The UK has a “moral duty” to produce more food to prevent the world from going hungry. That was the conclusion last month of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee of MPs, which predicted that global food production will need to double by 2050 to keep up with demand.
According to the MPs, the UK has a key role to play in helping to avert food shortages by growing more fruit, vegetables and grains. That said, it is clear that unless we amend our methods of agricultural production to reflect the new challenges before us, it will quite simply be impossible to meet the growing demand for food. We have three stark choices: either we produce more food from the land we currently farm; we bring more land into production and accept the environmental consequences; or we allow people to go hungry.
So accepting that one of the keys is to produce more food on the same or less land, genetic modification (GM) must be seen as an important tool that will help us achieve enhanced productivity, increased crop yields and reduce the impact of agriculture and horticulture on the environment. GM, of course, is not a standalone solution - there is no silver bullet, no quick fix and no magic wand - but it can play a key role in helping to stabilise global food supplies and, increasingly, the technology is being applied to fresh produce, especially in countries such as China and India.
According to The Times of India, the Indian government has recently announced plans to introduce GM foods within the next three years: lycopene-enhanced tomatoes and insect-resistant brinjal (aubergine) and cauliflower. Significantly, this is the first time the Indian agriculture ministry has promised to introduce GM food crops (to date, only GM cotton has been commercialised). China too is investing heavily in GM foods: GM tomatoes, sweet peppers and papayas have already been commercialised there, with GM chilli soon to follow.
Environmental benefits
A significant benefit of GM, which many farmers and food producers are recognising, is that GM crops can help improve the environmental and carbon footprint of food production. In fact, a recent peer-reviewed report demonstrated that, in 2007, reduced ploughing facilitated by the use of GM crops was equivalent to removing more than six million cars from the road for one year. Additionally, GM technology is leading the way to the ‘climate proofing’ of agriculture, with crops requiring significantly less fertiliser and able to survive drought.
This is especially relevant as many parts of the world, including Europe, are increasingly experiencing water shortages. A recent report by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Agriculture (published in April), states that high-water stress areas are expected to increase from 19 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2070. In many parts of the world, water is the biggest limiting factor in agriculture production: without adequate supply of water, crop yields are severely compromised. In Europe, this could have a damaging impact on food security; in developing countries, it can contribute to a downward spiral of poverty and poor nutrition.
Consumer concerns?
Despite the economic and environmental benefits of GM, we often hear from anti-GM campaigners that consumers “don’t want GM in their food”. In reality, most consumers do not regard GM as a major concern: indeed, the Food Standards Agency tracker survey conducted in June showed that only four per cent of those questioned expressed unprompted concern about GM food. Those who are worried are often misinformed about what GM actually is and how it works. For example, an IGD survey from last year found that just three per cent of people could properly define the term ‘genetic modification’.
It is abundantly clear that more must be done to bridge this knowledge gap so that, when people make decisions about the food they eat, they are based on sound science and not scare stories. The use of genetic modification is only one application in a growing toolbox of scientific knowledge of genetics that allows seed breeders to improve food production. The difference with a crop or food produced with GM is the regulatory approval and subsequent labelling of the crop and food. It is worth remembering, however, that more than two trillion meals containing GM ingredients have been consumed by people across the world over the past 13 years, without a single substantiated claim of harm to human health. Furthermore, there is great potential for GM to provide us with healthier, more nutritious foods: GM soya beans containing omega-3 fatty acids - commonly found in oily fish and widely known for their health benefits in helping to fight cardiovascular disease - are currently one of many such ‘consumer benefit’ products well into the development process.
Additionally, only last year, scientists at the John Innes Centre in the UK developed a GM tomato supplemented with genes from snapdragon flowers (rich in an antioxidant called anthocyanin), which could have cancer-fighting properties.
Moving the debate forward
The use of GM technology in agriculture has been an astonishing success. Last year, 13.3 million farmers in 25 different countries planted more than 125m hectares of GM crops, including maize, soya and oilseed rape, but also including tomatoes, peppers and even papayas - that is more than four times the land area of the British Isles. No agricultural technology in history has ever experienced such a rapid adoption.
In Europe, unfortunately, we have not seen the same uptake. The EU labours under a dysfunctional regulatory system surrounding the registering of GM crops for cultivation, not to mention imports. Without proper functioning of the European GM authorisation procedures, UK farmers, growers and importers will continue to be denied the opportunity of benefiting from agricultural biotechnology - and so too will consumers.
Although the greatest impact has so far been on commodity crops that find their way into more than 80 per cent of EU animal feed, the impact has yet to be significant in fresh produce; however, the next wave of products in current development will undoubtedly change all that.
Consumer choice is about ensuring that people have the opportunity to buy the widest possible range of good and healthy products, according to their own tastes and requirements. Isn’t it time to allow consumers to make up their own minds and allow them to vote with their wallets? The result might just be surprising...
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