August 23, 1999

Britons Skirmish Over Genetically Modified Crops

By WARREN HOGE

PICCOTTS END, England -- With fields of shin-high wheat, a carpet of white daisies, wild clover underfoot, lazy oaks overhead, Bob Fiddaman's farm at the end of a winding lane bordered with hedgerows provides an unlikely political battleground.

But that is what it has become since Fiddaman offered to devote some of his land to test planting of seed crops that have been genetically modified -- GM in the shorthand of the battle-hardened.

He and three other farmers whose willingness to take part in the government-run trials was made public the week before last have been targeted by protesters who have already invaded other such plantings, trampling and ripping up roots in fields of oil-seed rape and maize.

"It's quite likely there will be some sort of direct action against the crops at some point," said Andrew Wood of the protest group Genetic Snowball. "The public has made it clear they don't want GM crops, and there is no need for these tests."

The protesters' acts of destruction, while illegal and extreme, are an expression of the widespread opposition to the introduction of genetically modified crops in Europe and particularly in Britain.

Genetic modification of food has been a relatively unquestioned phenomenon in the United States and Canada, with altered ingredients in a range of processed food from soft drinks to beer to breakfast cereals. It is also common in animal feeds and soya, corn and cotton seeds.

But its arrival here has set off alarms and united demonstrators from lapsed causes in a powerful protest movement against what they call "Frankenstein food" and the large multinational companies promoting it.

There is no government agency in Europe with the regulatory rigor of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to build consumer confidence, and government approval can arouse suspicion as much as it can provide reassurance. This is nowhere more evident than in Britain, where the public is sensitized by the outbreak of mad cow disease in 1996 and the government's tardy conclusion that it was something that could harm humans.

"Let's face it, there are a lot of considerations in Britain that don't apply elsewhere," Fiddaman said, "the fact that we are an island, the fact that agriculture is not spread out across broad spaces but is close to inhabited areas, and the whole tradition here of wanting to keep land pure and unspoiled even by conventional agriculture."

A new MORI poll says 79 percent of the British public think that farmland genetically modified crop testing of the kind Fiddaman has agreed to should be stopped. Major food manufacturers, supermarkets and fast-food chains have already announced the removal of all genetically modified ingredients from their products sold in Britain.

The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, though on record as being in favor of genetically modified foods, has been forced by political pressure to impose a set of largely unenforceable regulations on food outlets, demanding that they identify on menus items that may have traces of genetically modified soya or wheat.

One of the central tenets of Blair's self-described "modernizing" program is the determination to see Britain become a country in the forefront of technological innovation, and he has been caught out by the furor over genetically modified food.

The British press has seen the issue as one for crusading journalism, and the scare headlines and wide publicity given to selected scientific studies alleging danger prompted Blair to accuse newspapers and broadcasters of fomenting "hysteria" and "skewing" coverage away from the more numerous studies finding no fault with genetically modified food.

It has been a moment where the Blair government's vaunted ability to capture the public mood has failed it, in the process reinforcing some underlying concerns about the otherwise popular government -- that it is cocky, beholden to big business and subservient to the United States.

The issue of scientifically altered food is the subject of a growing political dispute between Europe and the United States. Last month, Washington imposed tariffs on food imported from members of the European Union after the Europeans banned the importation of American hormone-treated beef. The World Trade Organization has declared the European ban unjustified because there is no scientific evidence that hormone-treated beef is unhealthy.

Monsanto, the American food company behind much of the genetically modified food in Britain, has seen a large public relations program aimed at halting its demonization by the British public have just the opposite effect.

The genetic modification at issue is a way of adding genes that confer resistance to insect, fungal and viral pests to plants that might otherwise die or require heavy doses of pesticides. It can also, as in the case of Fiddaman's crops, foster herbicide-resistance, meaning that weeds can be killed with a single spray that leaves the crops standing.

Objections to genetically modified food rest on the broad claims that genetic manipulation is an act against nature, that the food it produces is dangerous and that its cultivation damages the environment. There is scant scientific evidence to support any of these conclusions, and farmers like Fiddaman argue that only field tests, the procedure the protesters seek to halt, can come up with rational answers to people's worries.

The protesters who have destroyed test sites say letting them proceed would allow the escape of transplanted genes from crops to related wild species and contaminate the environment. Recent laboratory studies at Cornell University showing that monarch butterflies were stunted and killed by eating pollen from genetically modified corn received enormous attention here.

The first case to arouse concern was a study conducted by Dr. Arpad Pusztai, a 69-year-old scientist with the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, who told a BBC television documentary last August that the British public was being used as "guinea pigs" for the testing of genetically modified food. He said he based his conclusion on tests he had conducted in which rats that were fed genetically altered potatoes experienced stunted organ and brain growth and breakdowns in their immune systems.

He was immediately dismissed by Rowett, where he had worked for 36 years, and he was criticized by fellow scientists for going public with tests that had not gone through the standard procedures of peer review and publication.

Sir Robert May, a noted biologist who is the government's chief scientist, called Pusztai's research "garbage." The Royal Society, Britain's senior scientific academy, examined the study and said it was "flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis."

The scare has mobilized a late-arriving consumer movement in Britain and galvanized people with broad anti-establishment concerns beyond food safety, ranging from anger at the growing industrialization and corporate control of British agriculture to opposition to the construction of new highways in rural areas.

They have received the backing of Prince Charles, a passionate organic farmer, who scheduled a meeting with Pusztai, expressed sympathy for his findings and decried the reaction of other scientists to his study.

Fiddaman, 54, has been farming the same land since 1971. He pointed past a tractor and a tool shed to the field where he is about to start planting genetically modified winter oil-seed rape. "The protesters say they believe these crops may be dangerous, but they refuse to let us go forward with the testing to see if they are right," he said.

"If I am wrong, I'll have to accept that," he said, "but I wouldn't be offering the fields if I thought it was going to produce contamination." The owners of adjacent fields have backed his decision.

The seeds come from AgrEvo, a German joint venture of Hoechst AG and Schering AG. They give the plants a tolerance for a herbicide that kills all the weeds around them, thereby allowing Fiddaman to reduce the amount of pesticides he will be spraying. Promoters of genetically modified food argue that in this way their produce actually benefits the environment.

Scientists will be visiting unannounced throughout the yearlong process, and their findings will go to the government agencies that are judging the tests.

The police have been caught by surprise in past attacks, which were often conducted at night by people in full-body anti-contamination suits and goggles.

Thirty people, including Lord Peter Melchett, 51, the executive director of Greenpeace U.K., were arrested in Norfolk last month after they destroyed a field of crops. Melchett described the act as one of "decontamination" and said his organization was dedicated to ending "the whole program of commercialization of GM pollution disguised as science."

The owner of the field, William Brigham, 59, said: "This has nothing to do with genetically modified organisms. It's whether we want democratic government in this country, or anarchy."

The local police have promised Fiddaman a quick response if he calls with reports of trespassers.

"But there's not much I can do," he said, "The fields are only protected by hedgerows. I don't mind their opposing the tests, but I find their vandalism abhorrent. If they want to come and stand over there with protest flags, I don't mind. But they shouldn't trash the land."