Australian Attitudes to GM Foods and Crops

By Craig Cormick

Weed Management - 14 Australian Weeds Conference, papers and proceedings, Wagga Wagga, 2004 

Which of the following two statements do you think is true?

• The Australian public see great benefits from GM foods and crops and the forecast for increased acceptance is quite optimistic.
• The Australian public see great risks from GM foods and crops and concerns are continuing to rise.

The answer is that both are true, depending on how you interpret the data available. And, of course, the more complex surveying becomes, the more complex the answers are, and the more liable they can be to being selectively interpreted.

Take, for instance, the apparently conflicting findings that concerns about GM foods have remained quite high in Australia over the past 3 years, but the number of people who claim they would be happy to eat GM foods has risen from 25% in 1999, to 32% in 2000 and then risen again to 49% in 2001 (ACNielsen, 2000; Millward Brown, 2001) (Figure 1).

The levels of concern, or the proportion of those willing to eat GM food, are quoted by the anti-GM food or pro-GM food lobby as best suits their needs—neither looking at the real issue of correlating concern and behaviour to determine if concerns influence behaviour or not.

Biotechnology Australia, the Government agency responsible for co-ordinating biotechnology issues in Australia, has been conducting comprehensive surveys since its inception in 1999, tracking changing attitudes to GM foods and crops as well as health and medical applications in biotechnology. Working through both qualitative and quantitative research Biotechnology Australia has established a fairly good understanding of both what Australians think about GM issues, and how they think.

General trends over the past 3 years have been that people have become more set in their attitudes, both for and against the technology. In 2001 a question such as: Will GM food risks increase or decrease? elicited about a 30% Don't Know response (with 33% saying Decline and 32% saying Increase) (MARS, 2001). By 2002 the Don't Knows had diminished to 24%, with a net gain flowing mostly to those who felt risks would Decrease—which rose to 45% (MARS, 2002).

And while it is true to say that most Australians have a degree of concern about GM foods, it is worth putting this concern into some context. About 39% of the those who responded to a 2000 survey stated that they had high concerns about GM food—compared to 45% having high concerns about uses of pesticides in food, 46% having high concerns about human tampering of foods and 58% having high concerns about food poisoning (Quantum Market Research, 2000) (Figure 2). Similar results have been obtained from similar studies in the UK (FSA, 2001) and USA (Wirthlin, 2001).

Australia’s attitudes to GM foods and the related issues of GM crops and regulation, tend to sit somewhere between those of the more-accepting USA and less-accepting UK, which also tend to be characterised by divergent awareness and trust in their regulators, as found by Moon and Balasubramanian (2002).

In the 2001 Eurobarometer study (16,029 people, roughly 1,000 people for each member state of the EU), 70% of Europeans did not want GM foods, with 59.4% believing they had adverse effects on the environment. By comparison, a 2002 study of 1203 people by the US Food Policy Institute found that 74% of people approved of GM foods which were less expensive or tasted better. While the two surveys are not entirely comparable, they do illustrate the general trend that more US consumers are willing to accept GM foods and crops than Europeans.

As a general trend, GM foods and crops have been slowly moving off the agenda as ‘hot topics’ in Australia, being replaced by stem cells, cloning and other human health issues, but following the launch of an anti-GM campaign by Greenpeace in 2002 in Australia there has been increased media attention and renewed interest in GM food and crops.

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