My doubts about GM food

Victor Sebestyen may well be happy to eat GM food. Indeed, on his trip to America (arranged by the US embassy), he may have had little choice, since an estimated 80 per cent of the food in the supermarkets is genetically modified - though because so little of it is adequately labelled, consumers may be ignorant of the fact.

Mr Sebestyen may relish, say, genetically modified fruit and veg - which, for the convenience of retailers often has an alarmingly extended shelf life - but most Britons feel very differently about it. Not, however, because we are gullible, hysterical or ignorant of the beneficent effects of science as applied to agriculture.

The real credulity in this debate is that of men like Mr Sebestyen, who accept any technological development as progress because some scientists say so. The truth is that scientists differ markedly on this subject as any other and the larger truth is that there is an extraordinary amount that we do not know about the immediate effects of GM technology on human health and the environment - still more about its long-term consequences.

Unlike human gene therapy, we have not given serious thought to the ethical implications of tinkering with the genetic composition of the foods we eat, but what we do know suggests that the potential benefits it offers are outweighed by the harm it may cause.

As for those benefits - are we to take the word of global conglomerates like Monsanto - which has prudently given itself a new corporate name lately - that the only way we can achieve desirable ends like drought-resistant crops is by the genetic modification of cereals? I think not. This is not just an academic debate; it is driven by the commercial interests of the huge corporations which develop and market GM products, corporations which, incidentally, exercise considerable influence on US administrations, and on the party of George Bush.

There has been relatively little work on the possible risks that GM foods pose to human health. This is largely because of the flawed assumption that the modified maize and soya crops currently in our food chain are "substantially equivalent" to their conventional counterparts.

Yet given the imprecise nature of current GM procedures and our still-embryonic knowledge of how genes work together, the development of new GM strains may well result in the inadvertent production of allergens or toxic compounds. Of course, the biotech companies screen their products for abnormalities - but what of the subtle changes in organisms that may slip through the safeguards in the rush to develop new products? As one scientist at the University of California, Professor Patrick Brown, has pointed out: "It is clear that the safety of one GMO (genetically modified organism) is in no way predictive of the safety of another. In many respects, the claim of safety by association is no more valid than the claim that the safety of aspirin predicts the safety of all other drugs."

Some aspects of GM technology are instinctively repellent. The insertion of animal genes into plants is one development which most of us find worrying - and the possibility that those animal genes might one day include human ones is not technologically far-fetched. As Victor Sebestyen points out, the only licensed product at present that crosses animal and plant life is a tomato which contains fish genes, but once we accept the principle that scientific ends justify any means, we are open to precisely such a development.

What about the moral argument for GM products - that they might feed the world's poor? Of course, drought-resistant crops would assist farmers in developing countries. But this fixation with producing new strains of seeds ignores the fact that the real problems in the developing world are not to do with flaws in the genetic make-up of the crops people grow, but with more fundamental evils.

Aid agencies say that the problem of feeding the hungry is to do with access to land, an over-emphasis on export-driven cash crops (rather than those people grow to feed themselves), local storage and, crucially, distribution and political instability.