There was much to admire in Mark Lynas’s speech about his personal journey from anti-GM campaigner to GM advocate at the Oxford Farming Conference last week. But he was wrong on one crucial point: the GM debate isn’t over; it hasn’t even started yet.
The reaction Lynas has had speaks volumes. Since last week, his speech has made headlines around the globe, crashed his website and prompted an onslaught of personal criticisms and hate mail, including one particularly unpleasant - and ludicrous - attack via Twitter, which compared Lynas’s pro-GM sentiments with a pro-rape stance. Pro-GM voices have hailed him as a poster boy for latter-day conversion to the GM cause and declared his speech a landmark moment for the GM debate in the UK, while critics have been quick to dismiss him as a peripheral figure of the anti-GM movement with little, if any, influence, and dubious motives to boot.
This is not what a mature, adult debate looks like; it’s sign of a debate stuck perpetually in teenager mode, all black-and-white certainties and tempestuous outbursts.
It’s worth pointing out that over-reaction and hyperbole are not the preserve of the anti-GM lobby. The other side is just as capable of toxic language - I have sat in more than one briefing where a pro-GM speaker has glibly equated opposition to GM with wanting to let the developing world starve.
This kind of rhetoric - even when it is informed by perfectly genuine motives and convictions - is about as useful as the Frankenfoods moniker so beloved of many GM opponents (and which many of us in the media reproduce far too easily). It favours extreme positions, and risks crowding out more careful, reasoned voices on both sides. And it’s those voices we will need to hear the most if we want to move the GM debate beyond simple grandstanding.
As global food security becomes an ever more pressing concern, the risks of getting our stance on GM wrong - green-lighting it on a grand scale when we haven’t spent enough time understanding the risks or stubbornly opposing it without properly evaluating the potential benefits - are too high.
So, with New Year’s resolutions and January detoxes still high on everyone’s agenda, let’s see if we can make 2013 the year we - pro-GM, anti-GM or somewhere in the middle - detoxify our language. And let’s then start our debate on GM.
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