Policing the Scientific Debate on GM Crops: the Royal
Society meeting of 11th Feb 2003
Les Levidow, Centre for Technology Strategy, Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
For the scientific review within the Public Dialogue on GM
crops, the Royal Society announced a meeting to 'examine the
scientific basis' of various positions. Opening the event,
Lord Robert May announced the laudable aim 'to clarify what
we know and do not know' about potential effects of GM crops.
At the very least, such a meeting could be expected to debate
the relation between knowledge and ignorance, e.g. by opening
up the difficult issues of designing and interpreting regulatory
science. Yet its structure did not facilitate such a debate.
Even worse, the event became an exercise in policing the
scientific debate. 'Scientific' credentials or criteria were
invoked to ignore inconvenient issues and findings, as if
they lay outside science. This bias operated at many levels:
1. Structure of the day:
Crucial issues were fragmented. In the morning, sources of
agro-biodiversity and soil biota were seriously analysed for
their relevance to the prospect that broad-spectrum herbicides
may be widely used in the future, especially in weed-rich
fields. There was also an important point that some uncertainties
could be meaningfully tested only by a large-scale experiment.
But those complexities were later ignored when considering
GM herbicide-tolerant crops in the afternoon. There was no
analysis of how the Farm-Scale Evalautions attempt to simulate
commercial farming, the limits of doing so, the relevance
to real-world farmer practices, the link to agro-biodiversity
factors, etc. Although Lord May mentioned the prospect that
GM crops 'could be used to ramp up intensive agriculture',
this point was not linked to research methods, nor to the
influences on farmer practices. Many important questions from
the floor were deferred till the final discussion, where they
remained lost.
2. Individual talks:
Speakers engaged in selective citation or even misrepresentation
of scientific findings, with a consistent bias towards ignoring
or downplaying evidence of risk. For example, in surveying
research on non-target harm from Bt, Guy Poppy spoke as if
the Swiss tritrophic study on lacewing had found no harm directly
due to Bt, though he somewhat backed down when challenged
from the floor. Moreover, no one mentioned the following studies:
- the Ecostrat survey which casts doubt on whether most
non-target studies have any meaning;
- Pilson's research showing that Bt transgenes confer a
selective advantage in weeds; and.
- research showing that GM herbicide-tolerant crop systems
can worsen (or improve) biodiversity, depending on farmer
practices.
There is no excuse for those omissions; several participants
in the room could have given more balanced talks.
3. Biased chairing:
The chairing operated double standards in policing the boundaries
of science. From the podium and from the floor, speakers freely
made extra-scientific comments without objection from the
chair, provided that these favoured GM crops, the dominant
paradigm of intensive monoculture, its technical fixes, military
metaphors, etc. Some comments attributed emotional motives
to critics of GM crops. Chairing the final session, the Earl
of Selbourne opined that GM crops could help to feed under-fed
populations, and that 'scientists should promote GM crops
for the good of mankind'.
Yet chairs sometimes dismissed other comments or questions
which were no less 'scientific' than those. Were double standards
operating? Or perhaps the chairing followed a single standard
-- labelling as 'non-scientific' (or simply deferring) comments
which challenged assumptions favourable to GM crops.
4. Conclusion: whither an open debate?
In sum, the Royal Society event did little to fulfill its
stated aim -- i.e. to provide a debate on the scientific basis
for various positions on GM crops, much less to clarify the
relation between knowledge and ignorance. Moreover, it policed
the scientific debate through assumptions and emphases favourable
to GM crops, e.g. by defining unfavourable perspectives or
awkward questions as extra-scientific. In this regard, the
event added its own biases to the current Public Dialogue,
which separates the 'scientific' review from the 'public'
debate. If there is to be an open debate on scientific unknowns
and difficult issues in risk research, then it will need to
be organized elsewhere.
For the Public Dialogue to gain credibility, several academics
advised that it needs:
- more rigorous commitment to including a wider array of
scientific and other knowledge-inputs, trying to avoid inadvertent
or deliberate marginalisation of relevant bodies of knowledge;
and
- to have public concerns inform scientific research and
analysis, as well as the reverse (letter of 04.11.02).
Such advice remains to be incorporated into the scientific
review -- and now becomes even more compelling.
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