At the end of the day everything boils down to politics: The evolving of German policy toward GMO crops and the existing stagnation

Abstract

Today it is “en vogue” to oppose the use of GMO plants not only in the environmental- and consumer-protection movement, the Green and the Social Democratic Party in Germany, but also in the conservative parties of the political spectrum. This article describes how such an atmosphere was able to develop over the last twenty years. An atmosphere in which almost everyone in favor of GMO plants within these parties is now quiet—because the political price of supporting the technology would be simply too high.

Keywords:

• CSU
• Germany
• party policy
• policy impacts

Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, physicist by her own right, who was always defending the technology over the years and rejecting banning a new technology for political purposes, finally gave up because the opposition was simply too bold and the topic too minor for her to resist any longer the political pressure form the other political actor.

Over the years a situation has developed that is comparable to the decade-long struggle of the prohibitionist movement in the US, leading to the 18^th Amendment of the US Constitution and the ban of alcohol in 1919. At a time when the European crisis is not over and the situation in the Ukraine and Russia is dominating the political agenda, key politicians have no time to fight with their coalition partners on “minor” topics such as the application of a specific new crop breeding technique—especially in a situation where there is no one left who could oppose such a switch of position. Scientists are tired of the endless debates, the bureaucratic delays in their experimental authorization, and the destruction of the fields. The industry left the country and farmer organizations are afraid of using genetically modified (GMO) plants because of a liability regime in place, which would leave the individual farmers under a business-threatening scenario.

Such a little plant, and yet such a strong impact. The petunia plant, authorized in September 1988 by the former Federal Research Minister Heinz Riesenhuber, was the first GMO plants, which saw the laboratory from the outside in Germany. But no one—beside the scientists working with the plant—thought it was pretty or cute. The very opposite: The first deliberate release experiment was at once the crystallization point for fierce attacks by greens and environmentalists. The institute requesting the authorization for the release was the Max-Planck-Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne with Heinz Saedler and Peter Meyer as the leading scientists running the project. At that time the institute was already famous for his director, Jozef Schell, who along with Marc van Montagu identified in 1983 the mechanism of transferring genes to plants via the natural existing Agrobacterium tumefaciens mechanism and laid down the fundamentals for transfer of genes to plants, the basis for now more than 2 billion hectares of GM crops grown worldwide over the last 20 years.

The strong public rejection of GM crops in Germany in the beginning was not a surprise because the principle discussion on the different applications of genetic engineering had been going on for years, focusing mainly on the pharmaceutical application and especially on the production of human insulin with the help of modified E. coli by the company Hoechst (which has now merged with another company). This debate had the interesting “side effect” of increasingly raising the political profile of several environmental organizations and of Green party—founded in January 1980 and for the first time in power in Federal State of Hessen, the location of the Hoechst production plan. As a “success” of this debate the pharmaceutical companies Boehringer and Hoechst were finally out of business with their products EPO and human insulin respectively.

The German Parliament, the Bundestag, was struggling with the “Risks and Benefits of Genetic Engineering” in a special Commission of Inquiry from August 1984 until December 1986 under the Chairmanship of the pragmatic politician Wolf-Michael Catenhusen (Social Democratic Party, SPD). The work of the Commission was the basis for several regulatory initiatives but also for research programs in the following years.

The debate in Germany was of course strongly influenced and shaken up by the first deliberate release of a GMO ever—the famous “ice-minus” bacteria, a modified Pseudomonas aureofaciens from Monsanto, authorized by EPA in the US in October 1987. The tone of the German debate was set by early headlines in the most influential newspaper which titled “First step toward Frankenstein” and influenced also by people like Linda Bullard, working formerly for the US “Anti-GMO-hero” Jeremy Rifkin and establishing in the middle of the 1980s a new NGO in Germany called “Gen-ethisches Netzwerk” together with Benedict Härlin, a Member of the European Parliament for the Green party form 1986–1990 and one of the key persons in the debates for stronger EU regulations on handling GMOs; having also close ties with the leading Environmental Directorate of the European Commission, which in itself had strong interests in extreme strict regulation. Härlin continued his efforts afterwards as Greenpeace campaigner.¹

Labeling

Rarely ever was an EU-regulation so intensively monitored in Germany as the so called Novel Food Regulation² which laid down the basis for the authorization of GMO foods and—even more importantly—the labeling provisions. Already the first draft in 1989 got heavy public attention and was followed until the final decision eight years later in 1997. During that time there was a continuous public battle between industry stalling behind the position that labeling would be impractical and consumer organizations, which were requesting more transparency for “the right for making own choices”. A fight with these antipodes could not to be won in public for industry. Not to mention that NGOs were shouting for a boycott any time a product was labeled on the market, as it was for example the case with the famous Butterfinger from Nestle.

Consequently GMO food—and therefore GMO plants—and all those working on and with them became the “dark side”. In addition it was not very helpful for getting a more rationalized debate, that companies like Monsanto were perceived as lacking sensitivity toward a European debate culture. The former CEO, Bob Shapiro, tried really hard, but it was too late: Monsanto had already the label of the “bad guy” and the NGOs had a very clear interest to keep it that way, because it made their campaigning much easier! Both facts, the gut feeling of the ordinary consumer that industry is hiding something and the possibility for the NGOs of playing the “David against Goliath” game led to an extremely skeptical public atmosphere, which made it for politicians deciding on new regulation and the authorization of new varieties more and more difficult to be “pro GMO”. The more politicians, however, made their skepticism public, the more difficult it was for the “other side” to get public support. The first Catch-22 situation was born.

Institutionalized Debates

To rationalize the GM debate, several attempts were made to bring opponents, scientists and industry together to find a common basis—but all of them failed at the end. In a series of retreats attended by high-ranking proponents and opponents in the mid 1990s for example, coordinated by Berlin sociologist Wolfgang van den Daele, the meetings “helped to reveal what many had until then been unwilling to admit: the dispute over gene-altered food was about much more than human health and the environment; it was rooted in deeply conflicting views about democracy, capitalism and global trade”.^3,4

I myself initiated (after intensive internal battling as—at that time—an employer of an environmental organization) in the beginning of 1994 a 2-year-long dialog with the company Unilever which focused its work on the common assessment of a single product (the baking enzyme xylanase). Realizing that the participating NGOs, mainly Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), could not show any significant risk related to the assessed product, they decided to leave the dialog, fearing the political consequences of admitting that there are safe GMO products on the market. I opposed strongly leaving the dialog for such obvious political reasons, but as an employee I had no choice but to the follow the requests of my bosses or resign from my post (which I later did).⁵

There was always a strong temptation of politicians to use “new scientific data” to actually do what was in their political interest but was not possible from a purely legal point of view—as the banning of GM seeds. One example was the banning of Bt-176 corn by the former Green Minister of Health, Andrea Fischer in February 2000 in cooperation with her colleague Jürgen Trittin, Minister for the Environment (as with Andrea Fischer, both from the Green Party). Her “safety” concerns were finally rejected by the responsible EU Scientific Committee on Plants which argued that the invocation of the safeguard clause by Germany was wrong. The planting for this year, however, was stopped—and the political support gained. Even for the price of rebuffing the scientific adviser, which were responsible according to the law to make a risk assessment before authorities make their formal decision. The Central Commission for Biological Safety (ZKBS) was simply ignored and was so angry that it made its frustration public for the first time in its own press release.

That the decision of the Minister Fischer was purely a political one is supported by the fact, that one year before, a first attempt to get rid of the GM seeds was already made by asking Novartis as owner of the EU authorization to wait with placing the seed on the market “on a voluntarily basis.”

But there were also other, more positive approaches. Industry and science for example had strong expectations toward an initiative of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who announced in June 2000 a “program of concrete experience.” The program should include an extensive monitoring program in the field to take concerns seriously into consideration and provide concrete data based on experiences collected in the field. The BSE crisis, however, killed the program—the political cost after the resignation of two ministers, Andrea Fischer, Minister for Health and Karl-Heinz Funke (SPD), Minister for Agriculture,⁶ have been seen simply as too high for Chancellor Schröder.

With Renate Künast (Green Party) someone else took responsibility in the newly created Ministry for Agriculture and Consumer Protection. Someone who was in open opposition to GMO plants. But trying to soften her negative image with farmer organizations and industry she made efforts for another dialog in December 2001—which, however, failed (again) after one year of extreme intensive negotiations between NGOs, industry and scientists.

Künast was therefore, politically seen, in a very comfortable position when she stopped surprisingly in autumn 2003 the release experiments of an Federal Research Institute working under her responsibility which tried to develop apple trees being self-resistant against a serious disease one could get only under control by burning the trees. The experiments were already authorized by the ZKBS, but again this institution with his broad expertise was bypassed and ignored.⁷

Regulatory Burden

In February 2005 another revision of the Genetic Engineering Law (GenTG) came into force—one of the last activities of the dying SPD-Green coalition that ended in July 2005 when Chancellor Schröder asked the German parliament for new elections after the SPD lost the election in the largest Federal State of Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia, for the first time in almost 40 years.

The GenTG, the final nail in the coffin for plant biotechnology in Germany as some characterized it, established for the first time strict liability rules (which were in the same time so variable that no farmer would know which cases were covered), and it made conducting research experiments in the field almost impossible by defining that even a single pollen of such an experimental plant shown up in any other agricultural product would lead to a recall action and an elimination of the product from the market. This zero-tolerance precondition, however, cannot be imposed in an open field environment. In addition, the doors were opened for radical opponents interested in destroying experiments an commercial farmer fields, because not only research institutes but every single farmer was obliged to show on the internet inch by inch where he put his (authorized) GMO plants on the field. The Government of the Federal State of Saxony-Anhalt brought this new law in April 2005 to the German Supreme Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht)—which needed another five years to finally decide in May 2010 that the strict limitation were in line with the German Constitution (Grundgesetz).

The new government at the end of 2005, bringing Angela Merkel to power as new Chancellor after an extremely narrow victory, was built as a coalition between the CDU and the Social Democrats, which were for seven years was strongly influenced by their former coalition partner, the Greens, resulting in a strong shift toward a more left policy. Insofar nothing really positive happened after that election concerning a more positive environment for GMO plants.

The pro-GMO side had still hopes that the CDU-Liberal Democrats (FDP) coalition in 2009 could finally bring a switch into the debate—but then it was too late. The other conservative partner in the coalition, the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian CDU, has decided to use the rejection of GMO plants as a political tool.

Horror Stories

One of the negative side effects of too strict regulation was obviously strongly underestimated (or covered purposely) during the half a dozen revisions the genetic engineering laws: Especially the creation of new “horror stories.” The zero tolerance for “non-authorized events,” for example, leads in a globalized world constantly to a situation where one can find minor traces of GMO plants in a huge transporting ship that was strictly regulated and assessed in one country—which is waiting, however, for years for the formal authorization in another region, like the European Union. This creates not only enormous cost for the industry involved,⁸ but also a new food “scandal” in which the public gets the impression that something really dangerous is happening. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has conducted research on the costs for instituting complete bans versus allowing for adventitious low-level-presence of GMOs approved for use in exporting but not importing countries, showing that such bans without allowing for low level presence (LLP) detection are costly and problematic. Despite that fact that often the risk of hazard is extremely low or not existing, the law would have been deemed broken, and that is sufficient for the outcry and no one complains that the law is simply impractical and badly designed. And again we have a Catch-22 situation with local authorities under pressure to double or triple their monitoring efforts, leading to more “events” that one will find without any doubt, which then can be used by those putting the pressure on the authorities to prove that more monitoring is necessary. And in parallel the NGOs bring every single event to the attention of the media, so that the consumer at the end of two or three years was almost bombarded with negative stories related to GMO plants.

One could argue that sooner or later people are getting desensitized or used to the negative stories about GM food. But this argument underestimates that there are companies out there which profit from spreading these fears as part of their business strategy.⁹ Not only NGOs, which were living from donations or monitoring companies like Genetic ID (established in the US by John Fagan, who started as a high level anti-GMO activist) but also the organic food industry which is less and less able to prove that their products are healthier and tastier than their conventional counterparts. What better marketing tool could they get than conventional food which is “poisoned” or “contaminated” with GMOs? Insofar we do have participants in the debate with a clear self-interest to allege that GMOs are dangerous and frightening, which is much different from the approach in the beginning of the debate 20 years ago where people were concerned and looking for answers on their skeptical questions.

And finally we have some scientists, who realized that being “anti-GMO” could be quite helpful for raising their images and their businesses, with Gilles-Eric Séralini as probably the best known example.¹⁰

The Role of the Christian Social Union (CSU)

It was interesting to observe that over the years, those who changed their positions from supporting genetic engineering to opposing the technology did get nothing but additional political support. The probably best example is the former Member of Parliament, Ilse Aigner. She supported the technology up to the moment she became Federal Minister for Agriculture from October 2008 until she left the office in October 2013.

Her party boss, Horst Seehofer, made it very clear from the beginning that he expected Aigner's full support in the coming election in Bavaria—including the continuation of a restrictive GMO policy. Aigner agreed, probably simply because she had no choice and no alternative if you consider her long-time goals. Her inner-party opponent, Bavarian Minister of Finance, Markus Söder, was just waiting for any mistake from her as both were competing to become Prime Minister of Bavaria in the future and therefore succeed Horst Seehofer. Söder was clever enough early on to recognize the emotional and therefore political impact of the plant biotech debate has on conservative voter, especially the small-scale farmer in Bavaria. Already in 1995, being active in the CSU youth organization, Söder recognized that the environment is a hot topic especially for young people. He feared that not taking their will into account might endanger the >50% majority of the CSU in Bavaria—and that the only possibility was “to ban the Greens from all city- and federal state parliament and the Germany Bundestag”.¹¹

When Horst Seehofer was trying to become the new CSU party Chairman in 2007 there were—unusual for this party—two candidates fighting each other in public. And Seehofer had a strong weakness in a State as Bavaria, dominated by conservatives and Catholics: he had an extra-marital affair and his girlfriend had recently given birth to their baby.¹² Only 2 weeks after the child was born, Söder, at that time General Secretary of the CSU, was commenting on Seehofer's policy as Federal Ministry of Agriculture and his strong support for plant biotechnology.¹³ This clearly affected the political stature of Seehofer, whose political support for plant biotechnology that went back at least until the mid 90s was fading away at once. Only two months after Söder's interview, Seehofer took farmers and plant breeders by surprise right in the middle of the planting season by banning the seeds of MON 810 Bt corn “as long as a monitoring program was not available.” He claimed that he based his decision on new “safety concerns,” which the scientific organizations rejected afterwards as not sufficient.

Following his own advice Markus Söder publicly met in 2009 with two well-known critics of the GMO technology: Vandana Shiva and Percy Schmeiser. Söder, returning from visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told journalists that some of the leading scientists at this Institute were concerned about allergic reactions and serious negative health effects of GMO plants on children. The Institute scientists themselves, when asked afterwards by the coalition partner, the Bavarian Minister for Science, Wolfgang Heubisch, were quite surprised, because they could not recount any of their own comments leading into that direction.¹⁴

Time is Over

And now, in 2014, even Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was always defending the technology and rejecting banning a new technology for political purposes, finally gave up. In a confidential meeting with the head of the coalition partners (Sigmar Gabriel, SPD and Horst Seehofer, CSU) she finally agreed that every single Federal State in Germany is free to decide as to whether to allow the planting of genetically improved plants that have to get a European wide authorization beforehand.¹⁵ This decision was also based on the fact that several SPD-CDU coalition governments on the State level agreed on joining the initiative of “GMO fee regions.” “No GMO plants in Thuringia, this is our fundamental position” argued for example Eleonore Mühlbauer (SPD) in line with her CDU-partner Egon Primas.¹⁶

Merkel knows that there were no serious safety concerns related to this new breeding technology. Physicist by her own right, she supported the application of genetic engineering, even at a time when her Bavarian partner, the CSU, already objected the application because of political opportunism. But the opposition was simply too bold and the topic too minor to resist any longer.

Conclusion

I like to compare the decades long debate on GMO plants in Germany with the struggle for the prohibitionist movement in the US, leading to the 18^th Amendment of the US Constitution and the ban of alcohol in 1919.¹⁷ The final decision to amend the constitution was made after 30 years of fierce political fights and campaigning. Those in favor of free access to alcohol simply lost their energy in fighting for it or moved on. The pro-prohibitionists, however, had an advantage with the religious fervency they fought for their goal—and finally won.

The same was the case with plant biotechnology in Germany. At a time where the European crisis is not over and the situation in the Ukraine and Russia is dominating the political agenda, Merkel has no time to fight with her coalition partner on perceived minor issues such as the application of a specific new breeding technique, especially if no strong opposition to her decision is to be expected.

And there is no one left who could oppose the anti-GMO campaigns in Germany. The scientists are just tired of endless debates, bureaucratic delays in their experimental authorizations and the destruction of the crop field trials. The industry has left the country as BASF Plant Science, is developing the products (actually sometime quite successful) for foreign markets while KWS SAAT AG, or is out of business, especially as a startup company with venture capital drying out because of the loosing perspective. Farmer organizations are apprehensive because of a liability regime that predisposes the individual farmers to potential lawsuits and the food industry reputation is tarnished because of orchestrated food scandals and increasing ploys by the competitors labeling their products as “GMO free,” hoping for a business advantage.

Today it is “en vogue” to oppose the use of GMO plants not only in the Green Party and the SPD (and, by the way, also in the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), which saw their opposition as a good tool for improving their negative image), but also in the conservative part of the party spectrum. Everyone in favor of GMO within these parties—and those people do exist—was more or less shutting up because the political price of supporting the technology would be simply too high. The message we can learn from this historical excurse is: “Once you are in a situation where a politician is committing political suicide in supporting you, you are lost.”

On December 5, 1933, prohibition in the US ended after Congress created the 21^st Amendment to the US Constitution (which repealed the 18^th Amendment) and it was ratified by the states. Maybe we will face a similar situation in Germany on the application of plant biotechnology. This only history will show us.

For now the door is shut.

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.