The UK is missing the GM boat and it will cost the industry in the future, Séan Rickard, from Cranfield University, warned at British Potato 2007.
Some 10 million farms across the world have planted 100m hectares of GM crops since 1996.
Rickard claimed that biotechnology is the next big driver for the food industry. “It is shameful of the government and industry that we lag behind in this technology ¬- the UK used to be a leader in science and we could hold our heads up,” he said. “This is the most important trend ever. It will change what and how we grow products beyond all recognition.”
He compared the effect that GM will make on the food sector to the impact that the internet has made since it became a mainstream tool in the early 1990s.
Sir Colin Berry, from the University of London, said the decision for the UK not go for GM is a “political rather than scientific failure”.
But Rickard insisted he was hopeful for the future. “This government will not close its door on GM and I expect it will be accepted within the next 10 years, if not sooner, he said. “It will down on everyone that people across of the world have been eating GM products for years, and they are fine.”
The three-strong panel, which also included Anton Haverkort, from Plant Research International at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, agreed that GM techniques would be key to pushing forward development to deal with the potential impact of climate change.
Rickard said the International Panel on Climate Change findings on the evolving weather patterns - forecasting hotter, drier summers, warmer, wetter winters and more extreme events, such as heat waves and flooding - have become both an environmental and political issue. “From the things you read, you would think that every issue will be subservient to the environment, but this is not the case,” he said. “We have to get the situation in context.
“It is impossible to predict what will happen in 10 or 20 years from now,” he added.
The potato industry is resilient enough to cope with the production challenges it faces, Rickard said. “If I had to pick one sector that was used to instability it would be the potato sector, which already faces a lot a pressure,” he said.
The likely outcome is that the UK industry will have higher yields and more export opportunities, Rickard said, and he predicted that British growers “will be screaming for trade barriers to come down”.
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