Plant science is probably one of the least appreciated
fields of life sciences, and yet, perhaps no other research area has produced
as many technological advances beneficial for society. In an open letter
released last month, 21 out of the 27 most cited plant scientists in Europe pledged decision makers to back plant research, which they feel is currently
threatened by lack of funding and global public and political opposition to genetically
modified organisms (GMOs).
“In comparison for instance with biomedicine and
fields with technical applications, plant science is not well funded, and
that’s particularly true when it comes to funding from Horizon 2020”, says Stefan Jansson of Umea University (Sweden), who coordinated the
letter.
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| Credit: © chaiyon021 - Fotolia.com |
In the open letter the scientists recall the
fundamental role of curiosity-driven plant research for a sustainable society
and to “deepen our understanding of nature”, and they warn decision makers that
without their support—financial and political—the Horizon2020 goals to “tackle
societal challenges” and “to ensure Europe produces world-class science” will
not be met.
Besides asking for funding to be maintained or, if
possible, increased, they demand that plant scientists must be allowed to
perform field experiments with GM plant varieties, and that Europe must “promptly”
authorise new GM crops that have been found safe by the European Food Safe
Authority (EFSA).
They claim that in most European countries, “permits
to perform field experiments with transgenic plants are blocked, not on
scientific but on political grounds”. And the few field experiments that do go
ahead are often vandalised, wasting years of work and public funding. To
make matters worse, the scientists say in the letter, the ongoing de facto ban
on approvals for new GM plant varieties in Europe has not only been damaging
for applied plant science, but it has also increased the competitive advantage of
agrochemical corporation giants like Monsanto; publicly funded scientists and
small companies just don’t have the means to go through expensive, and
sometimes decade-long, approval procedures.
“Every
approval of a [GM plant] variety is enormously expensive, complicated and
unpredictable, so no one ever tries nowadays”, says Jansson.
This opposition to GMOs can safely be called epidemic.
Lobbying by environmentalists and widespread popular resistance to GMOs has held
back the use of GM plants in agriculture globally, but only in Europe the
situation seems hopeless. A single GM plant is currently commercially
cultivated in the EU— the MON810 maze produced by Monsanto that carries
resistance to European corn borer, and which is cultivated in Spain, Portugal,
Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia. A de facto ban on GMO approvals has kept GM plants
off the fields and out of our fridges for over 10 years. Environmental activists often
associate GM crops with the ‘big bad wolf’ agrochemical companies, but in fact
Monsanto and Syngenta have pulled out from the European market all together, so
effectively the only people affected by this ban are farmers and plant
scientists.
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| (March agains Monsanto, Vancouver, Canada, 2013. Credit: wikipedia) |
“European agriculture is lagging behind when it comes
to development, yields and so on. So every year the rest of the world is improving
more than we’re doing here”, Jansson says “Unfortunately it’s because we’re not
allowed to use the right technologies”.
The extreme
position of France
This anti-GMO fever has changed the face of plant
research in some European countries. France is an extreme example. It’s a
national joke in France to say that all political parties, from far left to far
right, agree on one thing: they’re religiously against GMOs.
The radical resistance to GMOs in France began in the late 1990s amidst a growing anti-GMO mood that was quickly spreading worldwide. Ironically, back in those days France was at the forefront of the plant biotechnology field, and large consortium initiatives such as GENIUS and GISBiotechnologiesVertes (formerly known as Génoplante) received generous public funding. In fact, the first ever field experiment with a GM plant variety was performed in France in 1986, and for a decade, France ranked second only to the United States in the number of these experiments with GM crops, and they triggered no public protests. However, in just a few years the number of field trials in France plunged from over a thousand (in 1998) to only 48 (in 2004), and over half of these were eventually destroyed by activists. So what happened?
The radical resistance to GMOs in France began in the late 1990s amidst a growing anti-GMO mood that was quickly spreading worldwide. Ironically, back in those days France was at the forefront of the plant biotechnology field, and large consortium initiatives such as GENIUS and GISBiotechnologiesVertes (formerly known as Génoplante) received generous public funding. In fact, the first ever field experiment with a GM plant variety was performed in France in 1986, and for a decade, France ranked second only to the United States in the number of these experiments with GM crops, and they triggered no public protests. However, in just a few years the number of field trials in France plunged from over a thousand (in 1998) to only 48 (in 2004), and over half of these were eventually destroyed by activists. So what happened?
As the mad-cow disease and beef hormones scandals
shocked the world in the mid 1990s, people began to become very sensitive about
what was in their food. And exactly around this time, the Monsanto’s Roundup
Ready soybeans controversy exploded. Not surprisingly, this promising new GM
technology didn’t go down that well with the public. As Greenpeace promptly launched
its first campaign against GMOs in 1996, a very influential French
environmental activist named José Bové started a strong anti-GMO movement that
conquered the French public opinion: from Parisian “bobos”, to journalists and
even scientists, everyone seemed to hate GMOs, and politicians just followed
the trend.
The French Environmental Minister at the time, Corinne Lepage, began introducing laws to ban cultivation of GM plant varieties, and all subsequent governments, regardless of their political views, continued this anti-GMO policy. Activists that destroyed GM crops and research labs were prosecuted but got away with light sentences or amnesties. For instance, in 1999 protesters led by Bové completely destroyed a greenhouse for experiments with GM plants at CIRAD, a research centre for agriculture and sustained development in Montpellier. After a long and highly publicised trial, Bové was prosecuted to 6-months in jail, but the then president Jacques Chirac eventually “pardoned” four months of that sentence.
The French Environmental Minister at the time, Corinne Lepage, began introducing laws to ban cultivation of GM plant varieties, and all subsequent governments, regardless of their political views, continued this anti-GMO policy. Activists that destroyed GM crops and research labs were prosecuted but got away with light sentences or amnesties. For instance, in 1999 protesters led by Bové completely destroyed a greenhouse for experiments with GM plants at CIRAD, a research centre for agriculture and sustained development in Montpellier. After a long and highly publicised trial, Bové was prosecuted to 6-months in jail, but the then president Jacques Chirac eventually “pardoned” four months of that sentence.
“They [the activists] are protected by the justice,
they’re not really condemned. The laws were relaxed by the courts. It’s easier
for these persons to get a meeting with the Minister of Research than for
scientists,” says Georges Pelletier, president of the Scientific Committee of
the French Association of Plant Biotechnology and former head of the Department
of Plant Physiology of INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural
Research).
Because of this strong public aversion to GMOs, and of
the heavy administrative burden and expensive greenhouses required for testing
GM varieties for agriculture, plant scientists in France have dropped their
arms and simply “lost hope”, says Pelletier. Now, they use GM technologies only
for basic research, and then adopt classical breeding methods to obtain the
desired plant variety, or otherwise they perform field experiments with GM
plants abroad.
“Nobody is growing GM crops outside anymore, after a
while you understand the message”, says Brigitte Courtois, a researcher at
CIRAD who is trying to obtain rice plants resistant to flooding by classical
breeding, and who got some of her plants destroyed by Bové. “My main worry is
that one day we’ll not be able to do any breeding because of this narrow vision.”
CIRAD and INRA, the largest public agricultural
research institutions in France, have reduced the use of GM technologies in applied
plant research to nearly zero. Once a leading country in plant biotechnology,
France plant scientists in public institutions are now forced to work almost
exclusively on fundamental research.
“The pressure on the scientists continues […] so in a
way these people are also more or less destroying the science. They put
pressure on the scientists hoping they will change their research”, Pelletier
says.
Communication
breakdown
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| (Credit: Acrylic Artist/Morguefile.com) |
“I have stopped talking about [my work] with my
friends. Even educated friends with the same background in agronomy, they all
feel that there are other options, like organic farming […]. For me this is
associated with the fact that people have no contact with agriculture anymore,
they’re urban people who know nothing about how to grow a plant”, says
Courtois.
But in other countries, there are some signs that if
the public does listen to the researchers, they are more positive about the use
of GM technology to tackle societal problems. At Rothamsted Research (UK), one
of the world’s oldest agricultural research institutions, extensive information
about their field experiments with GMOs is available online, and researchers make
an effort to engage with the public to explain their research. The results
start to show: while a couple of years ago protesters attacked (but not
destroyed) a GM field trial at Rothamsted, the ongoing field experiment with Camina
plants that produce omega-3 oils hasn’t been at all targeted.
“When we discuss our work with the public the general
feedback is that the people are interested in what we are doing and more
positive towards the use of GM technology in trying to address research
questions and provide potential solutions to agriculture and food production
challenges”, said Rothamsted’s researchers in a statement to Lab Times.
It is difficult though for plant scientists to get the
message across to the public; if they’re not allowed to cultivate GM plants,
how can they show their benefits for agriculture and society? And if the public
doesn’t see those advantages, the lobbyists continue to put pressure on
politicians to ban GMOs. It’s a vicious circle.
“All the new environment-friendly varieties that
actually have been produced over the years, if they’re just in the drawers of
the scientists and never been used in practical agriculture, then its much
harder to convince society about the value of what we’re doing,” says Jansson.
Politics vs
science
The date for the release of the open letter, at the
end of October, was chosen carefully. The new European Commissioner for Public
Heath and Food Safety, Vytenis Andriukaitis, took office on the 1st
of November, and just a few days later the European Parliament voted on a Commission’s
proposal to give power to individual member states (MS) to ban GMOs in their
territory.
This proposal was initially meant to be a compromise
to unblock the over 10-year-long gridlock on GMO authorisations. Currently, any
GMO approval in the European Union (EU) first needs to go through a thorough science-based
evaluation by EFSA, and then the Commission drafts a proposal to either ban or
authorise the new GMO according to EFSA’s recommendation. The proposal finally
goes to the Standing Commission—made of politicians representing EU governments
and public authorities—and they have the final say. If nine or more countries
are against the Commission’s proposal, the approval is blocked. This has
happened systematically for over a decade.
“When it comes to pharmaceutical industries, for
instance, it’s not the politicians that make the evaluations whether the drug
is dangerous or has side-effects or not, it’s the scientific body that does
that”, says Jansson.
Anti-GMO countries like France have stalled the system
by using spurious scientific arguments to ban GMO approvals, and applicants are
either forced to spend years on end doing more and more safety tests, or they
have to go into long and expensive legal battles to overturn the Commission’s
decision (or lack of thereof). Inevitably, companies trying to commercialise
their GM plant variety in Europe give up, while publicly funded researchers
don’t even try.
This de facto ban has worked well for anti-GMO
countries so far, but ironically, because of the countless scientific studies
they’ve imposed, a huge amount of scientific evidence has accumulated showing that
GMOs don’t pose any risk for human health or the environment. Anti-GMO
countries are running out of arguments.
As a result, in an unprecedented move, thirteen
countries formally asked the Commission to give MS the “flexibility” to ban EU-authorised
GMO crops in their territory. Even though this would in theory go against the
single market principle, in June 2014 the Commission approved a compromise proposal
granting that request, but preventing MS from banning EU-authorised crops based
on health or environmental grounds. This was a painful and much-negotiated compromise
that could have worked. However, amendments introduced to the proposal by
lobbyists will effectively give countries legal grounds to ban GMOs on reasons
such as “environmental policy, town and country planning, land use,
agricultural policy, public policy, or possible socio-economic impacts, GMO
contamination of other products, persistent scientific uncertainty, development
of pesticide resistance amongst weeds and pests, invasiveness, the persistence
of a GMO variety in the environment or a lack of data on the potential negative
impacts of a variety”, MEPs say in a press release. So pretty much any reason
will do.
The Commission’s amended proposal was approved by the
European Parliament in November. The decision is not final yet, but the future
for GMOs in Europe seems bleak.
“The amendments that give MS the ability to challenge
cultivation on grounds of safety are worrying because they undermine the risk
assessment performed by EFSA” Rothamsted researchers voice their concern in a statement to Lab
Times. “Potentially, it will also make it harder for MS who do not want to
opt-out to justify to their consumers when neighbouring MS are using safety as
a reason to ban”.
The worry is that pro-GMO countries won’t be able to
cultivate EU-authorised GM crops in their country because activists can now say
“If that country banned this crop on safety grounds, it must mean it’s unsafe”,
and this will put even more pressure on politicians to ban GMOs. EFSA’s
science-based evaluation will lose weight on GMO approvals; the power will lie merely
on politicians, and science will have little impact on future decisions to
authorise or ban GM crops in Europe.
Seeds for the
future
The open letter has so far not received any response
from the European Commissioner, but it got extensive media coverage and
excellent feedback from the research community, except in France, where
researchers seem to prefer to remain quiet.
“The letter was addressed to two French scientists
amongst the best in Europe and they didn’t want to sign. One of them because of
the question of GMOs and application was inserted in the letter, so he didn’t
want to sign. The other never replied”, reveals Pelletier.
So what’s the future for plant science in Europe?
Jansson says “It won’t disappear but it won’t
flourish either. Maybe, in 10 years, there will be fewer plant scientists and
they will be a little less useful for society.”
Reference:
Bonneuil C. & C. Marris (2007). Disentrenching Experiment: The Construction of GM--Crop Field Trials As a Social Problem, Science, Technology , 33 (2) 201-229. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0162243907311263This article was published in Lab Times on the 9-12-2014. You can read it here.
