Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Trees

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]]

It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Curry. On this occasion, however, I believe this amendment is a Trojan horse seeking to end the classification of gene editing as genetic modification and replacing the EU regulatory framework with the Americans’ proof of harm.

Good regulation is about managing the risks and the benefits of a process, and while we have heard about the potential benefits of gene editing from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and other Peers, there are risks too. Although the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, may not wish to acknowledge these, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Young of Old Scone and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for articulating some of them. For brevity’s sake, I am not going to repeat them now.

I accept that the amendment sets out some undertakings before the Secretary of State could uproot regulations governing the food on our plate, but this Bill is not the place to do it and the amendment is, at the very least, pre-emptive. The Government must do two important things: first, they must lay before Parliament the policy statement on environmental principles as committed to in the Environment Bill, which will explain how environmental principles, including the precautionary principle, will be interpreted now we are outside the EU.

The Government have said that they remain committed to the precautionary principle. We are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which invites governments to take a precautionary approach with regard to synthetic biology. The Americans, with their proof-of-harm regulatory framework, uphold neither the convention nor the precautionary principle. Until Parliament has fully debated how environmental principles will be interpreted now we are outside the EU, there should be no consideration of changes to gene-editing regulations.

Secondly, the Government must introduce new laws on animal sentience, as they promised to do in the 2019 Conservative manifesto. These laws should place a duty to pay all due regard to the welfare needs of animals as sentient beings and, given that gene editing allows animals to be altered for food, would inform policy in this area. In America they sell AquAdvantage salmon, gene-edited to grow to size in half the normal time of three years. Animals are sentient creatures with intrinsic worth and should not suffer to obtain more productivity and profit. These invasive procedures can be painful, and animals that do not deliver the required traits are euphemistically “wasted”. It is not just me who is concerned. The Royal Society conducted research on gene editing in 2017 which found that the public were very concerned at its use on animals, particularly to increase the productivity and profitability of meat production.

The Bill rightly commits to the highest animal welfare standards and working within environmental constraints to enhance biodiversity and provide the food that we need. Into it has been smuggled this Trojan horse, studiously avoiding the words “genetic modification” or “gene editing”, at a parliamentary stage that limits wider debate. I cannot support this pre-emptive approach to remove a regulatory framework that takes a precautionary approach and requires mandatory food labelling. The welfare of our farmed animals, our biodiversity and public trust in our food are too important for that.

[Lord Trees [V]]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 275, proposed by my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington. Under strict regulatory processes, and after consultation—I emphasise that that is in the amendment, as referred to by other noble Lords—it is about applying exciting new technologies, supporting our superb UK biotechnology industry to continue as a global leader and an economic success. Above all, it is about strengthening global food resilience and security while potentially reducing chemical or drug use.

The amendment has particular relevance to plants but I want to support it with respect to animals and their diseases. I draw a contrast with the opinions of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who I respect immensely. The priority of disease control in animals increasingly lies in prevention, and key tools in prevention are management and husbandry, vaccines, and genetic resistance. Genetic resistance has of course occurred spontaneously by natural evolutionary processes in wild animals.

Apart from knowing what the R number is, many noble Lords will now be aware from the Covid-19 pandemic of the remarkable innate resistance of, for example, bats to viral disease. They carry infections that are lethal to humans, such as rabies and the Covid-19 virus, without apparent clinical disease. By definition, the process of natural selection occurs over many years, so conventional breeding methods to create disease resistance in domesticated animal species are extremely slow and raise real ethical problems.

Now we have the amazing potential ability to very precisely identify the parts of an animal’s DNA that permit specific pathogen invasion and then, in a very targeted way, adapt them by gene editing so as to be non-permissive to infection. This mimics changes to an animal’s DNA that might occur spontaneously but very rarely in nature, and does it in a fraction of the time. It is distinct from the wider techniques involving genetic modification yet is currently included within them and prohibited in current EU legislation, as many other noble Lords have said.

In relation to animal disease, there is already promising research to breed pigs with resistance to African swine fever, a highly infectious pathogen in pigs, distributed worldwide, that in recent years has killed millions of pigs in China, is now killing pigs and infecting wild boar, which are symptomless carriers, in continental Europe, and presents a real and present danger to our own domestic pig population in the UK.

The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh has recently created, using gene editing, pigs with resistance to the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, a disease endemic in the UK pig herd and a welfare concern as a cause of severe disease and high mortality, as well as having a substantial economic impact.

Finally, I stress that unlike processes involved in gene cloning, for example, using gene editing to establish a founder stock which breeds normally involves relatively few animals and no more intrusive processes for the animals initially than are used in normal veterinary practice. I very much support this progressive, forward-looking amendment.