Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 30th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Deidre Brock]

Q I have seen criticism that the Bill is too focused on enabling the commercial opportunities inherent within gene editing, rather than focusing sufficiently on animal welfare, for example. Would you agree with that, looking at the Bill as it is drafted at the moment?

Penny Hawkins: Yes, because even the animal welfare applications are ultimately for human benefit. If you think about the gene edited polled cattle, which are the poster child for the animal welfare applications, clearly polling cattle is extremely painful and distressing for them. A world in which that did not have to happen would certainly be a better world for the cattle, but it is actually possible to keep horned cattle together. It can be done, but it is very expensive. Many farmers would not be able to afford it and many consumers would be unwilling, or probably unable, to pay the prices that would be involved. So, yes, there is a welfare benefit, but it is ultimately an economic benefit.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Q Could I just press a little more about the Animal Sentience Committee side of things? We are now in the position where there is the welfare advisory body under this legislation, the Animal Sentience Committee and all the licensing regimes under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Do you think it would be better if this was all merged into one organisation? We also heard about the codes that apply in terms of farm animal welfare, some of which is legislative and some of which is guidance. Is it not all a bit messy?

Penny Hawkins: No, I do not think it is messy. The Animal Welfare Centre of Excellence, which will bring all these committees together, will ensure co-ordination. The purpose of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 is to look at policy across all policy areas and see whether due regard has been paid to the effects on the welfare of animals as sentient beings. The welfare advisory body is something that the Animal Sentience Committee would look at when it was making that assessment. I still think it is really important to have this overarching body that will look at policy right across the board. To me, they are all separate entities that complement one another.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q Do you not worry that things would get lost in the mix, and that something might be seen as the responsibility of one body and then be overlooked by another?

Penny Hawkins: No, I do not believe they would. I think there is a suitable framework in place to ensure co-ordination that I think will work.

[The Chair]

Can I thank Dr Hawkins for her time and for the evidence she has given to the Committee, which I am sure we will find very valuable? Thank you very much.

Penny Hawkins: Thank you for the opportunity.

Examination of Witnesses

Lawrence Woodward OBE and Pat Thomas gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Katherine Fletcher]

Right. I am very grateful for the exchange.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q May I ask about liability? I hope this is within your remit. What happens if an organic farmer finds that there is contamination? Does the Bill provide any mechanisms or safeguards for people who might want to resist going down this path and are affected by it?

Dr Edenborough: Very minimal safeguards. I think you are talking about the potential release of an edited genome. What happens if it breaks out into the wild and then, for example, goes into the field next door?

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q Contamination was always the concern with GM.

Dr Edenborough: That could be a real mess. To prove it, you would have to have some sort of genetic marker, because you would have to prove causation, but then you would also have to prove damage and it might be difficult to do that.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q But if your organic product has an organic trademark, in terms of the badging—there are rules about importing and exporting organic produce—that could potentially harm their ability to apply for organic certification.

Dr Edenborough: Yes.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q But you are saying that it might be quite difficult to actually assess whether it had affected the product in that way.

Dr Edenborough: It ought to be relatively easy to prove causation, because there ought to be a genetic marker, but damage is nearly always the hurdle in negligence cases. If somebody says, “I’ve lost everything,” the question is how much they have actually lost.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q If you have a field of organic crops that could be contaminated, you would not necessarily know the extent to which the produce had been contaminated. The certification is based on what you have used on the field, how you have farmed and so on, so you would not know if something had affected it. Do you see what I am saying?

Dr Edenborough: Well, there would have to be evidence that there has been contamination, and that evidence would have to be predicated on a sample.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q It might be quite difficult to quantify the extent to which—

Dr Edenborough: It is all worked on probabilities. You would not test every grain of rice; you would test a few thousand and extrapolate. That is the way that all damages cases work.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q I want to take this point about damage and liability a little further. You look alarmed, but actually I want you to simplify it a bit. The way you are describing it to me, I think the onus will really be on the person claiming that they have been damaged to make a claim and go to court. There may then be some difficulty for them. I think you are saying that there would be less difficulty in proving causation, because there would be a marker, but there would be considerable difficulty in proving the extent and the fact of the damage that had occurred. Is that correct?

Dr Edenborough: Yes, on both points.

--- Later in debate ---

[Deidre Brock]

Q Would you accept that, given the importance of Europe to the salmon export trade, it makes sense to wait to see what Europe is doing? I believe there will be some sort of response by next year. I am worried about the impact that moving ahead of Europe will have on salmon in particular.

Ross Houston: There is maybe a double-edged sword there. The trade is not only with the EU, it is also with other countries. We are an international company; we have operations in Iceland and Chile, and we are selling our genetically improved salmon eggs to a very large number of countries. My concern would be that if we do not start having that discussion with some urgency, including in Scotland, then, bearing in mind that Scotland and the UK are at the forefront of R&D in this field, we might fall behind in the innovation landscape. The benefits of that R&D and innovation might impact on elsewhere in the world, while we are taking that cautious approach.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q I was reading earlier this week about how in Japan they have been using CRISPR to change Japanese sea bream. I think the technicality is that you end up with bream that have 20% more meat, because it knocks out a protein that means muscle growth is supressed. Basically, there is less muscle in the fish and presumably more fatty meat—if that is what you call it on a fish. You mentioned the impact on human health earlier, and you mentioned allergies—that was with CRISPR rather than with gene editing—but to what extent do you see us getting to a situation where the finished product, the fish, is so changed that it is nutritionally a different product? To what extent do you think we would need labelling for that? Allergies are one thing, but I wondered about it from a nutritional point of view. People are often told to eat fish. Should it be marketed as something that is different?

Ross Houston: Good question. I was using CRISPR and gene editing as synonymous—it is a gene edited product in Japan with the red sea bream. Those early examples are interesting, because they are markers that show that the regulatory environment is changing in countries such as Japan and some of the Americas. From our point of view, what we are doing here is running very advanced scientifically based breeding programmes. We are keeping 300 families of Atlantic salmon. With them we are pedigree recording, recording the genotype in each year, and recording lots of measurements relating to growth, disease resistance and fillet quality. We are doing that routinely, all the time. We are monitoring the important traits of our fish.

The R&D we are involved in is targeting gene editing to tackle issues such as resistance to sea lice in the salmon, resistance to a viral disease called infectious salmon anemia, resistance to a viral disease called infectious pancreatic necrosis—those are the targets of our research and development. In the foreseeable future—I could also go further than that—I do not see that we would be doing something similar to what you suggest in our breeding programme. We are able to improve growth and fillet characteristics through the process of routine measurement, family selection and scientifically based breeding programmes. It is quite straightforward to do it that way, and therefore it just would not be a sensible target for the technology in our case. We also see the public acceptance and customer preferences. The use of precision breeding technology to develop traits that have concurrent animal welfare, environment and economic benefits has to be what we are moving towards.

This sort of edit, where you are knocking out a myostatin gene and allowing for faster fillet growth, just is not on our radar. On the specific point about changing fillet characteristics, if you were perhaps trying to use gene editing to modify, for example, the fatty acid profile of the fish, with potential health effects for humans—hopefully it would target positive health effects—there might be an argument for it there. But I do not see the need with the sort of traits we are focused on and targeting; I do not see that the product would be any different, other than having the favourable trait of disease resistance, for example.

[The Chair]

I want to try to get two questions in, very quickly.