The GM debate: One way forward

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

The UK Government will have to decide before the end of 2003 whether genetically modified (GM) crops can be grown here.

GM crops: In whose hands?

On a wider stage, the US and Europe look unlikely to avoid confrontation on the issue.

The debate grows shriller and more determined with each passing month.

And neither side can even hear the other, because they do not share a common language.

The stakes are high. The UK has been warned it could face civil unrest if GM crops are cleared for commercial planting. A US trade war with Europe is something to avoid.

And yet the debate grinds on in terms that are almost medieval in their absolutism.

Crossing the boundaries

On the one hand are the scientists, empirical by nature, absolutely committed to trying to extend the limits of the possible.

Their opponents seem united by an almost religious belief that GM crops are intrinsically wrong, so there can be no way forward in using them on a case-by-case basis.

Protest is building up

It is not a watertight division, by any means. Many scientists have deep reservations about GMs, or oppose them entirely.

And religion is not the real tie that binds the other side. After all, the Vatican has now weighed in to support the use of GMs.

But however you define them, the opposing camps remain separated by a gulf of mutual incomprehension. Both are sincere, but only one can be right: GM technology either will improve human wellbeing, or it will not.

We've reached the point we're at because the privately-owned biotech industry has spent prodigious amounts of money developing GMs, in the hope of earning still more stupendous profits.

Sceptics all

It's a familiar pattern: an industry develops a product, tells us we need it, and relies on governments to overcome any initial resistance to it.

Distrust of science is rife

That has worked up till now because we have trusted governments and the scientists close to them - or at least we have been ready to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But all that is changing, at least in much of Europe, which explains the threat of civil unrest over GMs.

Any attempt on that basis to secure a place for them is liable to cause huge problems. If society is to accept them, it will be only with the endorsement of truly independent backers.

South Africa's Truth and Justice Commission reached across a divide that yawned far wider to bring peace.

Opinion formers

There are people who inspire trust, and who can cope with the technicalities of the GM argument, but few of them are in or around governments.

We need them to judge whether we should use this new technology, and if so how: they should oversee the process of putting GMs on the market.

That leaves those stupendous profits the industry is expecting. If GMs do get the go-ahead, the biotech companies could be required to put a large slice of their returns into compensating the communities where the crops are grown.

They could also be obliged to devote some of their profits to accelerating the war on hunger. They may not want to, but if they don't they look unlikely to be making much profit from GMs anyway.

Why make GMs a special case, instead of relying on the state to force them through? The answer is simple: they are so radically different from what we have known that the old answers will no longer work.