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Genetically Modified Food

REPORTER: When it comes to genetically modified crops, Europe is looking increasingly isolated. Outside Europe, more GM crops are being grown than ever before, with the U.S, India, China and Brazil all producing GM food. And now research scientists promise a new generation of genetically modified crops nutritionally balanced to feed the world and benefit the environment. If that's true, could they change the European opposition to GM food?

Try to sell anything with genetically modified ingredients at this north London farmers market and I can guarantee you won't make much money. The buzz words here are local, organic and natural. People want to know where their food comes from and they're suspicious of intensive farming, let alone GM crops.

FEMALE FARMER: It's horrible, you should never tamper with nature, I don't like the idea at all. It sounds as if they're doing experiments and horrible things just make the food go further and it's not…it's not natural to have thirty five crops of cauliflowers a year when it's a winter vegetable, you know.

MALE FARMER: Why bother? There is perfectly good food without having it genetically modified. Why take the risk?

ENGLISH WOMAN: No I don't know anyone that feels it's a good thing. I mean the part scientist do, you know, there's a lot of money involved and I'm always suspicious.

REPORTER: They are familiar sentiments and ones you'll hear right across Europe. I've been covering the GM food debate for more than ten years for the BBC and on the surface at least, the arguments don't seem to have moved on. But in this week's One Planet I'll be hearing how European consumers might be persuaded to learn to love GM crops and how the European Union is under pressure to relax its restrictions on GM technology.

HUGH JONES: So this is our main GM glasshouse, this suite. So each of these rooms contain a population of wheat plants, maybe a few hundred wheat plants each of which have got a different candidate gene; the gene that we're interested in researching.

REPORTER: To get an idea of the sort of new crops that are being developed, I visited the government funded Rothamsted Research set in Parkland, some thirty kilometers north of London. This is the UK's largest agricultural research center. Hugh Jones showed me around.

HUGH JONES: And this is a room that contains wheat engineered with a gene that we hope will prevent pre-harvest sprouting. A problem that occurs in some years where farmers find that in rare summers just before harvest the seeds start to sprout. They start to germinate like they should do when they're sown again in the ground but they start to do that while they're still on the ear and that then ruins their bread making qualities.

REPORTER: So really with wheat at the moment, a normal variety of wheat, you know a very wet season, you can get this problem where overgrowing becomes useless.

HUGH JONES: Yes, yeah and we've got a number of candidate genes where we think if we could either over express these or knock them out that we'll stop this happening.

REPORTER: Did people come here expecting it to look different somehow because it's a genetically modified wheat as opposed to just wheat.

HUGH JONES: Yeah that is often a reaction, this doesn't look like GM wheat because it looks perfectly normal but that very much depends on the genes that we have transformed with, so a gene that you might hope changes the pre-harvest sprouting effect isn't likely to be something you can see. Where as we have candidate genes where we can change the heights of plants for instance and then obviously you could tell the GM variety from the non GM.

REPORTER: Why do you need to genetically modify a wheat plant rather than just breed one conventionally, does it give what it want?

HUGH JONES: While, because conventional breeding is like taking two packs of cards where you shuffle together the packs of cards and then try to remove all the other cards except the one, the gene you wanted to move. GM is much more precise than that. We can take the one card out of one pack that we want to move, the candidate gene that we're interested in. And cut that gene out from its genome and then just move that one gene exactly from the start to the end into the new variety so that you know that you don't have any um, its called linkage drag. Other genes that you're bringing along with your candidate gene that might have poor qualities.

REPORTER: Now this is just one small greenhouse and you've got a long row of them. And in a long row just on the other side of the corridor I see more wheat plants. It looks like behind this glass right here there's even more wheat plants going on and on and on. And these are all for different things, you've engineered them to do different things. What sorts of things can you engineer a plant to do?

HUGH JONES: Well we've got a range of projects and we've, we are interested in bred making quality so as I mentioned earlier the business of that pre-harvest sprouting. We've also investigated the genes that make a stronger or weaker flower. The genes that are involved in making strong flower for bred making. We've got a project looking at salt tolerance, we've got genes that are involved in disease resistance, I mean what we're interested in primarily is understanding gene function. GM is a tool that we're using as research scientist to understand gene function and companies will use the same technology to make new varieties. We aren't in the business of making both of those steps in one go so we're really trying to understand what genes do and some of those genes will have important implications in making new varieties.

REPORTER: Hugh Jones at Rothamsted Research, one of the few places in Europe you're likely to find genetically modified crops.