Debate, what debate?
NATURE Editorial
June 12, 2003
The UK government is squandering the chance to canvass public opinion on one of the hottest controversies in science.

How do you condense the views of the public on genetically modified (GM) crops into a single document? One innovative, if experimental, solution is to try to spark public debate among community groups across the country. In Britain, this effort got under way last week. It is supposed to inform the decision, to be made in the autumn, on whether to allow commercial planting of the crops.

Six set-piece debates are being held in cities around Britain in the first two weeks of June. These are meant to act as springboards for discussions at local level. Questionnaires and recordings from the events should generate more detailed insights into public thinking than opinion polls can provide - helping to reveal how people have come to hold the views that they express (see page 672).

It's a laudable idea. But one problem has become painfully clear: most of the public don't know they are invited, for reasons that aren't hard to discern. Over the past three years, the Netherlands (population 16 million) and New Zealand (population 4 million) have conducted similar programmes to assess opinion on genetically modified crops, each investing some four times the sum allotted in Britain (population 60 million). This penny-pinching has restricted advertising, and turnouts at the first debates have been limited to a few hundred, with the majority already having a vested interest in the subject.

Members of the panel organizing the debate, which includes representatives from industry and academia, as well as experts on public consultation, claim that they were given too little time to set up the debate. The panel's first meeting was last September; the government expects the results to be complete by mid-July.

This sorry state of affairs will have two consequences. The opportunity to test a consultation process that could be applied to many other scientific controversies - from the alleged environmental hazards posed by nanotechnology to the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research - could be squandered. Worse, negative media coverage may leave the British people to assume that the government has already made up its mind on transgenic agriculture, and simply isn't interested in their views.

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