Geoffrey Lean
Independent on Sunday,
9 July 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1168240.ece

Seven short years ago, when The Independent on Sunday began its
campaign on GM foods and crops, 60 per cent of the products on our
supermarket shelves contained modified ingredients.

Now only two GM products are left on sale: Schwartz's Bacon Flavour
Bits Salad Topping, and Betty Crocker Bac-Os - neither exactly
household names.

Then, too, widespread cultivation of GM crops throughout Britain was
thought to be only a year away. No less than 53 of them were
confidently awaiting approval. Now not a single GM plant is growing
anywhere in any British field, and no one expects any to be sown any
time in the foreseeable future.

At the time ours appeared a hopeless cause. The giant biotech
companies seemed unstoppable: Monsanto, which led their charge, was
poised to make a merger that would have turned it into the world's
largest corporation. It had the full backing of the Government, fired
by the messianistic determination of Tony Blair to make the country
"the European hub" of biotechnology. Both the US administration and
the British scientific establishment were urging him on.

The Prime Minister privately dismissed public opposition as "a flash
in the pan", and so it appeared. Ranged against the Goliaths of the
boardrooms and the cabinet rooms were a motley band of Davids, ranging
from Prince Charles to pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of
the Earth and the Soil Association.

But we reckoned without the most powerful force of all, the superwomen
(and supermen) of the shopping aisles who, informed of the presence of
GM products in their foods and the arguments for and against, simply
refused to buy them. Thus the public achieved what parliament has
repeatedly failed to do - stopping one of Tony Blair's dodgier
crusades in its tracks.

We started our campaign in February 1999 by calling for a pause in the
rush to a GM future, demanding a three-year moratorium in cultivating
modified crops while more research was carried out. By the end of the
year we had our wish: Michael Meacher, the then Environment minister,
skilfully persuaded the biotech industry to agree to a three-year
halt, pending official field trials.

The trials, in true Whitehall fashion, were designed to clear the
crops. Everyone knew that the main danger that the crops posed was
that they would cross-pollinate with nearby plants, creating
superweeds, So the tests avoided this issue altogether, focusing on
the relatively minor issue of the effects of weedkiller on them.

Everyone expected this jiggery-pokery to succeed - including the
environmental campaigners who repeatedly pulled up the GM crops, in an
attempt to scupper the trails (after one protest Lord Melchett, the
then head of Greenpeace, was arrested with 20 supporters - only to be
acquitted by a jury). But when the results were published modified
crops were still generally found to be more damaging to wildlife than
conventional ones, even on these limited grounds.

Even worse for Monsanto and Mr Blair, public opinion had by then
decisively turned against GM. Both ministers and the industry had
fondly believed that the pause would allow the controversy to die
down, but they were sorely disappointed.

By the time the tests ended, 84 per cent of Britain's had decided they
would not touch the stuff. The supermarket chains fell over themselves
to clear it from their shelves - and the big food manufacturers rushed
to abjure its use.

Monsanto closed its seed cereal business in Britain and Europe, and
the industry withdrew the last of the 53 applications it had once
assumed would be granted. Anyone for Betty Crocker Bac-Os?

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