Sabine Louët

Sabine Louët is a freelance writer working in London, UK.

A European Commission-funded study of Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnology in Europe (PABE) will be published this month. It finds that the public's reaction to GMOs has been influenced by the misassumption—on the parts of not only regulatory authorities, scientists, and industry, but also non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—that the public needs to be educated, rather than consulted.

The PABE study was commissioned by the 4^th Framework Fisheries, Agriculture and Agro-Industrial Research programme as an exercise in "better understanding of the public." Between June 1998 and June 2000, 14 focus groups comprising about 6 people in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK were presented with a series of questions and statements and their responses and discussion recorded. Those questions and statements were compiled after interviewing the major players—biotech companies, agro-food firms, large food distributors, ministries, regulatory bodies, scientists, farming trade unions, and environmental and consumer NGOs—and surveying literature produced by them and, as such, represented a list of assumptions these groups have about public attitudes to GMOs.

Analysis of responses shows the public wants to know why GMOs are needed, who will benefit from their use and under what circumstances, who decided they should be developed and how, and who will be accountable in the case of unforeseen harm. Contrary to popular belief, the study suggests the public is neither for nor against GMOs, and challenges the view that there is "objective" scientifically assessed risk and "subjective" public perception. Nor do the findings support the views that people think the term "genetic" scary, are obsessed with the idea that GMOs are unnatural, or tend to reject agricultural but accept medical application of GM technology.

These results contradict those of the European Commission's Eurobarometer on public perception of biotechnology. In 1999, for instance, Eurobarometer found that the public agreed with such statements as "GM food threatens the natural order of things," and are generally more in favour of GM technology for medical applications than for agricultural applications (Nat. Biotechnol. 18, 935, 2000). However, with PABE and Eurobarometer being qualitative and quantitative studies, respectively, the two are not really comparable. Brian Wynne, professor of Science Studies at the Centre for Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University, who is involved in the UK side of the PABE study, says "Studies such as PABE help put this kind of large scale survey [like Eurobarometer] into perspective." Mark Cantley, from the European Commission Research Directorate, adds that "qualitative studies based on focus groups have value for formulating better questions for quantitative studies such as Eurobarometer."

Indeed, the PABE results show that the assumptions about public perceptions made by the establishment are wrong, and uggests that the public has been responding to the way it has been addressed by authorities, as opposed to misunderstanding the issues or behaving irrationally toward GMOs. "People's reaction to GMOs is not so much to do with GMOs, but stems from the behavior of scientists, regulatory institutions and industry [towards them]," says sociologist Claire Marris from University of Versailles (France), who is involved in the French side of the study. This view is supported by the finding that focus-group opinion was strikingly similar across the five countries, which were chosen for their presumed cultural differences. "Public perception of GMOs is influenced by institutional behavior of the regulatory and private sectors, which has been the same across Europe," says Marris.

The PABE study shows that NGOs are also guilty of this behavior. Marris points out that consumer associations such as Que Choisir in France and Consumer's Association in the UK also "believe that public behavior toward risk is largely due to a lack of education and believe the solution lies in better labeling and communication campaigns." According to PABE, although the public see NGOs as a necessary counterweight to industry, they acknowledge their lack of impartiality.

The focus group discussions revealed that the public actually understands risk, has a fair grasp of the issues at stake, and asks pertinent questions about the scientific basis of risk assessment, through lay knowledge of complex topics such as the interaction of GMOs with ecosystems. They acknowledge that it is impossible to anticipate all risks, especially in the long term, and are prepared to accept some level of risk as long as stakeholders publicly acknowledge uncertainties.

Concluding, the PABE study recommends involving the public as far upstream in the innovation process as at the risk-assessment level through consensus conference, for example. "If public debate happens downstream when a product is ready to be put on the market, it can only have a limited impact on technological trajectories," says Marris. "We need to develop and experiment with new procedures to get people involved in defining research priorities and the framings of risk assessments."