Monday, October 18, 1999 Published at 10:44 GMT 11:44 UK
Ministers 'ignoring public' on GM food
Trials of GM crops sparked protests from environmentalists
The government has underestimated the intelligence of the public over its policies on genetically-modified (GM) foods, says a new report.
The authors of the report say ministers believed their policies were based on sound scientific grounds and they treated public resistance as irrational.
Science not enough
"You need to bring political and ethical judgements to bear - that's central to understanding whether these risks are acceptable," he said. "And to do that you need to bring people into the process and people have very sophisticated and sensible attitudes to these kinds of risk."
UK Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, also speaking to the BBC, said he supported involving the public: "The Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes issued a consultation paper only last week on measures to increase the openness of the safety assessment of GM foods and to encourage more public participation."
Public ahead of scientists
The report says ministers must change their philosophy on the "science of risk" in order to handle future problems better than past ones, such as the BSE crisis.
The report's editor, Alister Scott, said: "If anything, the public are ahead of many scientists and policy advisors in their instinctive feeling for the need to act in a precautionary way."
The authors suggest that new forms of decision-making could include citizens' juries, where a selected group evaluates different possibilities, or larger consensus conferences. Other methods could include focus groups and deliberative polls, where people are briefed on an issue and then interviewed as part of a survey.
Dr Arpad Pusztai suggested his experiments showed that rats fed on GM potatoes suffered stomach and intestine damage. But the experiments were heavily criticised by fellow scientists.
Harry Kuiper from the Netherlands State Institute for Quality Control of Agricultural Products said: "The experiments were incomplete, included too few animals, and lacked controls. The results are difficult to interpret and do not allow the conclusion that the genetic modification of potatoes accounts for adverse effects in animals." <P