Stakes raised in Europe's GM food fight

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By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com writer

LONDON, England -- Across Europe, from the grocery aisle to the fields, consumers and environmentalists are stepping up the pressure on governments, scientists and biotechnology companies in a genetically modified food fight with global implications.

Showing a flair for grass-roots consumer activism, the more strident critics of bio-engineering brand gene-altered crops "Frankenfoods."

By conjuring a ghoulish image of mutated fruits and vegetables on dinner plates, opponents have helped galvanise a consumer backlash against GM food.

Amid the melée, governments and industry have been forced onto the defensive. Multinational companies -- leery of incurring the wrath of shareholders -- have quietly scaled back on their biotech ambitions, preferring to sit tight and wait out a shift in the grass-roots mood.

Meanwhile, anti-GM campaigners are ratcheting the stakes out in the field.

Two weeks ago, an English court acquitted Greenpeace's executive director and 27 other activists of criminal vandalism for destroying a field of genetically modified corn being grown as part of a government-sponsored trial near Norwich, Norfolk. A verdict is expected Tuesday in a similar trial in southwest France.

The defendants in both cases -- the latest in a series of similar trials across Europe -- portrayed their actions as a noble attempt to prevent traces of genetically modified crops wafting onto adjoining farm land and "contaminating" the environment.

Novartis, the Swiss-based company that has pioneered many advances in life sciences against stiff competition from American arch rival Monsanto, concedes that it will be at least three to five years before the commercial market is ready to accept -- let alone embrace -- GM foods.

"Our strategy is to use the three to five years time to show how this technology works, to make it so you can feel and smell it," said Arthur Einsele, a Novartis spokesman. "We believe in this technology and we believe that it will be the technology of the future."

An anti-GM movement that began quietly in Europe less than a decade ago is fast becoming a culinary cause célèbre with global implications.

In Europe, a company wishing to market a food with genetically modified ingredients must navigate a thicket of regulators and scientific panels akin to what pharmaceutical companies face when pushing a new drug to market.

Even getting a green light for commercialisation can be a mixed blessing, according to Bevan Moseley, the chairman of the European Union's Scientific Commission on Food, which vets GM foods for commercial use.

"Essentially, there is no market in Europe for any of them," said Moseley.

"In the UK, all the major supermarkets have practically guaranteed that they will remove GM products from their own-label brands, and these are a really significant part of their sales these days. Also, a number of manufacturers, like Unilever and Nestle and Frito Lay have taken steps not to use GM."

Campaigns to curb GM foods have raged in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and France -- although experimental trials of GM crops are under way in all four countries.

Even the Mecca of genetically modified food -- the U.S. - has been sucked into the debate as American consumers take a cue from Europeans. The U.S. has already approved about 50 varieties of genetically modified crops for commercial use -- compared with only 18 varieties in the EU's 15 member states.

In a benchmark of how far the global anti-GM campaign has come, the American food giant Kraft voluntarily recalled millions of taco shells from U.S. store shelves last month after tests determined that some shells contained traces of a genetically modified corn produced by French pharmaceutical firm, Aventis.

Aventis had already been licensed in the U.S. to market the corn, called StarLink, for use in livestock feed and ethanol fuel, but not as part of a human diet. In the wake of the Kraft recall, Aventis decided to suspend seed sales of Starlink pending a go-ahead from the U.S. government to sell the corn for human consumption.

Sentiment towards GM foods is even more hostile in Europe, judging from consumer surveys.

In a recent poll commissioned by Greenpeace in Great Britain, 90 percent of those surveyed said they believed eggs, meat and milk products should be clearly labelled if they contained ingredients from animals fed on genetically modified crops. The EU requires all food items containing more than one percent of GM ingredients to say so clearly on the package.

In France, where a mustachioed sheep farmer who militates against "malbouffe," or "lousy food," became a national folk hero after allegedly ransacking a rural McDonald's, a 1998 Greenpeace survey suggested that 77 percent of consumers opposed any genetic modifications to food..

Retail chains have read the message loud and clear. In Great Britain, major chains including Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury's are taking a closer look at ways to make sure suppliers do not use GM crops in animal feed. In France, Carrefour also gives guarantees that its products do not contain GM ingredients.

Bio-engineers boosters acknowledge the risks inherent in any new science. But they bristle at what they see as a knee-jerk public response to GM crops fomented, they say, by special interest groups hostile to big business.

Advocates say that claims that GM foods are inherently less safe than organically grown crops have no basis in scientific fact.

"There is not one case where you can show that these GM brands are unhealthy or not good, there is not one single drawback," said Einsele, at Novartis.

GM proponents say GM crop technology carries enormous promise for developing nations beset by adverse agricultural conditions. Genetically altering genes, they say, can produce plants that are more resistant to pesticides and weed-killers that might wipe out a frailer, organic counterpart.

GM crops could prove an enormous boon to subsistence farmers in the decades ahead as a swelling population spurs a growing demand for grain to feed billions of extra mouths. Much of the population surge is expected in economically undeveloped countries.

Genetically modified seeds of the not-so-distant future may be biotechnically tweaked to grow in less fertile climes -- or even drought-stricken areas -- as arable land becomes scarcer. In impoverished regions, GM crops may also provide a buffer against malnourishment, a scourge across large swathes of the Third World.

But for Arnaud Apoteker, an activist at Greenpeace France, wants any attempt to commercialise GM crops nipped in the bud.

"If Europe wants to save its ecology from GM contamination, we need to stop experiments. Even if the probability (of contamination) is low, we know there is a probability."

Parties on both sides of the debate must now stand by while the EU revises its legislation on GM foods.

From CNN.com Europe.

Anti-GM activists cleared over farm raid

Greenpeace International
European Union
Monsanto
Novartis
Aventis

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