France is an old ally of the United States, stretching all the way back to the American Revolution. General Lafayette was so valuable there’s a park named for him right across the street from the White House. In 1783, the French navy helped George Washington defeat the Redcoats at Yorktown--and a young country fighting a war for independence won a decisive victory.
In recent months, of course, the French don’t seem to be on our side very much. Yet tensions between France and the United States predate the recent disagreements over the war against Iraq. We’ve been fighting with each other over biotechnology for years.
France, in fact, is a big part of the reason why Europe has quit approving new biotech foods. Some of the world’s biggest enemies of biotechnology call Paris home.
That’s why it’s so encouraging to see French opposition to biotechnology begin to soften--at least among doctors and scientists.
In December, two important French organizations declared their support for gene-altered food. The first was the French Academy of Medicine and Pharmacy. It called on the European Union to end its moratorium on genetically modified crops, noting that they’ve been grown and eaten for many years now, especially in the United States--and that “no particular health problem has been detected.” What’s more, said the academy, “GM use has been a generally positive experience.”
Two days later, the French Academy of Sciences chimed in, also endorsing GM crops. “Transgenic varieties have been rejected in Europe, although there has never been a health problem regarding consumers or damage to the environment,” said the scientists in their report. “All the criticisms against GMOs can be set aside based for the most part on strictly scientific criteria.”
These announcements are critically important, because nobody’s been more down on agricultural biotechnology than the Europeans. A series of food scares, combined with the know-nothing activism of modern-day Luddites, has turned many Europeans against biotechnology.
The French Food Safety Agency, for example, recently demanded that biotech foods undergo more testing--even though they’ve already undergone rigorous analysis. There’s not a single scrap of evidence to suggest that GM crops are anything but safe. More testing won’t tell us anything we don’t already know. It’s increasingly clear that groups proclaiming otherwise either fail to understand basic science or they’re fronting for protectionist interests.
France has much to gain from participating in the biotech revolution. Its Minister for European Affairs, Noelle Lenoir, presented a report last year showing that France lags behind its British and German neighbors on biotechnology--to say nothing of the United States, which far outpaces the whole world. Lenoir recommended that France begin making more investments into this important field so that it can keep up with everybody else.
Greater willingness to experiment with biotech crops would be a good start. Before the EU’s moratorium on new biotech food approvals in 1999, the French were operating more than 1,000 biotech test plots, according to the Minister of Research and New Technologies. Today, there are only about 40. She labeled this an act of “self-censorship.”
Another part of the strategy should focus on public opinion. A democracy like France won’t ever become a biotech leader as long as ordinary people oppose the most basic benefits of biotechnology, which is to say, the stuff Americans put on their dinner tables just about every night.
Now an important set of French experts says there’s nothing wrong with biotech crops or the foods derived from them. It’s too soon to tell whether the European public will listen, but on my own visits to Europe recently, I’ve detected less negativity toward biotechnology than in the past, especially on the farmer level.
Farmers, doctors, and scientists--it’s a powerful coalition, and certainly one that’s well informed about issues of food health. If the politicians listen to them, perhaps they’ll finally do the job they were elected to do: Lead the masses.
News 
France is an old ally of the United States, stretching all the way back to the American Revolution. General Lafayette was so valuable there’s a park named for him right across the street from the White House. In 1783, the French navy helped George Washington defeat the Redcoats at Yorktown--and a young country fighting a war for independence won a decisive victory.
