The EU must end its resistance toward essential GM crops

Man intervening in nature is nothing new, and it need not always provoke a catastrophe

The Royal Society has called for a review of the EU ban on GM crops (iStock)

In the next three decades the world will need to produce about twice as much food as it does now to keep pace with the planet’s rising population. That is why, whether we like it or not, we have to try to exploit, as safely as we can, the potential of genetically modified organisms to provide for our collective sustenance. Without GM, too many will starve. Indeed, thanks to many centuries of experience and progress we know, broadly, how humanity has always dealt with this Malthusian nightmare: by raising agricultural productivity. That is the only way in which more mouths can be fed from less and less usable land, as more space is given over to urbanisation or preserved for environmental reasons.

GM food is unpopular and viewed with suspicion. As the latest – extremely valuable – contribution to the debate from the Royal Society concedes, many of these misgivings are well-founded. It is possible that GM plants will interbreed with existing varieties, with unknowable consequences. We do not have huge experience in Europe of their effect on human health, or animal health for that matter, if we include GM-derived livestock feeds. We cannot be certain that we will not end up in a world where a few biotech firms control much of the world’s food supply.

Still, as the Royal Society’s Professor Venki Ramakrishnan says, the time is ripe for another look at the European Union’s outright ban on GM production and consumption. It might be more sensible to take each GM crop or beast and assess them on their own merits. In some cases the scientists can be more satisfied than in others that the extent of genetic modification can be considered safe, and that released into the wild would not constitute an unacceptable risk. That, after all, is in a context where selective breeding and the introduction of species to alien environments by man – steps nowhere near as sophisticated as GM technology – have been known to create their own ecological chaos for decades. The irony may be that a GM crop of maize does less harm to the environment than, for example, the cane toad famously does in Australia, the Nile perch in Lake Victoria or the European rabbit virtually everywhere else on earth. Man intervening in nature is nothing new, and it need not always provoke a catastrophe.

There is also an imperative about providing food for human beings. GM produce, either grown locally or imported, could make a significant contribution to the dietary health of many poorer nations’ populations, as well as boosting living standards in the West through a steady reduction in the cost of food.

Of course, none of this would be useful if GM food were found to be detrimental to heath. But it has not. For many years it has been grown and consumed in the US and elsewhere, with no apparent ill-effects. Millions of people have tucked into GM corn, papayas, tomatoes and much else without noticing or suffering ill-effects. That is quite a large field study.

The suspicion is, as in some other areas, that the European authorities are wary of GM food simply because it happens to be a technology dominated by American companies and interests. And yet it need not be. European firms could be even more successful than they already are en this field if they were able to develop new crops for their home market. As with all good science, the case against GM, which has stood as the default stance for so long, should be tested and tested again for its validity.