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Would You Bet The Farm That GM Is Bad?
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- Jay Rayner,The Guardian (UK), Nov. 26, 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/
'Getting a famous free range farmer to present a Horizon documentary on GM food was a masterstroke'
When I first heard that Jimmy Doherty was to tackle the knotty issues around genetically modified food for last night's edition of BBC2's Horizon, I was hit by two responses in quick succession. The first was a surge of sympathy. I knew exactly what he was getting into. When I put out a call for pointers and opinions on the subject from you, our darling readers, I was swamped by waves of highly informed, highly impassioned comments and emails. It was one of the most complex subjects I have ever had to tackle as a journalist, as I think the final piece proved.
The second response was suspicion. Doherty has made a name for himself pandering to the purely aesthetic end of Britain's food interest, "the traditional, free range, farm-- that wholesome thing," as he himself put it. Too often, I fear, people obsessed with the lovely, touchy feely aesthetic elements of food mistake their interests with the wider debate on how we feed ourselves, and I had Doherty firmly in that camp.
I assumed his response to GM would be hideously predictable - anti unto the barricades - and that this would be an hour of BBC television which would do little to move the debate forward.
I underestimated both Horizon and Doherty. This was a smart, cleverly crafted piece of documentary television. I can't deny that it lacked the true scientific heft which, rightly, made Horizon a byword for solid public service broadcasting in the 70s and 80s - it used to do wonders with beardy men who understood unfathomable things about the universe - but it did a superb job of laying out the arguments.
Sure, it avoided one issue, which was the role played in the spread of GMs by the multinational biotech companies, fingered by many as the baddies of the piece. Then again, tangling with them is such a huge legal nightmare I don't blame them. The producers would have spent days in hand-to-hand combat with the lawyers, without necessarily advancing the argument any.
Instead they went to work on every other corner of the debate, and Doherty proved himself a sharp, open-minded and reliable guide. For every negative argument that was put forward - the threat to human health, for example, or the risk of cross-contamination - the rebuttal was there.
Finding an Amish farmer who grows GM corn, despite his sect's rejection of the modern world, was a master stroke. A man with a funny beard and a floppy hat saying anti-GM campaigners "don't know what they're talking about" was far more striking than hearing it from a bloke in a white lab coat. And the programme refused to pander to an anti-science mentality. Doherty may like to farm the "old-fashioned way" as he puts it, but he recognises that what he does will not solve the problems of global food supply.
But what really made it was the travel budget. This Horizon saw food as a global issue and hence travelled the globe, from England to Argentina, from Germany to the US and Africa. And it was Doherty's experience in Uganda, looking at blight to the nation's vital banana crop, which was the most instructive.
As he pointed out, in Africa not thinking about GM is a luxury they cannot afford (even if many African governments are trying to do so). Doherty's conclusion that, while GM might not have all the answers now, "it's madness that we turn away from this technology", given what it's potential might be, came backed up by an impassioned plea for the science to be pursued, for testing to continue. To me his argument was spot on, though I suspect a lot of you will disagree.
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