Sowing the seeds in the GM debate

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Former Vice-Chancellor Professor Gordon Conway is discovering the power of his current position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. As a result of worldwide pressure from Professor Conway and other influential lobbyists, multinational seed firm Monsanto has announced that it will discontinue development work on the so-called "terminator gene", which uses technology that makes food crops sterile.

According to a letter sent to Professor Conway, the biotechnology company based its decision not to commercialize the terminator technology on a wide range of input from its various stakeholders and other experts, including the Rockefeller president. In June of this year Professor Conway, a noted authority on agriculture in the developing world and author of The Doubly Green Revolution. Food For All in The 21st Century, urged Monsanto to disavow the use of the terminator technology in a speech he made to its Board of Trustees. Professor Conway had been invited to address the board as part of the company's promise of wider consultation on its biotechnology activities.

"We welcome this move as a first step toward ensuring that the fruits of plant biotechnology are made available to poor farmers in the developing world," said Professor Conway in response to the letter. However, the Rockefeller Foundation continues to challenge Monsanto and other multinational seed companies to support labelling and to make other concessions necessary to insure that plant biotechnology is better accepted by consumers. The idea of using "terminator" technologies designed to prevent germination of harvested grain as seed, thereby blocking farmers in developing countries from saving their own seed for re-sowing, has engendered strong opposition in many quarters. Professor Conway and other lobbyists believe that if farmers purchase such seed and attempt to reuse it, the negative consequences may outweigh any social benefits in protecting innovation.

Current faculty at Sussex have been influential recently in the ongoing GM debate. A team led by Dr Erik Millstone of SPRU argued in Nature that the idea that GM plants would be chemically the same as conventionally bred plants was "pseudoscientific". They claimed that genetically altered crops - such as Monsanto's herbicide-resistant soybean - could not be regarded as safe until they had passed the toxicity tests used for pharmaceutical products. Erik and his colleagues dispute the concept of "substantial equivalence", which proposes that if a genetically modified (GM) food is substantially equivalent to the organism on which modification was carried out, it should be regarded as similarly acceptable and can be assumed to pose no new health risks. Writing in Nature, the three authors claim that the concept is vague and has not been properly defined.

Erik, an expert on food-safety policy, said, "I am not arguing that all GM foods must always and indefinitely be tested to exhaustion, but I am arguing that if you start by assuming that known genetic and compositional differences are toxicologically insignificant you risk making serious mistakes."

In response to the article, five genetic engineers launched a counter-offensive in Nature, describing the arguments as "ill informed" and saying that they could equally be applied to every new strain of crops that is bred in a conventional manner. One of Erik's co-authors was Sue Mayer of GeneWatch UK. She has also just published a major new report in conjunction with SPRU's Dr Andy Stirling.

The pair have created a "map" of the debate surrounding GM crops, using a new technique called "multi-criteria mapping". The approach is familiar in areas like energy and land-use planning but - until now - has not been applied to the GM crops issue in the UK.

Instead of asserting a single "right" (or "wrong") answer, the new method highlights the uncertainties and the reasons for disagreement, and draws a "map" of the assumptions under which different options look "best".

Unilever, which funded the study, sees it as a useful contribution to the development of methods to help give greater focus to the societal aspects of consumer needs in business decision making. "Multi-criteria mapping", said Andy, "shows that difficult policy choices are not just about 'sound science' - they are about people's values and interests as well. If regulation is not clear about this, then the unproductive conflict will continue."