Pro-science types, when they lambast those who campaign against genetically modified crops, often point out that no one has ever been harmed by the food produced from them. After 3 trillion meals, they insist, nobody has credibly reported even so much as a headache.
August bodies – from the US National Academy of Sciences to the UK’s Royal Society – all agree that food from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is as safe as any other.
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Perhaps I am the first person, therefore, harmed by dealings with a GMO. During an hour spent recently examining the performance of genetically engineered maize in a “confined field trial” near Kampala in Uganda, I received quite a severe sunburn. The maize itself looked impressive, however. Carrying an insect-resistance gene called Bt, it was clearly able to fend off pests better than the neighbouring non-GM equivalents, which were riddled with holes, much shorter and carrying smaller cobs.
While there, I spoke to a local farmer called Lule Monica. Also a council leader, Monica told me she was “praying” for the day when the genetically modified maize being trialled in the research station would be available to farmers like her.
She is concerned about a pest called fall armyworm that has invaded maize crops in Uganda and elsewhere in East Africa, and farmers are struggling. . Produced under the banner of the Gates Foundation-funded philanthropic partnership, it also carries a drought-tolerance trait to help resist the worsening impacts of climate change.
However, Monica and farmers like her may have a long wait. Anti-GMO activists in Uganda, many funded by well-meaning European donors, have so far managed to block any progress towards the release of improved transgenic crops. This has also held up other biotech products such as bananas resistant to bacterial wilt, and cassava resistant to devastating viruses.
Protein not profits
All are staple foods aimed squarely at benefiting smallholder subsistence farmers in some of the poorest parts of the world – they have nothing to do with the seed and chemical corporate behemoths that are the usual targets of popular suspicion in the GM debate.
Talking to those denied the opportunity to grow disease-resistant or drought-tolerant GM crops, such as farmers in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as Uganda, always leaves me feeling uncomfortable because it reminds me of my own role in perpetrating this clear global injustice.
As an anti-GMO campaigner at the start of the movement, back in the mid to late 1990s, I was involved in destroying field trials in the UK and spreading popular opposition to scientific progress in modern plant breeding.
Five years ago, I took to the stage at the UK’s Oxford Farming Conference to . I explained how my change of mind came about when I realised that the scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs was equivalent to the scientific consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change.
As a writer and environmentalist, I couldn’t defend science in one area (climate), while denying it in another (GM). Yet many politicians and environmental organisations remain on the horns of this dilemma. Their refusals to accept overwhelming scientific evidence on genetic engineering puts them in the same camp as climate change deniers.
Change may be slow, but I think it is coming. It is one thing for an individual to change their mind, quite another for political parties or campaign groups to do so. Whether the shift will come fast enough to benefit struggling subsistence farmers remains to be seen.
Mark Lynas is an environmentalist and author based in Oxford, UK. His latest book , published by Bloomsbury, is out on 5 April
