March 18, 2014
UK calls for expansion of GM crops planting
UK''s Prime Minister David Cameron''s official science advisers have called for genetically modified (GM) crops to be expanded in the UK by scrapping "dysfunctional" regulations that risk curtailing the UK''s food supply.
In a report published on Friday (Mar 7), the scientists say GM crops should face the same regulation as conventional crops and that the UK government should take back powers from Brussels to be able to unilaterally approve the growing of GM crops across the UK.
The plant science experts who wrote the report argue that decades of use of GM crops around the world have revealed no adverse effects. They say the UK should forge ahead with GM crops to help secure future food supplies, ensure UK farms do not become uncompetitive and benefit the UK''s knowledge economy. GM crops are now grown on 12% of the entire world''s arable land but are barely used in the EU following years of public concern.
UK''s chief scientific adviser, Sir Mark Walport and the report''s authors argue that EU regulation- which has approved just two GM crops compared to 96 in the US- must be changed to test each crop on its merits, not on whether it was bred conventionally or by GM techniques. "When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts," said Walport. "The EU decision-making has been dysfunctional. It makes much more logical sense to regulate on a product-by-product basis: technologies are neither universally safe nor universally unsafe."
"The process takes years and costs millions of euros for each crop. Not surprisingly, there are very few applicants," said the report''s lead author, Sir David Baulcombe, at the University of Cambridge. The report notes that the EU imports 70% of its animal feed, most of it GM.
The report backs the conclusion of the European Academies Science Advisory Council that "there is no rational basis for the current stringent regulatory process".
The first GM plants were grown more than 30 years ago and the first commercial GM crop – the Flavr Savr tomato- was grown 20 years ago in the US. Now the area cultivated for GM crops is doubling every five years and already 80% of soy and cotton has been genetically modified to withstand pesticides or repel pests. GM crops in development could withstand pests or diseases such as potato blight, which costs US$5 billion a year, cope with heat or drought, or have better nutritional or storage properties. One GM crop would even produce the healthy Omega-three oils usually derived from fish.
But the report, commissioned by the prime minister''s Council for Science and Technology and endorsed by Walport, recognises that significant public opposition remains.
The prime minister will issue an official response to the report, although there is no set timescale for that to be published. In January, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, backed GM crops in a speech: "Europe risks becoming the museum of world farming as innovative companies make decisions to invest and develop new technologies in other markets."