Special report on Edinburgh OECD conference on GM food safety

It is a pleasure to report to you from Edinburgh at the conclusion of the three-day OECD Conference on GM Food Safety. If you have followed news reports of the conference this week, you will have noted that one of the most exciting developments for the media was the arrival of US lawyer Steven Druker. The rest of the conference was fairly predictable for the media and warranted relatively little coverage!

On Monday 28 February, towards the end of the first session of the conference, Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, gave a powerful speech from the floor of the conference to the 400 delegates. He said that he had been refused an opportunity to speak from the platform and that there was a clear bias in the agenda in favour of GM even though it was supposed to include all viewpoints. He announced a lunch time press conference at which Steven Druker and others would speak.

The event took place at the Scottish Parliament and had to be moved to the largest Committee Room available in order to accommodate the 50 media who turned up, and well over 50 "observers" from the main conference - OECD officials, representatives of the biotech companies, etc.

In the packed room it was a lively and powerful event that felt like history in the making. Facing a bank of television cameras and speaking into a dozen microphones as one might see at a presidential press conference, Steven Druker was supported at the event by Dr Geoffrey Clements, leader of the Natural Law Party, and the leaders of the Soil Association. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and GeneWatch. The event was hosted by the Green Party MSP, Robin Harper, who was recently elected to the new Scottish Parliament.

Collectively the speakers challenged the OECD conference to take note of the information that had come to light in the lawsuit that Mr Druker is co-ordinating against the US FDA - 44,000 pages of internal documents, indicating a massive cover up of scientist's warnings (refer to the NLP press releases already sent to you and available on our web site at www.natural-law-party.org.uk)

Dr Clements strongly brought out the parallels in the UK, with many eminent scientists, including those at the government's main advisory body on GM food safety, the John Innes Institute, seriously concerned about the risks of genetically engineered food for health and the environment. Dr Clements urged the Prime Minister to stand by his recent statement that he would ensure "the most rigorous safety assessments in the world" and therefore withdraw all GMOs in the UK. Dr Clements' message was supported by a powerful press briefing paper which gave a scientific assessment of the risks to health and the environment from the release of GMOs - a paper prepared by Mark Griffiths, FRICS, FAAV, environment spokesman for the Natural Law Party.

Almost all of the national media in the UK were in attendance along with journalists from all over the world. From the UK, The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, Mail, Express, Mirror, Sun, Press Association, BBC TV and Radio, BBC World Service, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky TV, New Scientist, Nature, the Scotsman the Scottish Herald, and Scottish independent and BBC radio and TV, all attended and all have reported on the event. World wide we had Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Kyodo News (Japan), Canadian Broadcasting (TV and Radio), RTE Irish national radio news, Toronto Star, Dow Jones, six US newspapers, Nationen (Norway), and several European media.

Inevitably the event ran for three times as long as scheduled and then continued into several other impromptu press briefings in the corridors as representatives of the US FDA and OECD were pressed by journalists to answer the questions that had so forcefully been raised. It was also referred to by almost every speaker at the conference for the rest of the day, including the conference chairman, Sir John Krebs, who encouraged delegates to address the issues that had been raised. There was even a strong exchange in a plenary session between Mr Druker and the FDA's senior scientific advisor on food safety who was clearly on the defensive.

Some headlines from the next day: "US accused of suppressing GM food fears" - The Daily Telegraph "US 'covered up warnings from its scientists on dangers of GM foods'" - The Independent "Lawyer's challenge to US over GM safety claims" - The Guardian "America accused of GM 'cover-up'" - The Sun "Cover-up over GM food safety exposed - Scientists in US were overruled says lawyer" - The Express

The Scottish Herald devoted most of its front page to the issue, under the banner headline: "Cover-up claim on the safety of GM foods - Challenge to US as Edinburgh talks open"

The momentum continued the next day as copies of the executive summary of the US lawsuit were handed out to conference delegates. Media interviews also continued unabated. In the evening, Steven Druker and the Natural law party were invited to participate in a special debate with other OECD conference delegates in front of an audience of well over 100 at the Centre for Human Ecology, which is associated with Edinburgh University. The debate called "The Other GM Summit" was lively and dramatic. As soon as the audience heard that Steven Druker was there they burst into spontaneous applause. In two days, Steven had acquired celebrity status.

There were two other rounds of applause at the start of the debate. One for Patrick Holden, Director of the Soil Association, when he said that genetic engineering is just the latest in a series of "scientific" interventions in agriculture over the last fifty years that are only making things worse because they deal with symptoms rather than working with Nature. He said that the Prime Minister's u-turn on GM was due to the pressure of public opinion and predicted that within five years there would be no GM crops.

The other was when we spoke on behalf of the Natural Law Party and called for a widening of the debate beyond considering the merits of GM food to investigate truly natural sustainable systems of agriculture, such as Vedic agriculture, which comes from the most ancient holistic system of knowledge of Natural Law.

Other positions in the debate became clear when the spokesman for biotech company Novartis said that the main objective of his company was to be as profitable as possible for their share holders, and the president of Gene Campaign, India, called for help in the developing world to stand up to commercial exploitation by the multinational biotech companies. Henry Brighouse also spoke on behalf of the Stroud Campaign for Safe Food and the Natural Law Party.

The final day of the OECD conference was devoted to discussion of recommendations that will be passed on to the next G8 summit of the leaders of the most wealthy industrialised nations for them to decide the way forward for the world. It is very clear from the conference that we have made considerable progress in our worldwide campaign to educate the public about the dangers of genetically engineered foods and to achieve a total ban. At the same time more needs to be done quickly and the ground on which we must operate is rapidly shifting. We will summarise the important developments that became clear during this conference in another message that we will send out shortly.

Peter and Deirdre Warburton