Chain reactions

yet to find an argument that has convinced the public that GM is a green revolution we can ill afford to miss out on. Until ministers do so, GM crops will remain a much talked about idea, but never an eaten foodstuff.” “Proven: environmental dangers that may halt GM revolution” headed The Independent’s coverage. “British scientists delivered a massive blow to the case for genetically modified crops yesterday when they showed, in a trail-blazing study, that growing them could harm the environment,” asserted environment editor Michael McCarthy. Apparently unaware that the pharmaceutical industry has been using recombinant organisms for many years to make life-saving drugs, the Independent’s editorial writer added: “It may yet be that genetic engineering could produce huge benefits to humankind, helping to feed the multitudes and cure them of all manner of diseases. These were the promises that lured a technocratic prime minister into uncritical support for Britain’s biotechnology industry.” ‘The verdict could hardly be more devastating for a government that always thinks it knows best,’ said the Daily Mail. “Three years of farm trials on GM crops have shown that they risk creating a biological desert, with our countryside denuded of butterflies, bees, beetles and songbirds.” Journalists on all sides told readers that, as the Daily Mirror put it most succinctly, “the technology damages wildlife”. Few voices pointed out that the trials were actually about the (intended and predictable) effects of powerful weedkillers rather than about transgenic manipulation as a generic process. Likewise, few observed that GM was being blamed for environmental consequences of the increasing intensification of agriculture that has occurred ever since the industrial revolution. One person who did offer this wider insight was Andy Coghlan in the weekly magazine, New Scientist. “Although these farmscale evaluations are being portrayed as tests of the environmental credentials of GM crops, it is really the weedkillers to which they are resistant that are on trial,” Coghlan wrote. If the aim of the exercise really was to save farmland wildlife, then banning any of the transgenic plants tested was unlikely to make much difference. “That’s because herbicide use in the UK is soaring even before any GM crops are introduced. And in the long term, farmers denied GM crops may instead turn to nonGM crops bred to be resistant to the herbicides.” Now being developed, these do not have to undergo the same regulatory scrutiny as transgenic plants. The Independent’s report hinted that GM per se should not be the target of criticism, but did not explore the idea further. It did provide a telling quote from Brian Johnson of English Nature: “The results confirm our long-held concerns that some (my italics) GM-herbicide resistant crops could further intensify (my italics) arable farming and harm wildlife.” Cogent remarks not from journalists but from newspaper readers amplified these much more reasonable perspectives. “I can hardly believe it,” wrote Michael Egan in the Independent. “An intensive scientific investigation reveals that the use of aggressive weedkillers reduces the number of weeds, which in turn has an effect on wildlife further along the food chain.” In consequence, transgenic technology “carries the can.” “Can we please have a more adult reflection on the whole context?... It is intensive, monocultural farming practice that has the real environmental impact, and it is our desire for cheap food that has made this happen. To portray GM technology itself as being fundamentally responsible for the study findings... is wholly misleading and deflects attention from deeper considerations.” True. But why leave it to readers to make the most crucial points of all?