High prices nudge Europe nearer to GM food

By Sam Cage

ZURICH (Reuters) - Like many in Europe, Switzerland's Coop supermarkets do not specify whether goods are genetically modified -- none are. But a wave of food inflation may help wash away resistance to "Frankenstein foods".

"I think there's a lot of resistance in Switzerland," said shopper Beatrice Hochuli, picking out a salad for dinner at a bustling supermarket outside Zurich's main station.

"Most people in Switzerland are quite against it."

Consumers are rarely first in line to adopt new technologies: even with food prices up more than 50 percent since May 2006, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index, relatively wealthy Europeans remain wary of foods derived from tinkering with the genetic make-up of plants.

But policy-makers and food companies are pressing the GM topic in a bid to temper aversion to biotech crops like pesticide-resistant oilseed rape and "Roundup Ready" soybeans, which tolerate dousing of herbicide.

These are already common in the United States and other major food exporters like Argentina and Brazil.

The European Commission has said it believes biotech crops can alleviate the current crisis in food supply, although it added in June that expediency should not overrule strict scientific scrutiny of the use of GMO technology.

The chairman of Nestle, the world's biggest food group, has said it is impossible to feed the world without genetically modified organisms and the British government's former chief adviser Sir David King said this week GM crops hold the key to solving the world's food crisis.

"If you take the pressure of burgeoning population ... we need a third green revolution," he told the Financial Times, referring to two waves of innovation that helped increase crop yields sharply in Asia in the past 50 years.

Climate change and increasing concern about fresh water supplies are helping to fuel interest with new GM seed varieties likely to be more resistant to drought and able to produce reasonable yields with significantly less water.

GM technology still has many opponents, who fear biotech crops can create health problems for animals and humans, wreak havoc on the environment, and will give far-reaching control over the world's food to a few corporate masters.

Yet a European Commission-sponsored opinion poll last month showed a creep in knowledge and acceptance of the technology.

"For me it is just a matter of time before we get our head around GM," said Jonathan Banks at market information company AC Nielsen.

"The way people will learn to live with GM is to say 'we do it product by product and make sure everything is OK.' At the moment we have a knee-jerk reaction which thinks of Frankenstein foods," Banks said.

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