Viewpoint: Anti-innovation activists have all sorts of rhetorical tricks to warp debate on food safety and genetically modified crops

Scientific literature isn’t a cherry tree from which one can pick the information they like. Credit Agence Scince Presse
Scientific literature isn’t a cherry tree from which one can pick the information they like. Credit Agence Scince Presse

Deliberations over our food production – please let’s not allow them to become a culture war – will follow a well-rehearsed playbook. Pro-innovation pressure groups like Science for Sustainable Agriculture will claim that processes such as gene editing bring huge economic and environmental benefits, while anti-innovation lobbies like Beyond GM and GM Watch will frame any newly proposed solutions as woefully untested technology that pose a threat to human health. Or, failing that, to the environment.

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These sorts of debates over food and agriculture should be pretty straightforward. Ninety thousand pages of peer-reviewed evidence concluding that the chemical compound of a weedkiller is safe, versus the conclusions of one single agency: it’s an open and shut case. But the issue is no longer really about expertise, it’s about politicised perceptions of whose expertise matters. The trouble is that people like to choose their own evidence.

The penultimate stage is activist cherry-picking. When organisations such as the European Food Safety Authority find that products such as neonicotinoids or chlorpyrifos are dangerous, they are praised for their independence and expertise. But if regulatory authorities use the same technical assessments and procedures and conclude that a modern process or chemical is safe, anti-innovation lobby groups will declare that the scientists involved are mired in conflicts of interest and that their research processes – which they may have previously extolled – are corrupt. You’ll know when we’ll have reached the final stage of anti-innovation activism when opponents claim that any result they dislike – for instance that gene-editing is harmless – is funded by big business interests.

In the end, the forthcoming debate over food production is likely to be instinctive and emotional, rather than sober and fact-based.

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