Patient science is GM food’s best hope

In 2007, the US embassy in Paris recommended that Washington inflict “some pain” on the European Union over its restrictions on genetically modified food, according to a recent WikiLeaks leak.

The embassy suggested the US take action against some European products. “In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue,” the cable said.

What was behind this outburst? The previous year, the World Trade Organisation had ruled that a six-year EU moratorium on imports of GM foods and crops had contravened international trade rules. It had also condemned six EU members for banning products previously approved by Brussels.

But the 1,000-page report was complex and did not question the right of countries to ban GM products on environmental or health grounds.

What adds to the irritation of the US, the world’s largest producer of genetically modified crops, is that no GM product has so far been shown to cause any harm to anyone.

But this omits political reality. EU members are democracies. They have to listen to their people, who have a widespread and long-standing horror of genetically modified foods.

When Monsanto, the US group, attempted to introduce GM products into Europe in the 1990s, there was uproar. (Americans are actually not crazy about GM products either. A survey last year by Deloitte, the auditing firm, found that 34 per cent of Americans were either “extremely” or “very” concerned about eating GM foods and a further 36 per cent were “somewhat concerned”.)

Can anything be done to change these attitudes? Yes, but it requires persuasion rather than force-feeding. Take two other issues: the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and the debate over organic food.

The MMR saga began with a 1998 paper in The Lancet suggesting a link between the vaccine and autism. The paper has been thoroughly discredited. The journal retracted it last year. Shortly after that, the UK’s General Medical Council barred Dr Andrew Wakefield, the article’s principal author, from practising. It found he had conducted investigations without the necessary approval and had improperly accepted money from lawyers acting for allegedly affected children. The British Medical Journal last week claimed that Dr Wakefield had reached his conclusions by falsifying medical records. (Dr Wakefield told CNN that he was the victim of “a ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”)

His paper caused great damage. MMR uptake plunged and, in 2008, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales for the first time in 14 years. But the vaccination rate is slowly rising. After falling to a low in England of 79.9 per cent in 2003-4, the MMR vaccination rate rose to 88.2 per cent in 2009-10, almost to where it was before The Lancet paper. Although this is still below the World Health Organisation target of 95 per cent, it is testament to the effort of doctors and scientists to prove Dr Wakefield wrong.

The organic food debate is different. The stakes are lower. Organic food does no harm. But then neither, it seems, does non-organic food. The food safety authorities of the UK, France and Sweden had declared that, on health grounds, there was nothing to choose between the two. In 2009, a review of the research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found the same. The organic industry reacted with fury, but consumers listened. Organic food sales in the UK fell 12.9 per cent in 2009. The Soil Association, which champions organic, attributed this to the economic downturn, but sales of Fairtrade goods, which also tend to be more expensive, have risen.

Although very different, these three cases do have common characteristics. The opposition to GM products, to MMR and to non-organic food are all driven by distaste for apparently interfering with the natural way of doing things, whether inserting a gene into a plant or animal, “overloading” a child’s immune system or putting pesticides on crops. What they have in common, too, is deep suspicion of the companies that benefit.

That means companies are not likely to be believed. Regulators and governments can help, but they sometimes have credibility problems too. It is independent scientists who make a difference, educating and explaining, as they have done in the case of both MMR and organic food.

There is a case for GM food and its pest-resistant properties, particularly at a time of rising food prices. But making it will require time, patience and giving people the right to make up their own minds, which is why the European insistence that GM products be labelled is quite correct. Changing attitudes will not be easy, but it will be more effective than threatening consumers with pain.

michael.skapinker@ft.com