areas where organic farming is a significant part of the local
agricultural economy. You can see people grouping together, elected
representatives and others, wanting to protect those interests.
There are interests in local food, and there is a trust in local
food, whether it is organic or not—although in the majority
it is not organic. I think there is sufficient pressure from a
large number of different regions in Europe, and from Wales in
particular in the United Kingdom, for the Commission to need to
move a little. They are only being as difficult as they are because
of the impending WTO case, not because there is anything in European
law or the constitution that prevents them responding to the views
of locally-elected, democratically-elected representatives, which
is where this pressure is coming from.
Q26 Joan Ruddock: While it is not yet
known if there is any prospect for that change, do any of you
see any merit in having voluntary GM-free zones, and, if so, how
could they work, and what advice would the Government need to
give?
Dr Parr: It is extremely difficult
to see how you could make a voluntary GM-free zone stick. Even
with the fuss in Scotland about GMOs, the Scottish Executive is
still not sure that it could make a voluntary GM-free zone stick
in the circumstances where commercial planting of maize was permitted,
because it only takes one farmer after all to completely nullify
that. It does not seem to us to be a viable mechanism on any sort
of sensible scale.
Q27 Joan Ruddock: So Defra has really
got it wrong!
Dr Parr: If they are advocating
voluntary GM-free zones, I just think it is not in real-world
practicality.
Dr Mayer: In other areas such
as waste, where you have voluntary schemes, they are usually backed
up by some kind of system. People enter into them voluntarily,
but then you have a legal back-up system so that people do not
suddenly drop out of them or change their minds, or leave a group
of farmers perhaps in the middle of a season at a complete disadvantage.
To envisage that they would work, just as purely voluntary happy
little events—there are individual farmers who are very
keen to try GM and it may be that they could stop a whole area
going ahead, even if the local parish councils would prefer to
have a GM-free area.
Lord Melchett: Another difficulty
is the extent to which the management of farmland changes pretty
regularly. The average age of farmers is high and people retire.
Very often, farms are amalgamated and contract-farming arrangements
are made. There are companies farming bits of farmland all over
England, Wales and Scotland. It seems to me very unlikely that
you could have a system that did not prevent a change of ownership
or a change of management of the land, altering what had been
agreed under some prior management or ownership.
Q28 Joan Ruddock: You would have to have
statutory back-up to a voluntary scheme if it was to hold for
any length of time.
Lord Melchett: You definitely
would, but I also think that the voluntary GM-free zone movement
has been extremely valuable as an expression of local public opinion
and local democratic opinion, because most of these zones have
been established, although not all of them, by democratically
elected councils and assemblies and so on. That has been a counterweight
to a national government that has not been responding to public
opinion in this area.
Q29 Chairman: When organisations such
as county councils pass motions to say they are going to be GM-free,
that may be a statement of their wish to be so, but do you think
that could be upheld in law; or is it fairly meaningless, a bit
like nuclear-free statements—nice in theory but not really
effective?
Lord Melchett: Nuclear-free zones
is an unfair one. First of all, councils have public procurement
policies that can insist on no GM, and the food they serve in
a wide range of places they are responsible for. They are often
landowners that own farmland and allotments. They can impose GM-free
policies there. They have more say than they do when a cloud of
radiation from Chernobyl is going to come over their area. As
I say, it is important that the public should have some democratic
means of expressing their point of view on this issue.
Q30 Alan Simpson: For those of us who
do not understand how co-existence can work, you fairly quickly
come to the question of liability. You will know that the Government
is currently consulting with stakeholders about this. Bayer CropScience,
which is due to follow you this afternoon, is on record as stating
effectively, "not us, Guv!" They say: "We have
not been asked to do anything of the kind anywhere else in the
world. We do not intend to start in the UK." What is your
reaction to that?
Dr Mayer: It is one of horror
really. The industry is in dire straits across the UK and Europe.
To tell the British public on the one hand that everything is
safe and manageable, and you can provide for non-GM food and it
is controllable; and on the other hand people ask if there is
any back-up to that system—"because any losses you
are going to face will be very small because you are telling us
the system is going to work"—when they say they are
not going to do that, it does not work very well logically. There
is an issue of justice and fairness in people's minds, given the
unwillingness of people to want to run those risks. I think they
are shooting themselves in the foot. One thing that might give
people confidence would be if they put their money where their
mouth was and that we are not going to be covering the country
in GM crops in the near future. Why not put forward a system in
good faith and back it up? Then maybe they would have a much better
future. I am puzzled.
Dr Parr: If you look at the public
attitude and research done right across Europe, the Public Perception
of Agricultural Biotechnology in Europe project looked at why
people are concerned about GM, and their concerns include health
and the environment, but one of the main reasons they are concerned
is that they do not feel the people and organisations who are
charged with taking forward GM technology are going to behave
responsibly. It seems to me that it is impossible to consider
people behaving responsibly if they will not claim ownership for
any effects their products will have if they effectively push
them out into the marketplace and say "it is your problem
now". As Sue said, they are both shooting themselves in the
foot and also, quite rightly, it raises deep concerns in the public
mind.
Lord Melchett: My reaction is
to say that it is not up to Bayer CropScience; it is up to governments
to decide, and the European Commission has made it clear that
they were devolving decisions about liability to national governments
not to multinational chemical companies. It is true that as far
as I know they have not been asked to or been made to do this
anywhere else in the world. But one basis of the dispute between
the European Union and North America is that the European Union
is trying to think through problems and sort out solutions before
introducing this technology, rather than introducing the technology
and then having to run around working out what we do when the
problems emerge, which is exactly what has happened in the United
States and Canada. It is not surprising they have not been able
to do it elsewhere, and I think the European Union has a chance,
and this country particularly, to give a lead in this area. It
has clearly got to be done. We have had experience in this country
of governments bailing out the farming industry when things go
badly wrong, and it is not a happy experience. I do not personally
think that anyone should have the cheek to ask the Treasury to
do it in the case of GM. I think that the people who stand to
profit should be willing to take the risk and pay if things go
wrong.
Dr Parr: The public purse has
ended up picking up previously, where liability has not been established,
over contaminated land and nuclear waste. Millions and millions
of pounds have flowed from the Treasury in order to sort this
out, and we should not let it happen over GM.
Q31 Alan Simpson: You might find a consensus
in the Committee that does not believe the Government should pick
up the tab on this. Can I ask you to explore the different dimension,
which is the industry saying there should be shared responsibility
and liability. Why should the industry be held liable for the
decisions made by a farmer to plant GM crops, knowing that they
would be planting next to an organic farmer, and causing the contamination
that follows? Why should the farmer be excluded from the liability?
Dr Mayer: I can envisage a system
where the farmer would not be excluded. If you made the biotechnology
company liable in the first instance, which is the easiest thing
to do because the identified contaminant could be traced back
to a company through the unique identifier system which is coming
in in Europe, then you would expect as a result of that the industry
to have established a set of contractual agreements with the people
it licenses the technology to. That would go on and on, down to
the farmer. The farmer will be expected to follow the co-existence
rules, for example. As soon as the company finds they are not,
they would indeed be able to reclaim their costs from the farmer.
You can see that that is the way that the system would work most
easily, without the public purse also having to pick up those
costs, or the affected farmer having to pick up that complicated
process of working out exactly where the contamination came from.
Q32 Chairman: It is quite possible for
somebody to plant these crops illegally, and that would be a perfectly
valid defence for one of the companies, to say "it was not
at our instigation". There are also many people in farming
that I would not define as a farmer; they have smallholdings and
may have a particular reason to want to grow some specific crop
which they think is going to grow quicker. How do we deal with
these kinds of problems?
Lord Melchett: It would not be
that easy for someone to plant one of these things illegally;
they have to get the seed from somewhere, and the seed is the
company's profit. The company that produces the seed is hanging
on to it and being very careful about selling it, and not allowing
people to save farm-produced seed. In America they have employed
the Pinkerton Detective Agency to go around checking that American
farmers are not saving seed, because they have to be able to sell
you new seed each year to make their profit from this technology.
I do not think illegal planting is that easy, and in any event,
if this is a technology which has some risks and which the companies
cannot control and is going to illegally spread anywhere, should
that not give us pause for thought about letting it be used at
all? They are saying: "We can control it; it will be safe;
we will know exactly what is happening; there will be clear rules;
farmers will be told what to do; we have years of experience of
doing this with other crops." Fine: take them at their word;
and if something goes wrong, they should be liable.
Chairman: From our experience of our
visit to Brazil, we know that not to be the case.
Q33 Alan Simpson: We do also know that
the companies that are connected with the illegal movement of
seeds from Argentina to Brazil are seeking to sue the Brazilian
farmers or the Brazilian Government if they try and export the
crops.
Lord Melchett: I am speechless
that you should think our agricultural industry is exactly comparable
to the Brazilian situation in all sorts of ways.
Chairman: We have just finished dealing
with sugar, so we know a lot about Brazil.
Q34 Alan Simpson: I wanted to finish
with a question about what we mean by "liability". If
we assume that in one form or another a liability regime is going
to be brought in, how wide would you want the Government to make
the concept of liability? We were talking initially about the
genetic contamination of a non-GM crop. Would you want the definition
to extend into the consequences of that contamination as it impacted
upon the food chain, on animal health, human health and the environment?
How wide a definition of "liability" ought we to be
considering as workable?
Dr Mayer: I understand that product
liability should address the health effects, if that were to be
the case, and might demand a bit more attention. The real gap
in that range of areas that you said seems to exist, for us would
be environmental liability. The Government has said it is going
to look at this in due course. We know that the European Directive
will not cover the majority of UK agriculture and environment.
The AEBC has made some very sensible and not very radical suggestions
to improve it and we certainly think those ought to be looked
at and taken forward quite seriously so at least we could have
some environmental system where there would be the potential for
remediation if it is possible and reclaiming those costs from
the people responsible, if that could be identified.
Lord Melchett: From an organic
perspective, we want to be sure that the liability regime would
allow organic farmers, food manufacturers, feed manufacturers
and retailers to recover economic loss as would be normal in suing
for damages, in tort. It would be the full range of economic loss,
which could be very considerable, and this is why this is such
a frightening prospect for organic farmers. Converting land to
organic farming and building up fertility, getting the system
working, is a very long-term process, altogether about ten years.
It is possible that if GM contamination got into wild plants on
that farm, the farm would lose its organic status and the loss
of capital value and future income would be enormous. The other
nightmare scenario for organic manufacturing companies particularly,
and retailers, is the possibility of a huge product recall. If
we found, for example, cows had been fed GM animal feed and nobody
knew until later and then hundreds of thousands of pounds worth
of cheese had been made, stored for years, gone into supermarkets,
we would be looking at millions of pounds' worth of potential
losses to completely innocent third parties like a retailer or
a food manufacturer. That was the case with StarLink contamination,
the maize contamination in the United States, it was a very expensive
product recall because of contamination.
Dr Parr: I would just like to
reiterate Sue's call for environmental liability which at the
moment I do not feel is adequately covered anywhere, but with
the corollary, of course, that should any commercial plantings
go ahead that this is not an empty statute because historically
it has been shown how difficult it is to make a case stick for
environmental liability, partly because there is not the appropriate
level of scientific support and baseline information to give information
about that. We would want an environmental regime, but with the
corollary of something to help it actually be made manifest and
real.
Chairman: Joan, could you just finish
with the tribunal.
Q35 Joan Ruddock: Before I do that, Chairman,
I just wanted to check with Lord Melchett, in the disaster scenario
that you described as an economic one, are you saying very clearly
that no existing laws would be adequate to deal with that scenario?
Lord Melchett: Not from the point
of view of the farmer. It depends on the circumstance. If you
bought a product from somebody who sold it to you with a contract
of sale and they hold out the product to be organic and that turns
out to be wrong, you can sue them under contract law for just
selling you something that was not fit for the purpose you sold
it for. When you get back to the source of the contamination and
where did it come from, as has already been said, there could
be more than one person planting the thing, and it is not just
that, it could have been the lorry that collected your grain that
contaminated it, it could have been the contract combine that
came in and had not been completely 100% cleaned, which frankly
is a physical impossibility during any realistic harvest. The
sources of contamination and, therefore, the cause of your economic
loss are a lot more than just neighbouring farmers, in real life
on ordinary farms. For that reason alone, as an ordinary farmer,
there is no hope of recouping your economic loss. You might get
the bizarre situation where farmers would be bankrupted by this
but supermarkets would not be.
Q36 Joan Ruddock: GeneWatch recommended
that it would help if an independent tribunal could be set up
to look at GM liability. If that were to be the case, who would
you see being represented on that tribunal?
Dr Mayer: We are taking this cue
partly from the AEBC, who also suggested that you could have a
tribunal to arbitrate and see fairness to all parties, be it the
industry or the contaminated farmer. You would have a mixture
probably of lawyers and technical experts and possibly also public
interest or lay representatives who would be able to ensure that
fair play was done. There are, if you like, best practices for
tribunals and how they should work and operate and they would
be important to bring into play in something like this.
Chairman: Thank you for your time. If
you said anything that you wish you had not said, it is hard luck
because we are being televised as well as being on the record.
There may be things you wish to clarify or expand upon and we
would be only too happy to receive further evidence. Thank you.
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