My Lords, I will be brief, but I start by declaring an interest as the owner of a farm. I am a newcomer to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but there is a danger here that those reading our reports could confuse our criticism of the Government’s process, which is our legitimate purpose, with criticism of the policy, which is neither our purpose nor our duty.
Unfortunately, much of the developing world has been misled into a suspicion of GM technology by a misapprehension that the EU has operated under a blanket ban on GM crops for many years. The reality is different: in fact, the EU has a long-standing regulatory process designed specifically for GM crop approval. In practice, however, polarised views across the EU member states have meant that the scientific evidence has often
been ignored, crops have remained stuck in the system, and it was therefore difficult to make progress. However, views seem now to be changing in the EU.
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I recall answering a Question at the Dispatch Box on the subject of GM in 2013 from the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, in which he informed the House that, before the turn of the millennium,
“several reports from the Royal Society, supported by every single national academy of sciences in the world, concluded that GM crops were no danger and caused no harm to human health or the environment. Since then, the enormous expansion in the cultivation of GM crops outside Europe and especially in emerging countries has strongly reinforced that conclusion”.
My response to him was that we were indeed
“going to need all the tools in the box to feed the rapidly growing world population”.
We ought to want the United Kingdom to take a leading role in feeding the world and increasing the resilience of global food supplies, not to stand by watching others take the lead. The United Kingdom is the natural home for scientific research; we surely want companies and research providers to know that the UK is the best place for them to carry out their work, which is exactly what these regulations are all about.
In the same debate in 2013, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, alluded to the strength of support in this House for the science and evidence-based approach that the Government advocate. She said that it would be
“irresponsible, given the need … to cope with a rapidly expanding and often malnourished and starving population, not to take the opportunities offered by GM and by the independent scientific expertise in this country to move forward and save lives”,
and she referred to “GM cotton manufacture” as having had a strongly positive impact on the
“lives of agricultural workers across the world”.—[Official Report, 26/6/13; cols. 736-38.]
These regulations are very clearly about releasing plants with genetic modifications which specifically could have been produced by traditional breeding, and only for non-marketing purposes. That latter point may address the last point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. The important message is for the Government to engage more widely, but I would not want to stand in the way of the first, tentative step represented by these regulations. Like other noble Lords, I strongly support them.