IT MAY take 10 to 15 years before Europe fully opens its doors to genetically modified food crops, but the doors will open, a co-pioneer of the gene transfer process believes.
“There is no argument against it, and we need it,” retired Professor Marc Van Montagu observed of GM technology to a meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists in Ghent, Belgium.
“The EU will open its borders step by step.”
“This zero tolerance is the biggest absurdity that you can imagine. The most toxic chemical always has a threshold.”
Prof. Montagu co-founded the gene transfer process in Belgium when he and a colleague recognised that a bacteria, agrobacteria tumefaciens, was changing the DNA of plants it occupied to make compounds not normally found in plants and so create an ecological niche for itself.
“Once we saw that, we realised we could use the system not for making new compounds, but for introducing new traits,” Prof Montagu said.
The discovery work began in the late 1970s, and the first transgenic plant was made in 1983.
Other scientists read the published work on gene transfer and a revolution was ignited.
Prof. Montagu’s regret is that he and other scientists failed to get out of the lab early on, and address the mounting criticism of GM technology by Greenpeace and other lobby groups.
The result, he said, has been a regulation process made so costly by red tape that it has given a few multinationals a monopoly on the technology.
“All this testing must be done, and costs easily reach $100 million before the project can reach the market. So no small medium enterprises can do it; no developing countries can do it, so most of the projects that are as prototypes in laboratories in developing countries can’t go ahead.”
In the professor’s view, not allowing full and free expression of gene technology ideas is a crime against the planet, not the other way around.
“We have chopped up whole tropical forests of Malyasia, and now of Indonesia, and we are replacing them with rubber and oil palm trees. We should on the contrary use the best science to see whether there are other ways of making rubber, or whether we do genetic engineering on rubber and oil palm trees to increase yield.
“That’s research that has not been done. There are hundreds of examples.
“I hope we can find the right words pretty soon to have a dialogue with society to say there is not the slightest danger at the moment with all the GM plants that have been tested and approved - there is not the slightest danger for health, for environment, and we badly need them.”
* Matthew Cawood was in Belgium courtesy of NSW Farm Writers.
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