Eat GM: “Better than starving to death!” It is not the most persuasive slogan in the history of food advertising. Nor, with this as his pitch, is Hilary Benn,
the environment minister, ever likely to compete, as a twinkly salesman
of repulsive treats, with figures such as Cap’n Birds Eye or Tony the
Tiger. But he has to find some reason why, after refusing them for
years, the picky British must now learn to love GM.

“The truth,”
Benn actually said, when he added GM to his new range of national
austerity measures, “is we will need to think about the way in which we
produce our food, the way in which we use water and fertiliser. We will
need science, we will need more people to come into farming because it
has a bright future.” Did he mean that the only modern, sustainable
farming is GM farming? If this endorsement was a little half-hearted,
compared with what Labour ministers have said in the past, you can see
Benn’s difficulty. He’s terrified that if he is honest about the
government’s determination to grow commercial GM crops in this country,
the public will – to use the technical term – go off on one.

At
all costs, Benn must avoid a PR disaster like that of a decade ago when
Monsanto, the multinational that owns 90% of GM traits (or properties),
set about wooing a sceptical British public with a series of huge
newspaper advertisements. The tone, funnily enough, was not that
different from Benn’s last week: modern yet soothing; idealistic yet
reasonable. Insufferably patronising. It struck Monsanto, back then, as
just the right tone to take with consumers who had recently learnt,
following the outbreak of BSE, that their lives had been endangered by
a farming industry that fed live cows with dead cows.

“Worrying
about future generations won’t feed them,” ran the slogan above one
celebrated Monsanto ad, in 1998. “Food biotechnology will.” Wasn’t GM a
better prospect, continued the chemicals giant, than conventional
farming, whereby, along with lavish use of fertilisers, herbicide and
insecticide, “soil erosion and mineral depletion exhaust the land”?
“While we’d never claim to have solved world hunger at a stroke,” it
conceded – after all, you’d want a couple of days for that –
“biotechnology provides one means to feed the world effectively.”