Australia Urges Water Investments

The GM Food Debate

Public debates about gene technology are often polarised into over-promising the technology with miracle cures or demonising the technology with scare stories. Craig Cormick, from Biotechnology Australia, asks in this editorial: what is the public to think when it receives conflicting reports and what does the public really think about gene technologies?

What does the public really think about Gene Technology?

Which of these two statements is true?

· Genetically modified Foods are dangerous and the Australian public will not eat them.
· Genetically modified Foods are perfectly safe and more and more people are willing to eat them.

The answers is: both are true, depending on whose argument you are listening to.

There are few scientific debates that are so polarised as that relating to gene technology. On the one hand, we have advocates of the technology over-promising its benefits: this technology will feed the world and solve most diseases. And on the other hand we have opponents of the technology demonising it: GM crops will lead to superweeds that cannot be controlled and GM foods are dangerous.

We have a predominantly science-based lobby group on one side, arguing scientific facts, and anti-GM lobbyists on the other side arguing emotions. For the public they are two different languages that rarely meet, whether it’s about stem cells or GM foods and crops or xenotransplantation.

So what is the public meant to think when confronted with these contrasting claims and counter claims? Most simply revert to an attitude driven by their strongest emotive drivers, such as trust in governments, or mistrust of multinationals, or trust in science, or mistrust of modern food technologies.

That’s unfortunate because we are not having the quality of public debate we should be having about gene technology. There are many aspects of the science that researchers should be better communicating to the public, and there are many aspects of public concerns that should be better communicated to researchers. Yet while we have a strongly polarised debate, too often focussed on winning political points and running sensationalist stories in the mass media, it is the public who are losing out.

It is also doing the public a disservice to simplify public attitudes into easily digestible percentages of for and against, such as 50% of people will not eat GM foods and 45% will, as these do not reveal the actual drivers of attitude change and causes of concern.

Biotechnology Australia has been undertaking major surveys of the Australian public’s attitudes to gene technology since 1999, and we now know quite a lot. This includes the fact that perceptions about GMOs being more risky have risen in the past two years – but concerns have not. This is largely because the concept of risk has changed enormously in society in the last three years. A lot of things in life, not just GMOs, are considered more risky now due to global insecurities.

We have discovered that attitudes towards GM foods are driven more by attitudes towards food and food safety than by attitudes towards the technology. This means that a health food buyer, who is very concerned about what is in their food, will tend to be more concerned about and avoid GM foods. However, someone who doesn’t care too much about what they eat will have much less concern about GM foods and won’t care so much if they eat them.

No surprise then to find that GM doughnuts, which are labelled as containing GM soy, aren’t suffering major loss of sales in supermarkets. However, if a GM soy milk came out I suspect the reaction would be very different.

Also very significant is that there is a high trust in food regulators. Despite all the scare stories, the biggest factor in consumer rejection of GM foods is that consumers see no benefits in them. Contrast this with farmer attitudes that are becoming more supportive of GM crops, as many of their benefits are agronomic. It needs to be added, however, that farmers still want to know that somebody is willing to buy their crop.

We also know that regardless of increased risk perception, a majority of people (56%) feel that Australia should accept some degree of risk if it would enhance our economic competitiveness. And 73 per cent of people disagree with the statement that the risks of gene technology outweigh the benefits to the point that all research and development should be stopped.

So what does it all mean? Put simply, public attitudes towards gene technology are not simple, and are driven by many things as well as being situation dependent - so while a person might be against GM canola they could well support GM cotton. And one person who uses genetically modified insulin might not want to eat GM products, but another doesn’t mind having a little bit of GM soy in their doughnuts or chicken nuggets.

So next time you read a media article about what the public think about gene technology, look closely and see if it tells you more about the ideology of the person being quoted than it actually tells about public atitudes.

Craig Cormick is the Manager of Public Awareness for the government agency Biotechnology Australia.
www.biotechnology.gov.au

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