Blair the key as decision nears over commercial GM crops in Britain

The hostile result of yesterday's report on the national GM debate is yet another obstacle in the way of Tony Blair's five-year mission to import genetically modified agriculture to Britain, and the most significant one yet.

It is Mr Blair who sits at the heart of the GM project. Although other ministers are keen supporters, such as the Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett and the Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, it is the Prime Minister who is the main GM cheerleader within Government: principally, it has long been rumoured, because of a face-to-face conversation with Bill Clinton in 1998.

The US President, himself a keen supporter, is said to have converted his British fellow leader to the benefits of GM, and Mr Blair now sees it both as an important technological step forward, and a way of keeping in step with the US. EU reluctance to accept GM has infuriated the Americans in recent years.

But in signing up to GM Mr Blair did something very uncharacteristic in so canny a politician - he got out of step with the public mood.

Ever since it dawned on people five years ago that this new form of super-intensive agriculture was coming, whether they liked it or not, they have on the whole been sceptical or hostile. And now this scepticism and hostility have been rubbed in the Government's face - through a public debate it endorsed and funded itself - in a way which will be politically very hard to ignore.

But the Government may yet try to. The decision on whether GM crops can be grown commercially here is due to be taken in the next few months. It has been put on hold for four years while extensive trials have been carried out on the four GM crops currently proposed for Britain.

The trials are designed to see if the super-powerful weedkillers which the GM crops are engineered to tolerate cause more harm to farmland wildlife than the weedkillers being used at the moment. If the trials show that they do, this will be the one chance the Government has of halting GM in Britain.

This is because the basic decision to authorise the crops is taken at a European level, and only new evidence of harm to human health or the environment can then be used to overrule the Brussels authorisation. The Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs) as they are known, to be published on 16 October, will thus be the crucial piece of evidence on which a decision not to turn Britain into a GM nation could be based.

But over the summer there have been three accompanying consultation exercises in advance of this, of which the debate is the last. And, crucially, they have all turned out to be less favourable than the Government might have wished.

On 11 July the Government's own civil servants concluded - embarrassingly for Mr Blair - that they were unable to find any compelling economic reason for introducing GM technology. The report on costs and benefits of GM by the Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office said that the benefits would be strictly limited, not least because no one would buy the products.

On 21 July the Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor David King, launched a report on the science of GM which dismissed food safety fears arising from GM crops, but highlighted environmental concerns, noting that GM crop weedkillers threatened "serious potential harm" to farmland wildlife.

Now the GM debate has indicated in a way that cannot be ignored that the British public are overwhelmingly hostile to GM, deeply distrusting those responsible for pushing it forward - principally government and the multi-national biotech companies such as Monsanto.

The cumulative effects of these three reports mean that commercialising GM crops in Britain will be very hard for the Government to justify with any sort of convincing rational argument. There are not many voices speaking out in favour of it, and very many against.

Ignoring the GM debate, furthermore, will mean the Government is flying in the face of its own public consultation exercise.

An atmosphere has therefore been created which may induce Mr Blair and his like-minded ministers to retreat, on the grounds that the political costs of going forward may be too high - if the Farm Scale Evaluations give them the opportunity.

The Government's political will is likely to be key, because if the trials admit of more than one interpretation - as they may - ministers can either retreat behind the argument that they are powerless in the face of an EU decision to authorise GM, or seek to derogate from that decision in the EU Council of Ministers.

The fact that the GM Debate has given the loudest public raspberry conceivable to GM technology may well push them towards the second course of action.

FACTS AND FIGURES

* GM crops were cultivated on 59 million hectares globally in 2002 with 99 per cent in four countries, the US (66 per cent), Argentina (23 per cent), Canada (6 per cent) and China (4 per cent).

* Three crops comprise 95 per cent of the land under GM cultivation: soybean (62 per cent), maize (21 per cent) and cotton (12 per cent).

* Millions of people, particularly in the United States, Canada and Argentina, have been eating food derived from animals fed on GM diets for up to seven years and no substantial ill-effects have been reported.

* Products from the US biotech giant Monsanto account for more than 90 per cent of the total area planted with genetically engineered crops in the world in 2001.

* Of the six million farmers who grew GM crops in 2002 worldwide, more than three-quarters were small-scale and poor cotton farmers in developing countries, mainly China and South Africa.

* In 2002, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia rejected donations of GM-maize as food aid from the US through the World Food Programme despite shortages that threatened 10 million people with starvation.

* Genetic contamination of non-GM and organic crops by GM varieties in Canada has started.

* In 2000, a variety of GM maize called StarLink, designed by GM company Aventis as an animal feed and not allowed to be fed to humans, was found to have contaminated taco shells in the USA. Aventis had to buy the whole harvest in the US, at estimated cost of $100m.

* In May 2000, conventional non-GM oilseed rape imported from Canada and sold in the UK, France, Germany and Sweden by seed company Advanta was found to be contaminated with GM oilseed rape.

* Nearly 800 million people go hungry every day because they cannot grow or buy food. One in seven children born in the countries where hunger is most common die before they are five.

* Commercialisation of GM oilseed rape and maize would increase costs of non-GM and organic farmers by up to 41 per cent.

* All of the GM oilseed rape trials by GM company Aventis in farm scale evaluations had been contaminated with an unapproved GM oilseed rape variety. The Government said it was a "serious breach of regulations" but allowed the crops to be harvested.

* The four corporations that control most of the GM seed market had a combined turnover from agrochemicals and seeds of $21.6bn in 2001.

* One study showed Monsanto's GM soya had 6 per cent lower yields than non-GM soya and 11 per cent less than high-yielding non-GM soya.

* The US biotechnology industry spends $250m a year promoting GM.

* Only 1 per cent of GM research is aimed at crops used by poor farmers.

* No GM crop has been approved for sale or growing in the European Union since 1998. No GM crops are approved for cultivation in the UK.

* The biggest UK supermarkets removed GM ingredients from their own-label products in 1998 and most fast-food outlets and other food manufacturers have followed suit.