DONALD BRUCE

CONTAMINATION, CROP TRIALS, AND COMPATIBILITY

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the ethical and social questions that underlie the present UK discussion whether GM crops and organic agriculture can co-exist within a given region or are mutually exclusive. A European Commission report predicted practical difficulties in achieving sufficient separation distances to guarantee lower threshold levels proposed for GM material in organic produce. Evidence of gene flow between some crops and their wild relatives has been a key issue in the recent Government consultation to consult on whether or not to authorize commercial planting of GM crops, following the results of the current UK farm scale trials. The admixture of imported Bt transgenes into landrace varieties of Mexican maize also presents difficulties. An ethical evaluation is made of the claim that organic growers should expect protection from adventitious traces of GM constructs in their products. To what extent – on either side of the debate – can any particular group in society set up agricultural standards for itself that may effectively restrain others from an otherwise just business? The assumptions behind notions like “purity” and “contamination” are examined, together with their underlying views of nature and human intervention. The 2001 UK Agriculture and Environmental Biotechnology Commission report is relevant to these issues. While the Government wishes to promote the UK biotechnology industry and is under pressure from US claims of trade restraint, a strong organic lobby demands purity from GM contamination. Does this adversarial framing of the issues reflect broader public opinion in the UK public consultation? In arriving at policy decisions, the role of the virtue of tolerance is considered in post-modern and Christian ethical contexts. KEY WORDS: contamination, ethics, gene flow, genetic modification, GM trials, organic agriculture, purity, separation, thresholds, tolerance

INTRODUCTION The UK Government’s plans for growing GM crops and selling GM food were thrown into disarray in a consumer revolt in early 1999. Major supermarkets that had promoted GM foods now removed them from shelves and they promoted themselves as GM free, in response to the loss of market confidence (BBC On-line, 1999). The reaction was stimulated by a combination of several factors, including the increasing public awareness and consumer uncertainty about possible risks to health from GM food and to the environment from GM crops. Moreover, many processed foodstuffs contained ingredients derived from imported US GM soya and maize that had been introduced without being labeled or segregated from ordinary non-GM varieties. It came to a head in the intense media coverage in Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16: 595–604, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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February 1999, which focused on the “Five-year Freeze” campaign (Five Year Freeze Campaign, 1999) of a coalition of environmental, consumer, and overseas development organizations, calling for a moratorium on GM foods and crops in the UK. This point saw the emergence especially of the advocacy of organic agriculture as the true, natural alternative to GM food, and to the interventionist philosophy of industrial agriculture that had created it. Organic food was promoted by the Soil Association and other groups as a kind of savior from the fears being expressed by consumers about GM food concerning “what scientists are doing to our food.” If one bought organic, one would know it would avoid the things people feared about GM. Appeal was made to concepts of naturalness, healthiness, and environmental friendliness. This was contrasted with a GM culture of technological intervention in food, which was presented as being opposed all three. Prominent supporters who added their voices included Prince Charles. In the media, the word “organic” came to be expressed in terms of a lifestyle alternative, which embraced a range of factors such as locally grown produce, farmers’ markets, fair trade, and vegetable boxes delivered to people’s homes. None of these were particular to organic agriculture but this association began to emerge and that GM stood against all these things. GM was interventionist, risky, driven by remote commercial motives, and against nature. Organic was harmonious with nature, inherently healthy, based around the small farmer, and pro-environment. Although at first the organic movement had been uncertain whether or not GM should be seen as compatible with organic methods, it was now presented in philosophical terms as inherently unnatural and fundamentally risky. Traditional selective breeding within a species was natural and safe. GM was unhealthy and posed environmental risks. A Soil Association pamphlet argued, Breeding between closely related forms of life exchanges variations of the same genes in their natural groupings thereby bringing out the best or desired traits that have been finely tuned to work harmoniously together over millions of years of evolution. [. . .] Therefore, without knowing all the genes that go to make up an organism, by working within the boundaries set up by nature, there is a minimum risk of things going wrong (Soil Association, 1999).

Having come to their decision in the mid-1990s, two things resulted. GM was now seen as an unacceptable contaminant within the organic system. The presence of GM material in organic produce would mean that the grower would now be unable to sell the relevant crop as organic, losing the expected organic price premium. It might even cause the organic farmer to lose his or her organic accreditation. As a result, the organic move-

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ment campaigned to protect organic farmers from what they saw as GM contamination. Secondly, leading organizations in the organic movement became determined advocates against the use of GM methods of any kind in agriculture, repeatedly calling for its elimination. Thus a polarization emerged between GM crops and organic agriculture, which has given rise to a serious question: Is it possible for organic and GM systems to co-exist and operate in the same region? PHYSICAL COMPATIBILITY ISSUES Evidence has been emerging from a variety of sources of gene flow from one crop species to wild relatives and occasionally to closely related species. For example, this has been shown to occur in conventional systems among the brassica family (Charters et al., 1999). This has become a controversial issue in relation to the farm scale trials of GM crops being conducted by the UK Government. The trials are primarily about effects on biodiversity, but in some areas, the mere act of conducting the trials carried a small but non-zero risk of pollen from a GM crop reaching an organic version of the same crop. In Canada, crops have been found containing three different genes that each conferred a tolerance to a different proprietary herbicide (Orson, 2002). It is interesting that two of the genes come from different GM crops but one came from a conventionally bred herbicide tolerant crop. The former would constitute a threat to an organic farmer, but the latter would not. There are various other ways in which non-GM crops can become mixed with GM varieties. In Mexico, native landrace varieties of maize have been found to contain the gene construct for Bt insect resistance (Quist and Chapela, 2001). It appears that local farmers had purchased some US GM maize as food, but, following traditional practice in their area, had also tried out some of this maize as seed. The produce of the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, is officially “GM free.” Yet it is widely known that GM soya is being imported illegally across the border from Argentina, where GM crops are grown widely. These cases raise a question to what extent food retailers are valid in claiming to sell their own brands of produce as “GM free,” because of the difficulty of sourcing non-GM commodity crops like soya and maize. The UK Food Standards Agency is asking supermarkets how effective they have been in practice at non-GM sourcing. The UK Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission report on GM crop trials reviewed separation and contamination issues (Agriculture Environment Biotechnology Commission, 2001). A Euro-

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pean Commission research program report has also examined whether GM and organic and other non-GM agricultural systems could be compatible in Europe (Brock et al., 2002). Their findings are only illustrative but they suggested that this is a rather complex issue. It would depend on the crop, the GM trait, and the type of agriculture and geographical location. The accidental presence of up to 1% GM material in organic crops is currently tolerated in EU law without the organic grower being penalized. The paper considers whether 0.3% or 1.0% could be achieved with current agricultural practices, or with changes that might reasonably be envisaged. This would probably be possible for potatoes for food, and for some (but not all) maize for animal feed, but oil seed rape for seed production would be a problem. This lends support to the view expressed by the Church of Scotland in 1999 to avoid crops that are likely to pose gene flow problems. The focus should be on ones likely to be less environmentally sensitive and that were primarily designed to give benefits to consumers or the environment rather than agronomic production traits (Church of Scotland, 1999). If a tighter limit of 0.1% were the overall standard, it would pose a major problem for GM agriculture. Some organic organizations are urging that the limit should be set at the present limits of detection by scientific analysis. This would presumably become more difficult still, assuming that analytical methods became more sensitive and lowered the level that could be detected. In effect, this amounts to a claim for zero GM in organic produce. Its implications would almost certainly be to make it impossible to grow GM crops in any region where organic crops of the same variety were being grown. On the face of it this suggests a case of incommensurability of the two systems, where one side has to lose and be excluded. Is it possible to find a mediated position of mutual restraint on both sides in order to enable the other to continue to exist and to flourish? ETHICAL COMPATIBILITY? This seems to represent a conflict in ethical justice between respective rights of two sets of farmers. It tends to be presented as a clear cut case of a polluter and an innocent victim whose livelihood is threatened by the actions of another. The presumption is on GM growers to restrain their activities, in order to protect organic and other non-GM growers against the unintended spread of GM into their crops. The situation is not so straightforward, however. There is a case for arguing that both sides have only limited rights, because the question of justice applies both ways.

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On the GM side, there is an obligation not to use GM crop varieties regardless of the wider implications. On the part of the seed company promoting a particular variety, the desire for maximum market penetration poses an ethical problem in a country with widely varying agricultural practices. The fact that the consumer is not the immediate customer of the seed company, but bears the burden of risk and ethical acceptance, raises questions of justice for the introduction of a GM variety. As long as the technology remains the source of widespread public concern and the opposition of some sections of the farming community, the company ought to practice an ethical restraint on their market ambitions. It would be unacceptable, for example, to argue that once a company had gained acceptance for using one GM variety, to use that as a lever to say that a country had “gone GM” and should therefore accept any future GM applications of that company, instead of viewing each case on its merits. On the part of the GM farmer, even if the crop variety has passed the necessary regulatory conditions regarding environmental or health effects, there is also an additional ethical duty not to pollute someone else’s farm as a result of the actions of the GM farmer, if this could reasonably have been foreseen and was avoidable. If the actions of a farmer using GM crops might reasonably put at risk the livelihood of organic growers in the vicinity, then that farmer is ethically obliged to restrain his or her actions accordingly. The question is how far this obligation stretches. Is it something applied only to particular crops, traits, locations, and proximities, which is negotiated locally or regionally on a case by case basis? On the other hand, would it amount to an absolute prohibition of all GM applications, if full containment of the GM trait cannot be guaranteed by one means or another? On the organic side, there is a right to claim protection from the actions of others that could prevent a farmer achieving the necessary standards set for organic agriculture. But there are ethical limits on how far he or she can claim society’s protection. If one defines standards for one’s own activities so strictly that others are thereby prevented from reasonably going about their legitimate business, the ethical justification is challenged. There is an ethical case to define one’s activities to exclude certain undesired items or practices, and to ask for some measure of societal protection in order to do so. There is a lesser ethical case to claim protection if one has defined one’s activities in such a strict way that it means that it would exclude anyone from conducting those practices, unless there was a shared norm whereby most people in society would say that those practices were indeed wrong. Currently, a plural situation seems to exist in the UK and some other parts of Europe about whether GM crops and food are acceptable (Marris

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et al., 2001). This means that there is a limit to the ethical claim on society to protect organic growers to enable them to grow either food that contains no GMO ingredients whatever, or food with such low levels that no GM farmer could meet them. Indeed, if society had not decided that GM crops were unacceptable, and if the result of the organic standards was that the separation distances were so great that no one could grow GM crops at all, society might have to consider protecting the rights of a GM farmer to be free to use GM. Since it seems that there is currently no agreed norm that growing GM crops is an intrinsically wrong practice, the organic grower cannot expect society to exclude them just because the organic movement disapproves of them. A further complication arises in so far as parts of the organic movement have campaigned extensively for the elimination of all GM crops in the country. It is one thing if both sides were seeking a “live and let live” approach, seeking ways in which each could conduct their chosen way of practicing agriculture without harming the other. It is quite another if one side seeks to have the other party’s way of agriculture banned. It is not ethically justified to set standards for organic growers that in effect grant the right to veto other systems of agriculture with which they disapprove. If there is a suspicion that the choice of standards of purity for which it demands society’s protection is a means of achieving that end, when it might reasonably have set less stringent standards, the ethical case is compromised. The respective rights of the two sides are also somewhat dependent on what are the expectations of citizens, either in buying organic produce “free” from genetic modification, or in desiring to have free choice to have GM food and other products available to them. An important aspect of this debate turns on the question of purity and contamination. PURITY AND CONTAMINATION The word contamination is widely used in the context of seed mixing, where it is not especially pejorative. But in wider society, it has come to have connotations of danger in general, and of poison in relation to food, through its application to the unintended presence of toxic chemicals and radioactive materials in the environment. Consequently the use of expressions of GM “contamination” or “genetic pollution” begs the question whether the presence of a transgene by molecular modification can justifiably be likened to a poison. It also assumes a pristine or pure genetic status quo that molecular biologists have spoiled and from which society has the right to expect to be protected. Is this notion of purity justified?

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Purity could be seen as a safety issue, in which case one could debate the acceptable levels, for example of pesticide residues that would not cause significant health effects, a level beyond which it was not reasonable to demand further restraints. This presumes that one has identified the possible causes of the risk. The AEBC notes that the EU regulatory framework implicitly assumes to go ahead with a commercial agricultural development in biotechnology unless a demonstrable adverse effect can be demonstrated by someone with the relevant evidence (Agriculture Environment Biotechnology Commission, 2001). This poses questions of the precautionary principle that have been discussed elsewhere (Bruce, 2001). The case of organic purity is different. It seems to be a matter of the ethical notion of purity coming from a belief system, which has some analogies with the sorts of understandings of purity that are made in a number of major religions. There is an underlying concept of nature and naturalness that is seen to be violated by the use of GM methods. Thus the Soil Association states its belief that, “Organic farming systems aim to produce food with care for human health, the environment and animal welfare. This is not compatible with the use of genetically engineered crops” (Soil Association, 1999). In the “Engineering Genesis” study, a working group of the Church of Scotland argued that the idea of a pure genetic blueprint that is violated by genetic engineering is a reductionist notion, presuming that the nature of the organism or the system is ruined by one blot of the contaminant (Bruce and Bruce, 1998). This seems to sit awkwardly with holistic concepts of both organisms and interactions in the organic philosophy, which considers the organism as a whole. In relation to organic systems, the stance of the Soil Association of wishing a zero threshold for organic contaminants, as described in the AEBC report (Agriculture Environment Biotechnology Commission, 2001), seems inconsistent, when other aspects incommensurable with organic agriculture are allowed trace threshold levels. This assumes that there is something special about genetic modification that requires a purity from contamination that is not granted absolute credentials elsewhere. The Soil Association also argues that there is a greater intrinsic risk from GM systems compared with selective breeding. We have argued elsewhere that this seems to be less a question of risk than of ideology (Bruce and Eldridge, 2000). It seeks a place to draw a line on technological advance and encroachment on nature that is considered to have gone too far, according to a naturalistic world view. One could justify arguing for an organic conception of “GM free” that means that the grower, processor,

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and supplier have between them done their best to offer, as far as is reasonably practical, food free of the use of molecular genetic modification. It is not so easy to justify that unless all impurity was clinically avoided it is not organic.

SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS AND OBLIGATIONS This leads to a consideration of how far these beliefs about nature and risk can claim to have overriding influence on the wider culture and over the practices of other farmers who may hold differing views about nature and risk. There are some parallels with a Christian understanding over the past 2000 years of how to keep oneself morally pure from a culture whose majority or power elite takes a more permissive view than that of Christian ethics. We have learnt that we only have limited demands upon society on a variety of issues important to us as a widespread community of believers. In the context of Christian ethics, love for the other cannot demand that everyone falls into line with what we uphold, even though we might wish this. It seems that the implicit concept of purity that is typically expressed by the organic movement, goes beyond normal societal expectations. In the complexities of agriculture and ecosystems, it may be argued that purity in this sense simply has no meaning. Short of withdrawing from the world into a restricted community, where one only grew food, used energy and other resources of one’s own making, in a tightly defined location, nothing we eat could be called absolutely pure any more than it could be said to be absolutely safe. Some have argued that people who buy organic have a right to receive what they expect when they buy it. The problem is what is a reasonable expectation? If people are seeking to buy organic because they think that this gives them an absolute guarantee that they are avoiding GM produce, the expectation is probably false, because nothing could be so pure. If people assume that the grower and the regulatory system have both done all they could reasonably have been expected to do, then there is a strong case for setting thresholds that are achievable, rather than demanding something that no one could guarantee to deliver.

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CONCLUSION It has been argued that the case for incommensurability fails ethically on both sides. The GM grower cannot go ahead without due consideration for others who are likely to be affected by his or her activities. This ethical obligation goes beyond merely complying with the current GM crop legislation. On the other hand, the organic grower cannot set standards of purity so stringent that the only way they can be met is to exclude GM agriculture from a country where society at large has not considered GM to be a wrong practice. If the concept of 100% purity, which some in the organic movement demand, is not generally shared in the population as a whole, then it cannot presume society’s protection, beyond a reasonable degree. The question is what is reasonable? This may mean agreeing to limits of GM presence in organic produce that are higher than the levels of detection, but lower than what would have been set merely to suit the convenience of GM agriculture. Where there is not a clear ethical norm, Christian ethics would argue that the appropriate ethical response is not incommensurability but to seek ways to co-exist. Both sides should restrain their own activities so that the other can go about theirs. This also raises the question of whether these are the wrong GM crops to be considering at this time. The Church of Scotland argued that environmental risks from GM crops should be treated on a case-by-case basis, because of the wide variety of circumstances, but that we should focus on those that are less environmentally sensitive. In a UK culture sceptical about GM crops and food, to use agronomic traits in widely used commodity crops may not be the wisest thing to do. REFERENCES Agriculture Environment Biotechnology Commission, Crops on Trial (DTI Publications, London, 2001). BBC On-line, Sainsbury’s Phase Out GM Food, 17 March (1999), http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/uk/298229.stm. Brock, A.-K. et al., Scenarios for Co-Existence of Genetically Modified, Conventional and Organic Crops in European Agriculture (Institute for Prospective Studies, EC Joint Research Centre, 2002). Bruce, D. M., “Finding a Balance over Precaution,”Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15 (2001), 7–16. Bruce, D. and A. Bruce (eds.), Engineering Genesis (Earthscan Publications, London, 1998). Bruce, D. M. and J. T. Eldridge, “The Role of Values in Risk Perception in the GM Debate,” in M. P. Cottam, D. W. Harvey, R. P. Pape, and J. E. Tait (eds.), Foresight and Precaution (Balkema, Rotterdam, 2000).

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Charters, Y. M., A. Robertson, and G. Squire, Investigation of Feral Oil Seed Rape Population, DETR Research Report 12 (Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, London, 1999). Church of Scotland, Reports to the General Assembly and Deliverances of the General Assembly 1999: The Society, Religion and Technology Project Report on Genetically Modified Food, pp. 20/93–20/103 and Board of National Mission Deliverances 42-45, p. 20/4. Five Year Freeze Campaign, You Are What You Eat, Leaflet of the Five Year Freeze Campaign (1999). Marris, C., B. Wynne, P. Simmons, and S. Weldon, Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnology in Europe (European Commission, Brussels, 2001). Orson, J., Gene Stacking in Herbicide Tolerant Oilseed Rape: Lessons from the North American Experience, English Nature Research Report 43 (English Nature, Peterborough, 2002). Quist, D. and I. H. Chapela, “Transgenic DNA Introgressed into Traditional Maize Landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Nature 414 (2001), 541–543. Soil Association, Contrasting the Use of Genetic Engineering in Medicine and Agriculture (Soil Association, Bristol, 1999). Soil Association, Genetic Engineering – the Key Issues (Soil Association, Bristol, 1999).

Society, Religion and Technology Project Church of Scotland Edinburgh United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected]