The GM Debate
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The GM Debate

Risk, Politics and Public Engagement

Tom Horlick-Jones, John Walls, Gene Rowe, Nick Pidgeon, Wouter Poortinga, Graham Murdock, Tim O'Riordan

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eBook - ePub

The GM Debate

Risk, Politics and Public Engagement

Tom Horlick-Jones, John Walls, Gene Rowe, Nick Pidgeon, Wouter Poortinga, Graham Murdock, Tim O'Riordan

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About This Book

This book tells the story of an unprecedented experiment in public participation: the government-sponsored debate on the possible commercialization of 'GM' crops in the UK. Giving a unique and systematic account of the debate process, this revealing volume sets it within its political and intellectual contexts, and examines the practical implications for future public engagement initiatives.

The authors, an experienced team of researchers, produce a conceptually-informed and empirically-based evaluation of the debate, drawing upon detailed observation of both public and behind-the-scenes aspects of the process, the views of participants in debate events, a major MORI-administered survey of public views, and details of media coverage.

With innovative methodological work on the evaluation of public engagement and deliberative processes, the authors analyze the design, implementation and effectiveness of the debate process, and provide a critique of its official findings.

The book will undoubtedly be of interest to a wide readership, and will be an invaluable resource for researchers, policy-makers and students concerned with cross-disciplinary aspects of risk, decision-making, public engagement, and governance of technology.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2007
ISBN
9781134162642

1 The origins of the debate

The GM Nation? public debate, which took place during 2002ā€“03 was, for the UK, an unprecedented experiment in large-scale public participation. It amounted to an extended process of information collection and provision, consultation and discussion, about a controversial technology: namely genetically modified (GM) crops, and related matters such as GM-derived food. The debate, which was sponsored at ā€˜armā€™s lengthā€™ by the British government, was underwritten by a commitment by the government to take its findings into account when making a decision about the possible commercialisation of GM crops in the UK. Despite suffering from a number of imperfections, the debate was successful in generating widespread interest and considered discussion about complex matters of science and policy among relatively large numbers of the lay public. Such developments would have been unthinkable in policy circles just a decade before.
This book charts the history of the debate, and examines some of its key implications. It does so in an admittedly limited way: the central focus of our work has been concerned with carrying out a systematic (and independent) evaluation of the debateā€™s implementation. In this respect, the book provides one of a small number of rigorous evaluations of such processes that may be found in the literature. As officially accredited evaluators of the debate, we were given unique behind-the-scenes access to virtually all aspects of the debate process. We are, therefore, in a position to provide a comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this unique experiment.
Despite our somewhat technical focus, we have formed some clear views about a range of contextual features that need to be considered in seeking to understand why the debate took place. We also appreciate the importance of what the experience of the debate says about the nature of governance in contemporary Britain: both narrowly in terms of regulatory controls on technological innovation, but also more widely in glimpsing something of the emerging politics of risk in the early years of the twenty-first century.
The debate may be seen as a concrete manifestation of a trend towards citizen engagement: a notion that has become a central motif in public policy discourse within many democratic countries. A greater role for the voice of the lay public in decision-making has come to be regarded as an important component of ā€˜good governanceā€™, and, in practical terms, is seen as having the potential to address a number of perceived, potentially problematic, ā€˜deficits of democracyā€™ faced by contemporary public administrations: shortages of knowledge, trust and legitimacy (CEC, 2001; DETR, 1998; OECD, 2001). Significantly, this ā€˜deliberative turnā€™ (Dryzek, 2000) poses important questions about decision-making over innovation and technology management; in particular in cases where the technology in question is associated with some degree of controversy, involving conflicts in underlying values and motivations. In such cases, how are expert knowledge and the needs of the market to be reconciled with strongly held beliefs and value commitments among the citizenry?
These international trends in thinking about democratic processes have been reflected within the sentiments expressed in the ā€˜modernising governmentā€™ programme of Britainā€™s New Labour administration (Blair, 1998; Her Majestyā€™s Government, 1999). They also resonate with a number of recent substantive developments within the British policy-making community, including the stateā€™s adoption of risk management as a basis for administrative practice (Cabinet Office, 2002; Horlick-Jones, 2005a, 2005b; NAO, 2000, 2004; Rothstein et al., 2006), and a decisive move away from a ā€˜deficitā€™ model of public (mis)understanding of science (which stresses public ignorance of technical facts; see Irwin and Wynne, 1996) towards an advocacy for engagement with the lay public and their values (Cabinet Office 2002; House of Lords, 2000; POST, 2001).
Such changes may be understood partly in terms of responses to large-scale social and economic shifts, and attempts by the British state to reconcile tensions within the nexus of scientific and technological developments, social values and expectations, and market pressures (Walls et al., 2005a). However, they also appear to reflect the impact of a number of high-profile government and corporate failures in recent years, perhaps most notably the BSE/CJD disaster ( Jasanoff, 1997; Phillips, 2000). A further important factor seems to have been a pre-occupation within British government circles about the need to ā€˜regainā€™ a perceived loss of trust in public institutions (Lƶfstedt and Horlick-Jones, 1999; Poortinga and Pidgeon, 2003b; Walls et al., 2004).
The technology in question ā€“ genetic modification ā€“ had been controversial, in international terms, for many years (Bauer and Gaskell, 2002; Gaskell and Bauer, 2001; Toke, 2004), and the period running up to the announcement of the debate was characterised by many unresolved tensions. In Britain, the continuing market uncertainty over GM-related products had been signalled by their withdrawal from supermarket shelves during the late 1990s. A de facto moratorium on GM crop cultivation was coming to an end, corresponding to the imminent results from field-scale evaluations of the impact of GM crops on farmland biodiversity. All cultivation of GM crops in Britain continued to be threatened by a sustained programme of opposition, including trial crop destruction by environmental activists. In international terms, the US was threatening to take action against the European Union (EU) through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the basis of its allegedly anti-free market position on GM products (Toke, 2004).
Whatever the motivation behind the GM debate, the need for a thorough evaluation of its implementation, and a measure of its performance against a range of appropriate criteria, seems undeniable. In this way lessons from this important experiment may be learned, with a view to performing such public debates more effectively in the future. In this chapter we set the stage for the detailed discussion of the debate that is to follow. We do so by tracing some important features of the institutional, political and cultural landscape that provided the backdrop against which the debate came into existence. We also describe how we came to have a close involvement with the debate process. We conclude the chapter by first noting the relevance of the debate to some wider issues in the scholarly and policy-related literatures, and then finally by providing some signposts to assist the reader in navigating the text.

The GM controversy

Recent years have seen a widening gulf between Europe and a number of regions of the world in terms of both governmental policies towards GMrelated agricultural practice and associated regulatory controls, and consumer views towards GM-derived products, with the most stark contrasts being between Europe and the US (Bauer and Gaskell, 2002; Wiener and Rogers, 2002). Indeed, by 1998 almost three-quarters of the global land area planted with GM crops was located in the US (Anderson, 1999). US-based corporations, backed by the US government, were pushing for unhindered entry to European markets ā€“ for both GM seeds, modified to resist tailormade herbicides (typified by Monsantoā€™s Round Up Ready soya) and GM products, particularly modified soya beans (a basic ingredient in many supermarket foodstuffs).
Given the apparent enthusiasm for GM agriculture in North America, it is easy to forget the level of controversy that existed there in the mid-1970s, leading to a prominent group of US scientists calling for a moratorium on ā€˜recombinant DNAā€™ experiments. There was a widespread fear of the possible adverse effects of releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment. This level of controversy, and a recognition of the need for ā€˜genetic engineeringā€™ to be governed by special levels of regulation, led to the establishment in the UK in 1976 of the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group, or GMAG (Bennett et al., 1986; Fincham and Ravetz, 1991). GMAG was, for its time, a highly unusual government advisory committee, including as it did representatives of the ā€˜public interestā€™. In this way it was designed to promote a discussion of technical matters in their wider social, political and ethical contexts. GMAG was a short-lived experiment, and is now rarely mentioned in the literature on GM, however, in many ways its existence prefigured the recent developments in institutional innovation that led to the establishment of the GM debate.
Despite these cautious beginnings, in recent years biotechnology has become a diverse, and potentially lucrative, area for technological development and industrial innovation. Indeed, in a widely reported speech to the Royal Society in London in 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed to its key potential role in securing the UKā€™s future prosperity. In that speech he warned against resistance to new scientific developments that amounted to ā€˜a retreat into a culture of unreasonā€™ (Blair, 2002: 10).
The political and regulatory trajectory that led to the fears underlying Blairā€™s statement have been documented very effectively elsewhere (Bauer and Gaskell, 2002; Gaskell and Bauer, 2001; Levidow and Carr, 2000; Toke, 2004; Wiener and Rogers, 2002), and to address this background in detail would take us far beyond what is possible within the confines of this book. Therefore, in the following paragraphs we simply attempt to capture something of the mood of the times leading up to the GM debate.
As Gaskell and Bauer (2001: 4) note, the year 1996 proved pivotal in a developing period of controversy. The concerns of scientists who had investigated the potential environmental hazards of extensive GM crop plantings (e.g. Rissler and Mellon, 1996) were beginning to attract increasing attention. There were two main sources of anxiety: that the habitats supporting rare species and biodiversity might be degraded or destroyed (here, the Monarch butterfly was later to become a case in point), and that traits from GM crops might be transferred to other plant varieties contaminating neighbouring crops and generating unwanted ā€˜superweedsā€™ that had developed resistance to targeted herbicides. Tensions were brought to a head in 1996 when it emerged that the first shipment of GM soya beans from the US arrived in Europe with EU labelling rules not yet in place, prompting the launch of an anti-GM campaign by a number of pressure groups.
During the next two years, the level of controversy in Europe about the GM issue continued to rise. A vigorous campaign by two leading environmental pressure groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, argued for the protection of organic crops from ā€˜GM contaminationā€™, and against the introduction of GM crops and foodstuffs. Meanwhile, a concerted campaign of direct action by environmental activists sought to destroy all trial GM crops. These tensions culminated in the public row in 1998 over the sacking of a scientist, Arpad Pusztai, from the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen. Pusztai had claimed to find evidence of adverse effects in rats caused by them consuming GM food. These claims had been hotly contested by the scientific establishment, including a critique by the prestigious Royal Society of London (Rowell, 2003: 79ā€“102). In June 1998, Prince Charles, an enthusiastic advocate of organic farming,1 called for a public debate on whether to allow GM crops to be grown in Britain. The following month, English Nature, the governmentā€™s official advisory body on wildlife conservation, called for a threeyear moratorium on commercial planting.
Also in 1998, pressure groups successfully mobilised a campaign to persuade supermarkets to withdraw GM foodstuffs from their shelves. Marks & Spencer agreed to remove all GM ingredients from the foods on its shelves, and Waitrose and the Co-op promised to make their own-brand ranges GM free. Other supermarkets began to start sourcing from non-GM food supplies, and indeed, one of them, the Iceland chain, decided to market on the basis that none of its own-brand products would contain GM material. In this way, businesses responded not only to uncertainty about consumer preferences, but also, in the context of a perceived rising environmental consciousness in the UK, appear to have sought to capitalise on emerging marketing opportunities. Prior to 1998 the EU had, in fact, approved nine GM products, but from October 1998 had agreed to stop approving any more products for planting or import. Retailers were refusing to stock GM food, and the market in GM products began to fail. As Grabner et al. (2001: 28) put it, ā€˜as a wave of scepticism flowed over Europe, the process of product approval ground swiftly to a haltā€™. Faced with a mounting crisis, the EU used the revision of Directive 90/220 as a device to introduce a de facto moratorium on the production and sale of GM crops in Europe.
The moratorium existed in the UK between 1998 and 2003. Initially the biotechnology industry regarded this state of affairs as just a ā€˜breathing spaceā€™ before a ā€˜managed process of commercialisationā€™ could begin. The moratorium was sustained by a voluntary agreement between government and industry; the latter represented by five companies ā€“ representing the biotechnology industry, crop protection companies, seed producers, farm produce distributors and farmersā€™ interests ā€“ known as the Supply Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops (SCIMAC; discussed in detail in Toke, 2004). During this period, SCIMAC worked with regulatory bodies to agree a set of best practice guidelines for the growing and harvesting of GM crops. The moratorium in Britain eventually expired at the end of a programme of farm-scale trials, designed to investigate the impact on biodiversity of herbicide resistant GM crops (AEBC, 2001). The findings from these trials were published in the autumn of 2003 (Hawes et al., 2003).
In global political terms, the EU moratorium fuelled pre-existing tensions between Europe and the US over regulatory approaches for transgenic crops (Levidow and Carr, 2000; Wiener and Rogers, 2002). According to the EU, its ā€˜precautionaryā€™-based regulation was prudent, and responsive to significant uncertainties in the possible risks posed by these crops. However, in May 2003, the US and a number of cooperating countries announced that they would file a case through the WTO against the EU. The moratorium, they argued, was illegal and not based upon ā€˜sound scienceā€™. Moreover, they suggested that it was harmful to both agriculture and the interests of the developing world (e.g. Toke, 2004).
Of course, Britainā€™s membership of the EU imposes certain obligations regarding the licensing of crops and, indeed, EU rulings had made clear that ā€˜GM free zonesā€™ were illegal within European law. When, in March 2003, the EU GM products approval process was re-started under EC/2001/18, serious questions were raised about the credibility of holding a public debate about the cultivation of GM crops in the UK. Indeed, the timing of this development was unfortunate, occurring as it did just a few months before the public aspects of the GM Nation? debate were scheduled to ā€˜go liveā€™. As we note in Chapter 3, news of the activation of the approval process prompted the Chair of the debateā€™s Steering Board to write to the Secretary of State, seeking reassurances about the governmentā€™s goodwill.
The form of the EU regulatory framework for GM crops, and of the wider WTO obligations provided an important backdrop to the GM Nation? debate. The negotiations over the EU GMO Directive EC/2001/18 had resulted in a tough regime that laid greater emphasis on the environmental assessment of any proposed GM crop. However, it also included a somewhat ambiguous clause providing member states with the discretion to take appropriate measures to avoid unintended ā€˜contaminationā€™ of other crops by GM species. In practice, the UK government found itself squeezed between an essentially techno-scientific regulatory framing of ā€˜sound scienceā€™, and uncertainty about the political repercussions of accepting GM species for domestic cultivation (see discussion in Toke, 2004).
The debate went ahead, but doubts remained in some quarters about the value of ā€˜nationalā€™ public debates about issues where individual nation states have limited scope for autonomous action. Such concerns were reinforced by an important development that occurred whilst we were finalising the text of this book. The threatened WTO action by the US, Canada and Argentina, which had been taken, had led to a preliminary ruling in which the WTO had found against the EU.2 At the time of writing, the full implications of this decision, with a final ruling pending, have yet to become clear.

The public mood

Throughout the period immediately prior to the GM debate, there was considerable uncertainty about the likely behaviour of consumers with respect to GM products. Opinion polls suggested that consumers were far from convinced of the much-vaunted virtues of GM-related products, with the Eurobarometer survey indicating rising levels of opposition to the technology in many European countries, including Britain (Gaskell et al., 2003; Gaskell and Bauer, 2001). Such polls indicated that GM food was an area where the lay public had relatively little faith in the competence of government regulation. This is perhaps unsurprising given the recent history of food-related controversies in the UK, culminating in the BSE/CJD disaster.
The polls indicated that up to a third of people neither supported nor opposed GM food: attitudes that earlier focus group-based studies had variously interpreted as ā€˜ambivalenceā€™ (Grove-White et al., 1997: 1) or ā€˜an instability between optimism and playing safeā€™ (Petts et al., 2001: 92). The existence of a substantial portion of the lay public holding such ambivalent views was a clear finding from the survey work that formed part of our debate evaluation exercise, as will be discussed in later chapters.
In the light of these apparent consumer attitudes, supermarkets were loath to stock GM food, fearing the potential risk to their reputations if seen to be abandoning their no-GM policy.3 A public relations campaign in Europe by the multinational corporation Monsanto in 1998 had been recognised as a failure (Bauer and Gaskell, 2002: 351). This state of affairs led the largest industry firms to form an association, the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, with the primary objective of counteracting anti-GM claims made by environmentalists. By the time that the GM Nation? debate took place, an earlier mood of confrontation had shifted to one in which industry had begun to respond to calls for public dialogue, and to present its position in terms of being ā€˜committed to listening and responding to issues surrounding GM technologyā€™.
Given the sometimes obscure technical details of GM, and the high level of public ambivalence associated with its agricultural applications, media accounts of these issues require particular attention. Here, we have in mind the extensive literature that has examined the role of the media in shaping public opinion, in agenda-setting, and in ā€˜amplifyingā€™ or ā€˜attenuatingā€™ the perceived significance of certain risk-related issues (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Kitzinger, 2000; Murdock, 2004; Murdock et al., 2003). This literature points to the significance of how media accounts are ā€˜framedā€™: providing ways of talking about issues, and highlighting specific aspects of the situation by constructing stories around particular themes. In addition, ā€˜templatesā€™ organise the overall structure of reporting by suggesting analogies and comparisons with salient past and contemporary events.
While risk as a theme has been central to media coverage of GM, we note that from the outset, however, the GM story was never solely about risk. It was also about corporate power and political accountability: themes that were developed in two other major news frames, one focused on the location of control over the development of GM, and the other on distrust of government and the Prime Minister. The ā€˜controlā€™ frame mobilised worries that the future of GM in Britain would ultimately be determined ā€˜offshoreā€™, first in the EU and second in the US, operating through the WTO. The ā€˜distrustā€™ frame drew on popular suspicions that government policy had been captured by corporate interests and that an ideological commitment to ā€˜freeā€™ markets took precedence over public concerns (Marquand, 2004).
The emerging ā€˜riskā€™ and ā€˜controlā€™ frames were consolidated in February 1999 when GM emerged as a major news story, with a group of scientists demanding that Pusztaiā€™s findings be re-examined. Eight days later an opinion poll published in the Independent on...

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