Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, after much thought, I am afraid I am a reluctant opposer of these amendments. I understand the need for transparency with the consumer—and the answer to the noble Baroness’s last question is very important—but I feel labelling will not work in this case.

Everybody supports the proposal to have a register of PBOs, and no one is trying to hide anything. If anyone really wants to know, they can find out, but not necessarily in 20 seconds—which, I gather, is the time it takes an average shopper to decide on a product. Secondly, we do not currently require people to label that a crop has been produced using an F1 hybrid technique or bombarded with radiation, or that it has undergone polyploidy induction or somatic hybridisation, or that a chemical such as colchicine has been involved. But if you asked people in the street whether they wanted such techniques to be labelled, they would almost certainly say yes, which is why they answered “yes” to the labelling of gene-edited products. Of course they did. But we need to be led by the science on whether these products are actually different if we are going to put a statutory labelling requirement in place, and the product is the same as in traditional breeding.

For instance, if I devised and produced a particular potato by editing its genes, and someone else, because they had been working on it for 20 years or so, produced a similar potato by traditional means, what would be the difference? It would be scientifically impossible to tell the two apart. ACRE would grant them both a licence and the FSA would pass them both as perfectly safe to eat. So, a label that distinguishes one from the other could be misleading and would not do our labelling system any favours. Incidentally, that view is shared internationally. Canada, the US and Japan do not require labelling for precision-bred products.

I believe it is the product that matters, not the technology used to produce it, provided that all the safeguards and breeding processes are strictly adhered to—and we are obviously going through these regulations very carefully, covering the breeding process for both crops and animals. They are already amazingly strict. As someone said in the Commons, do we label or license everything produced by 3D printing, just because someone could make an unlicensed gun with it? No—let us license the gun and not the 3D printing process.

It might be helpful to have some breeding details here—and I apologise as I am slightly retreading ground that I touched on on Monday. The point is that any wheat used to make bread is going to be several generations away from any gene editing, and obviously, ACRE and FSA get involved long before a seed reaches the marketplace. But, as I said on Monday, if a company edited a wheat to improve its milling quality, it would then have in-house testing for off-target characteristics, which would take about three or four generations—three or four years. Then, there would be a further two generations—two years—of statutory testing. Then, the variety gets recommended listing, and there would probably be another one or two years of multiplying up the seed for the farmers’ marketplace. It is a very long process, and I am not sure that the final crop of wheat could be called genetically edited as such. It is six or seven generations down the line.

Very few flour producers, especially the smaller ones who make for specialist local bakers, will have the capacity to separate this new variety. So what about your local high-quality village baker, who probably does not even have a wrapping for their bread and puts it straight onto a shelf? You can tell I am talking about my own local baker here, because that is exactly what she does. She will probably have to put up a general notice above the door of her shop, saying that the products sold in that shop may contain flour that is remotely descended from a gene-edited plant.

Incidentally, on Monday, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned Jabal, which is a new drought-resistant durum wheat which has just been produced by ICARDA, one of the UN CGIAR centres. She rightly indicated that it had been produced by scientists and farmers, and had been developed between 2017 and 2021. It is true that it was produced by ICARDA—with INRA, incidentally, which is the Moroccan agricultural research organisation—in 2017, and that between 2017 and 2021 it, and four or five other varieties which were produced at the same time, were tested with local farmers. The scientists, I may say, did not actually favour Jabal. They favoured another one which had better drought resistance, but it was a short-strawed variety and the farmers preferred the long-strawed variety because that is what they feed to their animals. For once, the scientists listened to the farmers: it does not always happen, I may say.

Anyway, the farmers chose Jabal and soon, I gather, in two or three years’ time, when it has undergone all its public tests, it will be released for farmers to grow; in other words, some six or seven years after they first started trialling it. But the time we should really be focusing on in connection with this Bill, of course, is the pre-2017 period, when the various seeds were actually being developed. I do not know whether your Lordships have ever been to a plant breeding centre. A few years back I went to the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, where they breed barley, which is very important for the Scottish economy—for whisky. They have 700 varieties of barley, all lined up, in their greenhouse, and maintain those 700 different varieties each and every year, because they do not want to lose any of them. Then they hybridise each of them. I am not a statistician, but I cannot quite imagine the number of crosses you can make from 700 different varieties of barley: it is going to be huge, probably in the millions. But they do this. Say you are looking for a particular characteristic, such as drought resistance: you hybridise it and look at it, breed more hybrids with another hybrid and so on, and go on through the procedure, and then, probably some 10 to 15 years later, you will find you arrive at something that is a leap forward. Then, of course, you have to go through all the tests.

So ICARDA has been working for maybe up to 15 years to produce this Jabal wheat and its four or five contemporaries before you get to 2017. If there are 700 barleys, there are over a thousand wheats. But the whole point of the Bill is that the advantage of gene editing is that you can do that process in possibly two or three years, not the 10 to 15 years it would normally take. It is complicated, and not actually very easy. Do not forget that the wheat genome is actually much bigger than the human genome. I believe the human genome contains 3 billion DNA letters, while bread wheat has 16 billion. That is a big difference. But—and this is the key point—whether it is gene edited or not, they all have to go through the testing period of five or six years and five or six generations before they can be released.

When it comes to animals, as I explained on Monday, with the intergenerational gap of, say, two years and nine months with a cow, or four years with a salmon, even if you have some miracle breed on the stocks ready to go the moment this Bill becomes an Act, it is still, with all the necessary testing, going to be the mid-2030s before such a product turns up in a shop. Breeding improvements in a species is a very long-term process, even with gene editing.

On the traceability front, I can do no better than to quote the evidence given to the House of Commons committee by Professor Whitelaw, who works for Roslin. He said:

“When it comes to traceability … genome-editing technology generates the equivalent of what is naturally found. Every animal born carries 40 de novo mutations—


that was a new one on me—

“and genome editing adds another one to that list. Without having an audit trail of individual animals, you will not be able to identify one genetic change from another. It is impossible to categorically say, ‘That is caused by genome-editing technology rather than a natural mutation.’ Therefore, the audit trail of an animal or product will not be based on the molecular analysis of that animal; it must be based on something else.”

Another witness, Dr Craig Lewis, told the committee that

“if we look at the pig industry in the UK, it is more done on a … lot basis. For example, normal practice … is to use pulled semen at a commercial level for a terminal sire, so—

and this is an important point—

“even within a litter, you might have three … sires represented … so individual animal traceability in the UK pig industry … does not really exist.”

How can one label a sausage produced in one of those litters as gene edited with any degree of confidence? I do not think one can and, as I say, we could be bringing the whole labelling system into disrepute. I completely understand the desire for transparency, and it is only after much thought and research that I have arrived at my conclusions. I just do not think labelling would be valid or, for that matter, achievable with any degree of certainty. Furthermore, I do not actually believe it is necessary. I support the view taken, as I say, by Canada, the US and Japan to not require labelling for precision-bred products.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I can assure noble Lords that this is not some sort of Cross-Bench conspiracy, but I am afraid to say that, although I can see the arguments, I too do not support the idea of labelling precision-bred products.

I have three principal arguments, some of which have been touched on, but I will nevertheless repeat them. The first is to do with enforceability. As we have heard, and indeed my noble friend Lord Cameron said a few moments ago, there is no chemical test that can distinguish between a precision-bred organism, whether it is a plant or an animal, and one that is produced by conventional breeding. So trading standards officers or public analysts would not be able to do what they would normally expect to do: take a product off the shelf and subject it to a chemical test to justify or assess its authenticity.

We have heard quite a bit about traceability and my noble friend Lord Cameron pointed to some of the difficulties with traceability in the livestock industry. But also, it is important to remember that in the food industry traceability works on a one up, one down principle. That is to say, you are buying a raw material to put in a product and you check that the person who is selling you the raw material claims that it is what it is on the tin. But that chain can often be very long. You are buying grain that has been produced in Argentina and there is a long supply chain from the farmer to the transport to the dock to the transport in the ship to Liverpool; the cargo is unloaded in Liverpool and then it is transferred through many stages before it finally ends up in the Warburtons bread factory. The one up, one down system is by no means fool-proof—which is why to really check what something is, you need to have an analytical test to back it up. A regulation that is unenforceable is a bad regulation.

Secondly, what are consumers supposed to do with the information? Of course, if you ask consumers whether they want to have precision breeding on the label, they will say yes. I know from my time at the Food Standards Agency that almost whatever you ask people about they will say “Yes, we’d love to have it on the label”. But you also have to remember that other surveys show that only between one-quarter and one-third of consumers ever read the label. So many people who say they want it on the label do not actually look at it. If it is supposed to allow people who are worried about technology to avoid PBOs, as my noble friend Lord Cameron has said, why not label products which have been produced as a result of mutagenesis with ionising radiation or chemical toxins?

I can, however—and perhaps this speaks to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock raised—have reason to label the effects of a PBO. For example, if precision-breeding were used to create tomatoes with more lycopene, if no fungicides were used in growing potatoes, or broccoli had more omega-3, there would be a reason to label those, because it would affect the way in which the consumer might wish to use the product. But those benefits do not need mandatory labelling because producers and retailers will do it anyway. You can buy eggs in the supermarket labelled as containing enhanced omega-3. Similarly, standards such as organic foods, Freedom Foods and Rainforest Alliance foods are labelled without the need for regulation because there is a marketing advantage.

Labels are already overcomplex. Although, as I say, people will always ask for more, cluttering up labels with more information will make it more difficult for those who have to read the labels for crucial information —for example, to avoid allergens. If you add extra labelling, you are just making it more difficult for people to read the crucial things.