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On September 24, 2003, the independent GM Debate Steering Board published the findings of a national consultation exercise, GM Nation? - the public debate, which was conducted in many parts of the UK, including the Isle of Wight, earlier in the summer. As part of the consultation, a public meeting, one of almost 700 across the country, was organised by the Isle of Wight Council in July and members of the public were also invited to send feedback forms to the government. The steering board has acknowledged that the key messages to come out of the national debate were:

• People in the UK are generally uneasy about GM
• The further people go into GM issues the harder their attitudes become and the more intense their concerns
• There is little support for early commercialisation of GM crops
• There is widespread public mistrust of government advice and of the multi-national companies involved in GM
• People generally want to know more and want more research to be done
  

Professor Malcolm Grant, the chairman of the independent steering board said, “This was an innovative exercise around a complicated issue, and it has provoked a remarkable level of response. The debate gathered force week by week. There were hundreds of meetings across the country, ranging from small gatherings in village halls and upstairs rooms in pubs to large conferences of several hundred people in towns and cities. We promised to report the voices and the views we heard in the debate to Government. This we have done. It is a report from an independent steering board, and it does not attempt to judge the public’s views.”

The Council's response to the GM national debate

Following the public debate held in Newport in July, the Council submitted a formal response to the consultation which represented the majority of the views on the issue which had been received at that time by the Council.

The background to the debate

The recommendation that there should be a national debate was contained in a report, Crops on Trial, published by the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) in September 2001.

The European Parliament enacted legislation in July 2003 which will allow GM foods to be sold in the UK and other European countries for the first time in five years, as long as the products concerned are clearly labelled. Under the new law all foods and animal feeds, the content of which is more than a 0.9 per cent genetically modified, will have to be labelled. The changes in the law have been approved in principle by EU governments, and could take effect as early as 2004. The European Parliament partly acted in response to a suit against the EU's moratorium on the production, import and sale of GM food - imposed in 1998 - which had been filed with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by the US and several other countries. In the WTO suit, the US and other governments argued that the EU moratorium was an unfair barrier to trade. Under the new EU regime, however, national governments will be allowed to impose restrictions on the way GM crops are grown to ensure there is no cross-contamination with conventional crops.

In a further development in August 2003, however, the US, Egypt and several other governments announced that they would continue action in the WTO against the EU over the issue of GM foods despite the EU's commitment to end the moratorium on GM foods. The US and other governments argued that the labelling requirements imposed in the new EU regime amounted to a further barrier to trade.

Resources

• An alternative view on the GM debate is available from the Greenpeace site. Greenpeace has an online petition to the EU Commission and the UK Government demanding that GM be kept out of seeds.
• Further information is also available from Monsanto, the leading producer of GM seed varieties.
• You can still contribute to the Isle of Wight Council's GM forum.
• Information on GM issues, including the result of farm-scale evaluations of GM crops, is available from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.