COMMENT from Professor Brian Wynne – submitted to the Guardian debate:

An admittedly quick look at the BSA GM public attitudes survey causes me to agree with Tom McMillan of The Soil Association, that it has been heavily spun in order to reach the dodgy story-line about British public attitudes to GM supposedly softening. I resigned from the steering group of the Food Standards Agency's "GM public dialogue" in 2010, because after being reassured that it would broaden the frame to address sustainable long-term global food security as the key issue, in which GM is a small possible player, the dialogue was continually reduced only to the industry-government-science obsession, "GM or not?". A key issue not sufficiently examined, is the assumption made by so many official statements from, for example, the UK chief scientific adviser, and the Royal Society, the EU, and almost everywhere, that we must have 'every tool in the tool-box' including GM, for maximum production. Quite apart from the fact that we have enough global food production now, adequately to feed not just the existing population, but the 2050 projected one of 9 billion people, distribution and access are a crucial dimension of this too, and different possible modes of production will affect these aspects, some negatively, some positively. A key question for our scientists, and politicians to address, and to have the courage to demand that industry addresses it too, is also whether GM technology can and will co-exist in the global agricultural toolbox with other technologies, without having the effect of destroying those other tools. Apart from more promise than delivery, and delivery of only private benefits like greater market share for their own chemical pesticides, GM has brought with it a marked narrowing of seed-varieties available to farmers, a concentration of ownership of seed-production and sales, and a concentration in ownership and control of the knowledge (intellectual property rights) which is required for agricultural production. In 2002, the Director of the Vietnamese government agricultural research Centre told me at a conference in Asia, that he could spend all of his annual R&D budget (US$20m, as I recall) just on lawyers, trying to sort out what materials his researchers could and could not use, and on licence fees for such IPRs, according to the intellectual property rights jungle which has grown on plant and crop materials and molecules. Is this kind of commercial restriction, and narrowing of diversity of agricultural innovation trajectories, helping such food-poor countries to gain food-security? The business model for GM appears to be to design strategies which gain at least as much profit from IPR controls as from approaching monopoly control of seed production and sales to farmers. This global strategy also destroys the distributed and situationally varied practical grounded knowledges of countless small farmers, and ignores their knowledge and needs, some of which could be translated into productive scientific R&D and crop innovation, if the institutional conditions were being supported to do this. Instead, GM seems to be demanding the opposite. This concentration and narrowing, and the associated transformation of agriculture into industrialised monocrop production requiring more expensive and unsustainable inputs, which in turn ignores and externalises entirely predictable pest and weed resistance and thus short-term yield-drops, cannot be a sustainable technology. Nor does it seem that it could co-exist with other technologies in the so-called toolbox. When we understand such technologies as social forms corresponding with their specific technical attributes, we can see that GM brings a particular social and institutional form based on an industrial-consumer standardised model which cannot coexist with sustainable agrobiodiversity production technologies which allow indeed require diverse and grounded knowledges, skills, and forms of exchange. Thus far at least, the evidence is against this disingenuous or naive claim. Jules Pretty and colleagues, (Pretty, ed, The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Agriculture, Earthscan 2005) and the global IAASTD Report of 2008  http://www.agassessment.org/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads_Global%20Report%20(English).pdf) have shown empirically that when reorganised to work with local farmer knowledges and needs, in poor countries, science can be redirected so as to help farmers extract greater productivity, when  properly and inclusively assessed, and over the long haul, than the dominant industrialised modes of agriculture, including GM.

Maintaining, or indeed in areas like the US and Europe, re-establishing a full diversity of agricultural materials and situated knowledges would encourage not only multifunctional agrobiodiverse agriculture and food production with environmental health and social economic sustainability, but would also allow a different kind of science to thrive, with a society which saw its point, and engaged constructively with that science.

Professor Brian Wynne,
ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Cesagen
Lancaster University