Not a gene out of place

Graeme O'Neill reports back from the recent CSIRO Horizons in Livestock Science conference at the Gold Coast, which addressed the progress, challenges and problems associated with redesigning livestock.

Is an empty beer can discarded in a forest a bad thing if causes no ecological disruption? Does the mere presence of a transgene inserted into a plant or animal genome automatically constitute a bad thing?

Speaking at an expert forum on challenges and problems associated with redesigning animal agriculture, US bioethicist Dr Paul Thompson told the Horizons in Livestock Science conference that most consumers today would probably regard a transgene in the 'wrong' place as an adverse event in its own right, irrespective of any beneficial or adverse consequences.

Thompson, who holds the WK Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at the University of Michigan, said such value judgments reflected a false and over-idealised notion of a pristine environment. But they also illustrated the philosophical dimension in all risk analysis.

"Hazard identification and exposure quantification are purely scientific processes, but in order to have risk analysis, you need to be aware that something bad could happen," he said. "I don't know how scientists decide what is good or bad. There's not a lot of disagreement about [events that could cause] death or disease, but genetic modification involves some pretty subtle judgments."

Thompson said a philosophical element was built into the very earliest stages of risk analysis.

"The question of when to do risk analysis is absolutely fundamental. Despite all the efforts put into risk analysis over the past 30 years, risk analysts still can't answer that question.

"But you can't do risk analysis on everything we do. That would be the most irrational approach imaginable."

The wrong questions

University of Houston economist Prof Tom de Gregori, one of the world's best known critics of the anti-GM movement, and co-author of the The Frankenfood Myth, told the Horizons forum: "There are so many wrong questions [about GM agriculture].Things that aren't risky are investigated to quantify risk."

De Gregori said there was a parallel in the consumer perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry. "Every mistake is generalised to infer that all modern drugs are dangerous. But if they're dangerous, why do we worry about people not having access to them?

"We have a whole series of public debates going on about things that aren't risky. Some deal with GM livestock, some with GM crops. We waste huge amounts of resources pursuing answers to meaningless questions."

He said the anti-GM movement had an idealised picture of a past age in which agriculture was simple and pure -- but it had never been like that.

The risks of life

Prof Margaret Alston, Director of the Centre for Rural Social Research at Charles Sturt University in Wagga, told the forum there was a demand from "an increasingly vocal middle class" for zero risk that had had no exposure to major global issues like premature death from disease, and poverty.

"There is a feeling that a happy, healthy life, free of risk, is a universal human right," she said. "But zero risk does not exist. There is always an issue in choosing between different options, and the different costs that new technologies may entail.

"Why should people refrain from using genetically modified organisms if they feel the risks are so small, and when the benefits they would give countries are so large? The problem is that planetary risk issues need global management, but we don't have a... world body that takes decisions on these types of emergency situations. Risks have become global, but our management of risk has not."

Alston said China and India were emerging as great powers, and significant markets for Australian produce. Both were investing large amounts in research into GM agriculture. Both had very different cultural histories to Australia, and very different philosophical approaches, and different imperatives in agricultural development.

A global perspective

On the evidence of massive expansion of the area of GM crops in China, India, Argentina and Brazil, GM agriculture is here to stay. It is the fastest expanding area of agricultural research, and the area of GM crops in developing nations now exceeds that in the West.

Alston said that the impact of growing GM crops on such enormous acreages -- for example, a million hectares of GM cotton in China alone - are unknown, and there are no protocols for monitoring the environmental impacts, such as soil compaction and the soil fauna under minimal tillage systems.

De Gregori said he had been very impressed by China's initiatives in GM crop research during a recent visit as a guest of the Chinese Academy of Science.

"Thirty years ago Chinese biology was Lysenko," he said. "Today, China is a world leader in protein chemistry and molecular biology, and they have developed fantastic research networks, with PhDs and postdoctoral researchers moving back and forward between China and the US.

"They're determined to be world leaders in agricultural biotechnology by 2015, and that's very possible. They're looking at conservation issues, such as the reversal of desertification.

"At the Chinese Agricultural University they were referring to an article in Science on the tremendous potential for developing GM rice cultivars that will reduce pesticide use.

"A few decades ago, this was a closed society. Today they're truly global in perspective. They still censor the internet, but Chinese scientists can go wherever they like in the world."

Mutual benefits

Dr Chris Delgado, program director for Livestock Market Opportunities with the International Food Policy Research Institute in the US, said the threat of an avian influenza pandemic illustrated the unreality of Western consumers' demand for zero-risk agriculture.

"Many people would say, 'kill off all the chickens,' starting with chickens owned by the poor, then kill off all the wild birds and ducks, on the assumption that you will eventually get rid of the disease, " Delgado said.

But eliminating poultry from traditional farming systems would result in the deaths of large numbers of people from malnutrition. There are inherent and unavoidable risks in raising poultry as a source of dietary protein.

To have political legitimacy, any trade-off between risk and benefit has to be based on scientific research, rather than community or political perceptions.

Delgado said he believed the idea of mutual benefit in confronting risk had broken down in Western society -- everyone would benefit from eliminating influenza as a threat to global health, but the measures required to do so would have an enormous impact on Asian economies and cultures.