A first victory against those who want to play God

A survey published today says that 78 per cent of the public want Genetically Modified foods to be clearly labelled and Sainsbury's have now agreed to the naming of all their GM products. ALAN SIMPSON, a Labour MP campaigning for safer food, foresees a wider and fiercer battle as to who owns the food chain

I USED to think the idea of crossing a kangaroo with a sheep to produce woolly jumpers was just the stuff of schoolboy humour and silly dreams. But look where we are now.

You can cross a rat's gene with a soya bean to produce a plant which will produce, but not reproduce. You can put fish genes into tomatoes to extend their shelf life, create potatoes containing their own insecticide, or put genes from soil bacteria and petunias into wheat, to make it herbicide resistant. Scientists have found a whole new world of biotechnology to play in and believe it contains the answers to all the world's fears. Overwhelming numbers of the public, as today's Mintel survey confirms, remain stubbornly unconvinced. Before we all start to play God in the garden, someone has to question whether this is all based on wretched scienceand even worse ethics. Moreover, when four out of five people in Britain want a comprehensive labelling regime to cover all genetically modified ingredients and products, we need to look at why national governments (across the world) lag so far behind the public they are supposed to represent. The politics of GM foods stinks. It is fraudulent, corrupt and corrupting. It has nothing to do with feeding the world, but who owns the food chain. It will not reduce pesticide dependance, but increase it. It will increase shelf-life, but not food safety. And it will weaken bio-diversity rather than strengthen it. The big seed multinationals and biotech companies know all this. They also know there are megabucks to be made from taking us down this path. They know, too, that intensive agriculture needs GM crops to answer awkward questions about the over use of growth hormones, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics and the like. A GRI-BUSINESS is desperate for something which fends off farmers and consumers, who now argue for a subsidy shift in favour of sustainable farming and safe food. This is the battleground of the next century and the next politics. So let's just look at where the enemy has pitched camp. The biotech industry has given up on you and I - or at least they've given up on you. Public ignorance is their best bet. Private surveys in the USA suggested that Americans would not buy GM products if they were labelled as such. So the industry bought its way around the political system and "hey presto", labelling was not required. When Ben and Jerry's ice cream company advertised their products as free from bovine growth hormones, the company behind the hormones threatened to sue. They tried the same with the Canadian government before Canada decided to throw them out. Those who question the safety of GM products place themselves in the front line of gagging writs and "unlimited damages" claims. But the main strategy has been to genetically modify the political system itself. The industry has been quick to get into the seedbed of political decision making, pop in a few errant genes of their own, and reap a bumper harvest of modified policy decisions in their favour. In Britain it has been no different from anywhere else. Biotech companies recruit senior political staff into PR companies working for them, second "advisors" to government policy committees, promote "research" suggesting their products are safer than breathing, and run image PR companies to woo public support. And still you doubt them. Monsanto spent GBP 1 million trying to win you over last summer. But the public still remembered them as the outfit that gave the world Agent Orange, dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls. Monsanto's PR firm told them the campaign had been a disaster; every time they thought they had hit rock bottom, public support sank to a new low. Only one group in society believed them. It was the group they called "the elite" - politicians and senior policy advisors. FORGET the fact that Parliament had already decided we weren't having any GM foods on our own menus. We (it seems) were the only ones sympathetic to the belief that the rest of you could eat any old crap. This is how you ought to view the House of Lords' report on gene foods. It would be easy to dismiss the Lords' report as one disastrous form of over-breeding recommending another. But a lot of hard work had gone into securing such a bland and inaccurate endorsment. And it won't be the last. Big business has too much at stake to allow doubts about the science, the safety and the consequences to stand in the way of a large monopoly profit. This goes to the heart of modern politics. For in today's world of a global, deregulated, free-for-all, big corporations are seeking to buy a degree of influence which could easily turn civic democracy into corporate feudalism; where the shareholder matters and the citizen no longer does. The only trouble is that citizens appear reluctant to play the game. Across the world there are citizens movements kicking against the (modified) grain. I've just come back from India where the "cremate Monsanto" campaigns of farmers and peasants is burning down fields of GM crops. In France, farmers in the Farmageddon movement plought up GM fields. America has its X-Fields movement and in Britain Genetix Snowball removes plants from test sites and replaces them with organic ones. Only last month the nation's chefs and food writers gathered in the Savoy to say "to hell with this wretched stuff". Good food, safe food has always been the first national health service. And in Britain there is a 200-year history of food riots and social movements against malnourish-ment and food adulteration. How perverse it would be if today's "Safe Food" campaign for a complete moratorium on gene foods, is led not from the corridors of political power but from the kitchens of England. You can almost hear the chef's riposte - "If you can't stand the heat!" P Alan Simpson, MP for Not-tingham South, is one of the leaders of People's Europe, Labour's Eurosceptic faction

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