Government to suppress GM debate 19 September 2002
The Government has begun consulting on a plan to strip citizens of their current legal right to a public hearing on GM seed approvals. The plan would only allow written objections to be made in the future.
Friends of the Earth received a leaked document from DEFRA in May 2002, outlining the proposals that are now being put forward. Under the current Seed Listing Legislation, members of the public can object to any seed being proposed for commercial use and demand a public hearing. The first GM seed proposed for the national list was a GM maize called Chardon LL, produced by Aventis (now Bayer) to be tolerant to the company's weedkiller Liberty (T25 transformation).
Over 220 people paid £30 to make written objections to the listing. Of these more than 60 paid a further £60 for the right to make oral representations before an independent inquiry. The hearing for Chardon LL started in October 2000 and concluded in June 2002. The inquiry's report is expected to be completed shortly.
At the hearing a large amount of new information about the approval of the GM Maize came into the public domain for the first time including Aventis' now infamous study of chickens which expert witnesses at the hearing described as "inadequate" and "not of a standard that would be acceptable for publication in a scientific journal". As a result of this and other evidence the Government's Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE) were forced publicly to review the scientific objections to their 1996 decision to approve the T25 maize.
Irregularities in the way seeds were tested in France and the UK also came to light only as a result of the hearings. This led to an long adjournment of the hearing from November 2000 to May 2002 whilst the EC developed new legislation to cope with the legal problems exposed by the hearing.
Friends of the Earth Legal Adviser Phil Michaels commented: "The Government is spinning these changes to suggest that citizens' rights to object to GM crops are being maintained. Nothing could be further from the truth. The right to hearings and to cross examine industry witnesses is being stripped away, leaving yet another toothless paper consultation exercise. What the Chardon LL hearing showed was that members of the public were fully capable of presenting complex legal and scientific arguments to challenge the sloppy science carried out by science of the biotech industry and accepted unquestioningly by the regulators. The real reason for the Government's plan is not to save money but to prevent the proper scrutiny of their decision making on GM."
The original leaked government proposal noted that "we will be criticised because it will seem we are trying to silence GM objections." Now that the draft legislation is on the table it is clear that there is no question here of 'seeming'. Attempting to silence GM objections is precisely what this proposal aims at. We will demand that any new legislation upholds people's rights to public hearings on these controversial new crops."
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