Professor Mark Ferguson:

If the committee is looking at that issue, it might be interested to know what New Zealand, which has remarkable similarities to Ireland in terms of climate and the status of GM, has done. There is an extremely interesting New Zealand study that modelled the expected climate change in New Zealand at individual farm level. With farmers, it thought about how to manage it and what crops and varieties of grass to plant. A consequence of that was that a discussion about GM varieties which would perhaps be more tolerant to drought or wet or whatever the changed condition is could for the first time be part of the mix. New Zealand probably has an image of being non-GM and very natural but it is on the agenda because in order to adapt to potentially quite quick changes over 50 or 100 years, there may be a need to do that. It is an interesting approach to taking climate change data and making it real for people on an individual rather than a country-wide level and then thinking about strategies that may be deployed to mitigate against it. It may be a change in what is done but it may also be a change in the nature of what is sown. That might change the attitude to what is done.

There are a lot of fears about genetically manipulated crops but there is actually no evidence they are not safe. Safety is not the issue. The issue is much more to do with public acceptance and the interference with nature and not safety. The precautionary principle is very important. The way all regulators work is that in the absence of doubt, we should always veer towards being precautionary. That is the so-called precautionary principle. Interestingly, at EU level, that has now been balanced by the innovation principle. We should not only be precautionary because we could be so precautionary that we never make any progress at all. We can never prove anything is totally safe when we want to change it. In these discussions, the precautionary principle needs to be balanced against the innovation principle. We must consider how much innovation is being shut down and what potential is being shut down because we decided to take a conservative approach. That is the new way for regulators to approach new technologies, of which GM is just one. There are lots of others. We need to have an eye for precaution but also for innovation. We do not want to be so conservative that we have no innovation.