ASK and you may indeed receive 鈥� but the news you receive will not necessarily be what you wanted to hear. Earlier this year the UK government instigated what it called GM Nation?, a series of round-table discussions, town hall debates and other consultation exercises, all aimed at discovering what the famously sceptical British public really thinks about genetically modified crops as the government gears up to deciding whether to sanction commercial growing.
Well, now ministers know. The findings, published this week, show that the vast majority of participants are convinced that GM food has the potential to cause health and environmental problems. Indeed, more than half those who attended the debates could foresee no circumstances in which they would want GM crops to be grown in the UK. Ever.
True, surveys of this sort always risk being skewed by a disproportionate turnout from those already passionately opposed. So a lot of this recorded opposition is neither surprising nor informative. Some of it, though, is highly revealing. If the government does decide to sanction some commercial growing, the sheer scale of the mountain it will have to climb, even to win over waverers, is highlighted by what the survey found when it homed in on a subset of apparently unprejudiced participants.
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Many of these people started out sitting on the fence or harbouring only mild doubts. Yet as they immersed themselves in the topic, their attitudes hardened. Some 96 per cent of these people ended up saying that not enough is known about the health effects, compared with 80 per cent to start with. And negative views of the environmental impact of GM crops rose a whacking 28 percentage points, to 85 per cent. In general the more these people learned, the more sceptical they became.
In the wider survey, many respondents apparently thought GM crops would be grown in the UK anyway because of pressure from the US. In fact, the UK government鈥檚 pro-GM tendencies stem more from an ambition to compete with the US, not cave in to its demands. Ministers see giving at least an amber light to GM as crucial to cultivating an image of the UK as a nation at ease with the innovations that will power the knowledge economies of the 21st century and attract inward investment. Perhaps the government would have more success in the GM debate if it made that argument explicit.
Next up, the farm-scale trials. Set up to examine the impact of herbicide-resistant crops on wildlife, these are due to report next month. The government needs an unequivocal thumbs-up for the GM varieties. Anything less could leave it having to push policy through in the face of even deeper public unease.