Democratising Technology - reclaiming science for development
2 Nine experiences of democratising technology
In the diverse experiences described below, different individuals and organisations have adopted a variety of roles to bring about what can broadly be termed the 'democratisation of technology'. Each account begins with a brief summary of these contrasting roles.
2.1 A major UK medical research charity brings non-specialist carers into the decision-making process about how it spends its research funds.
In the early 1990s, the two-million-pound annual research programme of the Alzheimer's Society focused on the puzzles scientists wanted to solve, rather than on the needs of the Society's thousands of members. Lynne Ramsey was one such member. A prison inspector from South London, she cares for someone with dementia. As a fundraiser, she wanted to know whether the money she raised for the Society was producing useful results.
The research funds, she learnt, were awarded by 'peer review', a standard procedure in scientific research. Applicants submitted their proposals to a panel of experts who assessed only their scientific rationale. The Society was therefore funding research without taking account of the extent to which it would benefit people with dementia and their carers.
In 1998 the Society started to transform the way it funded its medical research. Scientists applying for funds were required to provide a jargon-free description of their proposed research and the possible benefit to people with dementia. The applications were then assessed by Ramsey and her fellow members of the society's Quality Research in Dementia (QRD) network, who rated each project application on a scale of one to ten. Those with the highest scores were then included in the next stage of decision-making.
The citizen-led nature of this research funding process comes from the combination of the QRD's ranking scheme together with an extended peer-review process: formal meetings attended not only by scientists with expertise in the area concerned, but also by carers like Ramsey. Once the scientists applying for money have made their presentation, the 'citizen scientists' ask questions first, before the more technical experts voice their questions.
One benefit of the extended peer-review system is that it has obliged scientists to communicate their science in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. Opposition to this part of the scheme from some scientists was initially fierce, yet today the QRD's success in improving the cost-effectiveness of research in the field has silenced most critics. Now it is the lay members of the QRD network who decide the sorts of medical innovations that are likely to increase the quality of life of patients and carers.
2.2 An Indian indigenous peoples' movement revives a deliberative and participatory process of governance and uses it to tackle the challenges presented by new agricultural technologies.
Girijan Deepika (People of the Forest) is an indigenous peoples' organisation working in East Godavari District of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. In 1995 it recruited facilitators from local communities with a view to analysing local problems collectively. They learned that an indigenous system of regular community meetings known as the 'Gotti' was in decline. These meetings allowed issues of concern to the whole community to be addressed, but over the years they had died out or become dominated by a small number of people who did not necessarily represent the diversity of views in the local population. It became clear, however, that these meetings could offer an ideal forum for people to engage in dialogue. The reviving of the Gotti was therefore the first task and was undertaken through a campaign using street theatre, music, dance and painting.
The Gotti is now restored as a vibrant forum for community debate. As an indigenous institution, it offers much greater chances of encouraging sustained participation than discussion and decision-making tools that have been developed by donor agencies in unfamiliar contexts. It is, in the words of participants, a space 'to sit and talk', 'to share our happiness and our sorrows' and 'an opportunity to reflect'.
Agriculture is consistently highlighted as a major concern, particularly where rapid changes have taken place following the introduction of cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. The Gotti offered a space to analyse key agricultural issues with historical maps portraying contrasts in agricultural practice over the previous thirty years.
Crops grown for sale were identified as not offering any livelihood security other than cash, yet having considerable requirements, such as land, plough bullocks, seeds, capital, market, water supply, pesticide and labour. Furthermore, they had led to many negative consequences such as indebtedness, food shortages for people and livestock, no proper market, farmer suicides and health effects such as pesticide poisoning. In contrast, food crops were seen to be useful for encouraging communal work, providing food security and fodder for livestock and poultry, maintaining fertile soil, producing some cash if they were sold, and avoiding debts because the required inputs were so minimal. The disadvantages related to pests and the vulnerability of some crops to heavy rains or winds.
The cumulative analysis over several weeks meant that the resultant actions were often substantial rather than piecemeal, with many communities deciding via a series of Gotti meetings to plant half their land with food crops, reversing the trend towards complete domination of the land by tobacco and cotton. The meetings also initiated a political campaign to make the authorities responsible for most of the decisions in these remote mountainous areas take action on the Gottis' demands, particularly regarding the over-promotion of cash crops.
Local people are clearly in control of what has become a catalyst for social and technological change in this region. At its outset the group received some guidance from urban professionals trained in participatory methodologies, but decisions about the long-term goals and strategies are made locally. Despite having low levels of literacy, rural people involved in Girijan Deepika have been able to critically assess the new technologies represented by government-promoted packages of seeds, pesticides and fertilisers. They have managed to have their voice heard on this issue as well as other new technologies such as vaccination, GM crops and industrial forestry techniques.
2.3 A top-down agricultural reform programme in Indonesia turns into a bottom-up movement for political accountability and agricultural change.
Integrated pest management (IPM) emerged in Indonesia in the late 1980s as a reaction to the environmental and social consequences of the new agricultural practices that have become known as the Green Revolution. At its height during the 1970s and 80s, the shift from small-scale subsistence farming to cultivation of varieties of food and cash crops requiring expensive inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, affected rural people all over the industrialising world. Following fifteen years during which pesticides had become subject to annual subsidies of over US$100 million a year, a devastating pest outbreak of the brown plant hopper on the Indonesian rice harvest of 1986 forced the national government to introduce a strategy that moved away from pesticide use towards methods of pest control based on combining external expertise with the farmers' own knowledge of their fields.
A co-operative programme between the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Indonesian government centred on Farmer Field Schools (FFS). These Schools contained elements of conventional training in methods such as agro-ecosystem analysis, using diagrams generated by smallholder farmers to help them examine different factors affecting their crops. More importantly, however, the Schools also aimed to support and develop farmers' expertise in their own fields, enabling them to replace their reliance on external inputs such as pesticides with indigenous skills, knowledge and resources. Over time the emphasis of the programme shifted towards community organisation and planning of integrated pest management, and became known as Community IPM.
The adoption of Community IPM through Farmer Field Schools has spread to more than one million rice farmers in Indonesia. It might be expected that such 'scaling up' of a successful practice could only occur via a shift in policy by national policy-makers, followed by incentives for farmers to change their practices. However, one of the key lessons from Indonesia, a country with a fragile democratic system that did not allow public meetings of any kind, is the extent to which Schools of 20 and more people were initially allowed and then gradually organised into farmers' unions, which forced a reluctant government to change not only agricultural but other policies related to rural technologies, livelihoods and governance. Community IPM demonstrates that participatory approaches to technology development can be institutionalised by the participants themselves, given an environment that removes political oppression and provides safe spaces for discussion. Farmer groups and associations have now developed their own organisational and advocacy functions, and so are able to bring about pro-farmer policy changes at national and local government level.
There are fears that trends to increase 'corporate farming' will reduce access to markets for smallholder farmers and increase poverty and environmental degradation. There are also market constraints to further enabling IPM. Farmers are currently not permitted to market products as 'pesticide free or low/zero residue', which would facilitate market access. With Farmer Field Schools and their associated political movements having begun to raise the awareness of Indonesian policy-makers about the perspectives of their country's farmers, many have the potential to become a vehicle for broader issues such as corporate accountability.
2.4 An ITDGPractical Action Zimbabwe initiative draws on farmers' knowledge to work towards the restoration of local food security.
Chivi, in Masvingo province, is one of the poorest districts in Zimbabwe. During a drought in 1992, people survived only by receiving famine relief. Around that time, a project initiated by ITDGPractical Action began working to enhance the availability of food in the district's households by supporting activities that local people felt were effective, and building new approaches based on local farming skills and experiences.
Before the ITDGPractical Action project, state extension workers had a top-down approach which generally failed to consider whether the farming methods they promoted would fit the needs of local farmers. Farmers, in turn, tended to wait for external help to change their lives. Their traditional knowledge of land management had been eroded in both the colonial and post-colonial periods and was further eroded by this situation.
When the ITDGPractical Action programme started, Chivi had farmers' clubs, but these were mainly dominated by men, even though women performed the bulk of the agricultural work. During the 1992 drought, small gardens were abandoned and 90 per cent of arable land suffered crop failure. More than thirty thousand cattle died in the province, leaving most families without draught animals.
By setting priorities through participatory meetings with the local community, especially its women, the project drew on farmers' existing knowledge and researchers' and other projects' experiences to introduce cropping methods that minimised the need for pesticides and fertilisers and enhanced soil and water management.
One project participant, Mrs Muteuri, had become dependent on food aid to feed her family of three children following the 1992 drought. Having participated in the project, she became far more self-reliant. During the 1997 crop season, Muteuri harvested 600 kg of sunflowers, 900 kg of millet and 500 kg of sorghum and shelled maize - enough food to see her family through to the next harvest and with a surplus to sell. Being able to feed her family and sell the surplus meant that food aid dependence syndrome, which had long characterised the people of Chivi, became for her a thing of the past.
Most important of all was the way the project enabled its participants to reclaim the knowledge that had been ignored or discredited by the Government's agricultural advisory system or that it had failed to disseminate. "Our villagers were seen as knowing nothing, because we are poor - so we just got handed out drought relief," commented an ITDGPractical Action project participant. "We now realised that there are many good things we knew as Africans before colonialism and we realised that we are indeed clever."
2.5 A landless workers' movement in Brazil supports low cost agro-ecological technologies and challenges the introduction of GM crops by transnational corporations.
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST - Landless Workers Movement) is the largest organised group of rural poor in Latin America. The MST grew from a small land occupation in the district of Rio Grande do Sul to a movement of over a million of the poorest people in the country. During the past twenty years, it has taken control of fifty thousand square kilometres of land - about the size of the US State of Ohio or three quarters of the Republic of Ireland.
In a country where, until 1988, the illiterate were not allowed to vote, the MST has promoted social justice. One hundred thousand children study in MST schools, and adults gather in tens of thousands of literacy circles across Brazil, so building the capacity of the movement to grow.
While the MST movement has been spreading over rural Brazil, the country's agricultural sector has become far more integrated into the globalised world food industry. By 1999 seventeen transnational corporations handled around half of all Brazil's agricultural exports. The emerging global food system transforms previously self-reliant farmers in effect into hired hands on their own lands. This change often leaves such people far more vulnerable to periods of hunger than before. In March 2000, one of the Brazilian government's advisers pointed out that farmers could not afford to risk the technological packages of high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and pesticides that were needed to enter competitive export markets. He estimated that around three million family farms in Brazil have very little income and are therefore 'sick'. About half the migration into cities in Brazil, around four and a half million people between 1996 and 1999, comes from agricultural families.
The MST believes that the programme of rural land reform it has started, together with the move towards the localisation of economies, can reverse this trend. Once people own their land and have organised themselves into a powerful economic and political unit, they will be better able to choose the seed varieties and other agro-ecological practices and sustainable technologies that promote their long-term welfare.
In the mid 1990s, the MST began promoting a model of low-input agriculture - agro-ecology - that prioritises crops that can be eaten, consumed and marketed locally, rather than sugar-cane and soya that are subject to the vagaries of export markets. People who are returning to work the land from the city slums have often lost their families' experience of farming, agronomist Jose da Silva has found. "They've never used chemical fertilisers or pesticides on food crops, so they don't miss them and can move directly onto organic methods without going through the problems caused by chemical farming."
More important for wider issues of bottom-up democratisation in Brazil, the powerful political force represented by the MST has played a role along with other people-power movements in coalitions that have led to major set-backs for Monsanto as it attempts to introduce GM crops into Brazil. Those MST farmers practising organic and other agro-ecological methods were particularly under threat. After a series of conferences and votes by regional representatives, they decided to reject currently available GM crops. By contrast, neighbouring Argentina became the world's second largest cultivator of GM soya in 2000 and its farmers are now impoverished.
The Brazilian experience of democratising the control of agricultural land - the most basic resource for rural people - over the past two decades has broader lessons for democratising agricultural technologies and the promotion of agro-ecological farming. Brazil's MST began with a regional focus in the south of the country, but built up a movement that is now prominent throughout Brazil and which has influenced other people's movements through the World Social Forum movement.
2.6 An ITDGPractical Action project in Sudan combines external with local knowledge to improve brick-making technologies and enlarge markets for co-operatives using the new techniques.
If it were not for the harsh arid climate prevalent in the Kassala region of eastern Sudan where Osman Hummed and Mohammed Ali Abu-Amna live, they would probably farm for a living like many millions of others across the continent. Instead they do something else to survive. They are brick makers for the Shambob Brick Producers Co-operative.
Brick making is one of the main rural alternatives to farming, employing 5000 people around Kassala. But most are kept in real poverty because they produce bricks which are bought by middlemen on behalf of wealthy merchants. Shambob village, where 80 per cent of the families derived their living from brick making, was so poor in 1998 that many of the men could not afford to marry, while the village had no services.
ITDGPractical Action helped the villagers to form and legally register a co-operative, and trained them in the necessary management skills. Women as well as men are accepted as co-operative members, each of whom makes a basic cash contribution. Throughout the process ITDGPractical Action representatives deferred to the indigenous knowledge of the workers to help them find the most appropriate way forward.
Local brick makers learned more about brick production processes and techniques from ITDGPractical Action staff and then began managing their own production and marketing. They started to experiment with new moulding and drying methods, so improving brick quality. The brick makers' incomes rose by 20 per cent in the first year and 67 per cent in the second. They now produce one million bricks a year, and demand is still rising. The improved Shambob bricks have helped set new national standards in Sudan, and to influence brick makers and consumers across the Kassala region.
By the year 2000 the Shambob brick makers' incomes had risen dramatically, and they were able to improve health services and establish a local school. As part of its shelter programme, ITDGPractical Action started working with brick makers like Osman, Mohammed and their 113 co-workers to set up a commercially viable and sustainable co-operative which would provide a better income and improve their quality of life.
A big part of Shambob's success was to cut out the middlemen and enable the villagers to run their own business. Equally important was the energy efficiency resulting from the co-operative's successful experiments with alternative fuels to replace expensive wood.
2.7 IT manufacturing workers in Scotland and Thailand forge research alliances to challenge the lack of corporate and government accountability with regard to workers' health.
Part I: United Kingdom
During the 1990s, the growth of the semiconductor industry fuelled the worldwide spread of computer technologies at the same time as government scrutiny of employers' health and safety practices became substantially weaker. Alliances with local rights workers and academic researchers forged by factory workers at National Semiconductor in Scotland have done much to make computer manufacturers more accountable to their employees. At the same time, these alliances have highlighted the challenges of integrating technical data with evidence based on individuals' personal experience.
More than ten thousand people are employed in the semiconductor industry in Scotland, which now accounts for a third of all European personal computer production.
Semiconductor manufacturers portray the industry as free of pollution. Workers, who are mainly women, wear head-to-toe white suits and work in sterile 'clean rooms' where air is filtered to remove minute particles. Industry representatives claim that these rooms are cleaner than operating theatres. Yet, while protecting the production line from sweat or dust particles from humans, such measures do nothing to protect workers from exposure to hazardous chemicals and solvents, some of which are known to have harmful effects on human reproduction.
A former employee of one such firm, National Semiconductor, Helen Clark recalls:
"'During my interview with the company I was asked if I was affiliated to any trade union and was strongly urged not to contact any previous union. My job training was only for 10 minutes, and it did not include anything about safety procedures or hazards from chemicals. The hazardous gas monitor was never taken seriously, especially when the workload was high, and managers often told us to ignore the danger warning, claiming it to be just a malfunction of the monitor, and to continue to work. I worked for six years, from 1979 to 1985, and one day I just collapsed on the floor. The company doctor told me that I should consider retiring, but I was only 36. Further diagnostic tests showed that I had developed stomach cancer and the doctor told me that my stomach had the look of an 80-year-old woman's. Many workers died of different cancers. I tried to fight back and demand compensation from the company. I commissioned a report and even hired a lawyer. Managers would openly say that it is very difficult to fight with multinationals."
Injured and ill workers did not receive any compensation beyond standard sick pay from the company. The company was not willing to acknowledge that these illnesses had any link with the manufacturing process. The sick women, with a local activist, formed an organisation called Phase II (People for Health and Safety in Electronics), which then formed a partnership with Californian occupational physicians and Stirling University's Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group. The researchers helped Phase II members publish evidence of the effects of the toxic chemicals and build a case for the factories to be visited by inspectors from the government's Health and Safety Executive (HSE). However, during their early inspections, the HSE did not take any samples to check the concentrations of hazardous chemicals, including several carcinogens, in the air or on work surfaces, and received no such data from the companies. Soon, Phase II had gathered enough evidence to launch a lawsuit against the plant, demanding compensation for cancer, birth defects in their children, miscarriages and other illnesses.
In response to the legal pressure from ex-workers and growing media coverage, the HSE conducted a new study into spontaneous abortion rates at six semiconductor plants in the UK. In 1998 it announced that, despite evidence from large studies in the USA, there was no sign of increased miscarriage rates. The university and Phase II co-researchers pointed to the statistical unreliability of the HSE's results, and the fact that the government researchers had ignored employees' knowledge of symptoms and their history. In 2001 the HSE conducted another small study on cancer in the company and found excesses of some diseases that have led to further investigations. Phase II and its supporters indicate that only large-scale studies of the industry will glean the epidemiological data needed to establish accurately the health status of past and present workers in the industry. National Semiconductor still employs over five hundred workers at Greenock.
In a joint paper in the International Journal of Occupational Environmental Health, in 2003, Phase II and the Stirling researchers suggested that assessments of occupational safety were all too often "exercises that followed paper trails", allowing inspectors to be deceived. The HSE, they concluded, suffered from "apathy, complacency, underfunding", and was inspecting an industry that was "fairly secure in the belief that it will not be regularly and rigorously inspected".
In November 2003, the company, which had experienced a 79 per cent rise in profits that year, announced a further investment of around £11 million to "significantly increase production capacity" at its Scottish facility. Organisations like Phase II, working together with unions and international coalitions of workers facing similar risks, are continuing to challenge the lack of corporate and government accountability in the industry.
Part II: Thailand
Thailand's IT manufacturing sector accounted for a fifth of Thailand's total exports in 2001. It is characterised by an overwhelmingly female workforce with minimal union representation and weak government oversight. Regulatory capacity is fragmented and overshadowed by the Board of Investment (BOI), which has a mandate to attract foreign investment. The BOI has previously used high-level government contacts to seriously disable the Ministry of Health's only occupational health clinic after it investigated questionable production activities.
In 1988 and 1989, a Californian computer manufacturer called Seagate opened two plants in Thailand. By 1991, worker health problems began to surface and there were four deaths. According to their co-workers, the four who died had all experienced headaches, fatigue, muscle aches and fainting. As a result, Seagate found itself facing strong calls for unionisation. In reaction, Seagate laid off 708 employees who were demonstrating in front of the US Embassy for union action. Seagate's director strongly resisted calls for unionisation, and in firing 708 people ensured that union leaders could not secure the 20 per cent of employees required to officially represent the workforce. When it became clear that the company would not recognise a union, most of the fired workers asked to return to their former posts, but were denied the opportunity to do so.
In response to the abuses of worker rights and the poor health conditions at Seagate, Dr Orapan Metadilogkul, the country's foremost practitioner of occupational health, was asked by a coalition of civil society organisations (CSOs) to investigate the deaths. Dr Metadilogkul concluded that more than two hundred members of the workforce had blood lead levels which suggested chronic poisoning, possibly aggravated by solvent exposure. Seagate disputed the evidence on the grounds that job applicants already had high levels of lead in their blood due to exposure to the high levels of leaded petroleum in local urban areas.
Thai laws exacerbate the lack of access to reliable health and safety data. Employees have no right to know about occupational hazards, nor do they have the right to refuse to undertake certain tasks. The law requires that employees are medically examined, but they have no right to choose the doctor or define the level of examination, or to see the results. Each labour inspector monitors, on average, over a thousand sites. Meanwhile, third party organisations are helpless to assist in monitoring conditions due to the same lack of information that workers face.
While IT firms in Thailand claim continuous improvements in working standards and employee health records, they do not disclose their information, making any attempt to evaluate the claimed improvements impossible. Moreover, there is a basic lack of baseline information, such as historical blood lead levels. However, the incidence of workplace accidents at Seagate has encouraged Thai CSOs to organise and demand improvements, campaigning for legislation to set up a national institute for occupational health, safety and environment that is financed independently from the state.
Both Scottish and Thai experiences demonstrate that it is important to have democratic input not only into the sorts of technologies that are developed, but also to the conditions under which they are used.
2.8 Indian community groups form alliances with UK research institutes to create an accountability forum for Indian scientists and policy-makers on future agricultural technologies.
Initiatives aimed at bringing new developments in biotechnology under a greater degree of control by non-elites have demonstrated that there are widespread and well-founded misgivings about genetically modified crops among the very people the technology is supposed to lift out of hunger. Between 2000 and 2003 five separate citizens' juries were organised by broad-based coalitions, in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, two of India's largest states, in Zimbabwe, and in the states of Cearᠡnd Maranh㯬 Brazil. Closely involving the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development, and funded by the Dutch government and the Rockefeller Foundation, the event in Andhra Pradesh has had the most widespread international impact and is described here.
Anjamma, one of the jurors in Andhra Pradesh, is the female head of an extended family of 17 people who survive on just four acres of land, only two of which can be irrigated. She joined 18 other farmers of small and marginal holdings in perhaps the largest-ever event to allow the poor to assess the potential advantages and risks of GM crops. She had not known about such technologies before joining the citizens' jury.
Called Prajateerpu, meaning 'people's verdict' in Telegu, Anjamma's jury sat over five days and heard from thirteen witnesses on a huge range of topics. The witnesses included representatives of the authors of 'Vision 2020', a plan to transform the state's agriculture to one based on GM crops and mechanised farming methods, which was devised by the US management consultants, McKinsey and Co, in collaboration with the state government and funders at the World Bank and the UK's Department for International Development.
As in other areas, the proposed introduction of GM in Andhra Pradesh would come within an industrialised system of agribusiness, grouping small farms into larger units, and the introduction of contract farming whereby a large proportion of the state's land would be run by large corporations rather than by small-scale farmers. It would see the number of people working on the land being reduced from 70 to 40 per cent, equal to a loss of livelihood for around 20 million people with no plans for alternative livelihoods for these people.
Having listened to the witnesses and discussed the issue among themselves, the Prajateerpu jury found that the policy and technical package of Vision 2020 was unacceptable to them. But neither their verdict nor those of the other jury processes that took place between 2001 and 2003 - one in Zimbabwe and two in Brazil - was a simple 'no'. In most cases jurors were provided with the opportunity to put forward their own carefully considered vision of the future of food and farming, with a wide-ranging list of demands detailing action to be taken by the government, civil society organisations and foreign aid agencies to implement their recommendations.
As for Vision 2020, Anjamma could not understand how any responsible government could knowingly take part in a scheme that would drive her, and millions of smallholder farmers like her, from their land. "You are talking about the removal of a third of the population. Where will the farmers go? If you throw them away, what will they do with their lives? You have introduced hybrid varieties and also chemical agriculture, and we are now in debt. Now we are talking about GM crops. Again the small and marginal farmers will be losers. The big farmers will walk away with all the returns."
The citizens' juries conducted on GM in Zimbabwe, Brazil and India differed from many previous attempts at allowing farmers to assess new technologies because the process allowed jurors to analyse the proposed introduction of new agricultural technologies in the context of broader social, economic and political questions. Rather than concentrating merely on specific issues such as land consolidation, GM crops and forest produce, the witnesses' evidence and the resulting discussions ranged across aspects of rural livelihoods that jurors, rather than the organisers or witnesses, thought were important.
2.9 Two citizens' jury initiatives on GM crops - one overseen by a multi-stakeholder consortium and the other carried out by a government agency - provide contrasting qualities of input into the UK government's GM debate.
Following a widespread boycott of GM foods by UK consumers, the UK government launched the 'GM Nation' debate during 2003, which claimed it would inform its policy-making as to whether, and if so how, GM crops would be planted commercially in the UK. In July and August 2003, citizens' juries funded equally by four different organisations - Unilever, Co-op Supermarkets, Greenpeace and the Consumers Association - met to discuss the issues. Having heard a wide range of evidence, a GM Jury in Tyneside and a parallel jury in Hertfordshire agreed with the Indian farmers of the Prajateerpu process - that GM crops should not yet be introduced.
Despite hearing from the same witnesses, each GM Jury reached its verdict independently of the other. The two verdicts broadly agree, in that both juries called for a halt to the sale of GM foods currently available, and to the proposed commercial growing of GM crops. They based this conclusion on the lack of evidence of benefit and an application of the precautionary principle. Both juries also called for long-term research into the real risks of damage to the environment and the potential for harm. One jury particularly asked for an end to blanket assertions that GM crops are necessary to feed the starving in the Third World, given the complex social and economic factors that lie behind such hunger.
As another contribution to the 2003 GM Nation debate, the UK Food Standards Agency commissioned a citizens' jury from a division of the public relations firm Bell Pottinger plc. In contravention of standard practice for citizens' juries, no panel of stakeholders was assembled to oversee balance and fairness in the jury process. Senior staff at the FSA stated that it was itself an 'independent' agency and had been advised by Bell Pottinger that no such oversight panel would be necessary.
A major disadvantage of not having drawn on a broad range of interest groups for oversight of the jury process became apparent when the question was set for the jury to consider. This was announced by the FSA as "Should GM Food be Available to Buy in the UK?" One of the witnesses to the jury immediately objected to this question, commenting: "With a question like that I can predict a 'yes' verdict without even needing to give evidence". Not only was this question open to the accusation of being skewed, like some opinion poll surveys, towards getting a particular answer, but it is likely to have severely limited the scope the jurors had to discuss a range of issues relating to the links between GM technologies, the food system and farming that they - rather than the FSA - might have thought were pertinent.
Though both GM Jury and the FSA citizens' jury were on the subject of GM crops, the lack of fairness and competence in the latter jury process, as well as a failure to safeguard against it being used to legitimise the pre-formed agenda of an already avowedly pro-GM government agency, leaves the motivations of those who initiated it open to question.
