The ethical minefield of GM crops

9:20am Wednesday 14th May 2008

The rising cost of food, because of drought, the price of diesel, the demand from 75 million more people each year and an increasing middle class in the developing world has put the emphasis, once again, on the genetic modification of crops.

Farmers have always improved their plants and animals by selection to get higher yields or leaner meat. It has been a slow process of trial and error, controlled pollination and normal breeding.

Genetic modification, or GM, is very different and involves the addition of an extra gene, often from another species, and it raises questions about possible long-term health problems and the effect on the surrounding natural vegetation and wildlife.

Successful GM crops would need to increase the amount of food, reduce the use of herbicides and pesticides, and make the benefits available to all farmers including those who produce food for their own consumption.

There would also need to be a trustworthy regulatory system outside the seed and chemical companies. Increasing milk yields by the addition of growth hormone genes, or more protein-rich animal feed from soya by adding a gene from Brazil nuts, with nut allergy implications, could be a step too far.

The GM industry has mainly concentrated on producing seeds that are resistant to its own herbicides and insecticides. This means that farmers can spray the maize, rape seed and cotton to kill the weeds and insects without destroying the main crop, though birds will suffer with less to eat.

There is a double benefit for the GM industry as they not only sell the seeds but they also make the chemicals for spraying and so can dominate the market.

There is now the possibility that they will also make the seeds sterile so that they can't be used for the next season. This GM approach may work for the large animal feed, cotton and biofuel producers in the West, but more than half the farmers in the world can't afford new seeds, let alone the chemicals.

It was suggested that a genetic approach would produce a Golden Rice, enhanced with vitamin A, or a banana that included a hepatitis B vaccine, or cereals that are drought-resistant or salt-tolerant, but little progress has been made as they are too expensive for the developing world.

There are still ethical doubts about GM crops and concern about the long-term damage to health and the environment. The fact that the technology is in the hands of a few multi-national companies raises the question of equity and the limits of this approach for subsistence farming.

However, a blight-resistant potato would be very useful and, to date, no-one has died from GM food whereas countless thousands starve to death each year.

The important question is whether GM crops will fill these empty stomachs, and at the moment they don't.

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