GM food: a dinner discussion. The votes are in
By Jason Major
TechNyou
It has been two weeks since our GM food: a dinner discussion event – which is now up on our YouTube channel– so I have been tardy in getting some of the evaluation and voting data posted up.
But it is done and here it is – see below, though more thoughtful commentary will have to wait. Just before GM food: a dinner discussion, I was at Science Alive in Adelaide, and just after it I was at the Gold Coast Science Fair, where we had a voting board where people voted on similar crops discussed in the GM food: a dinner discussion event. I will pool all the data and commentary from all three events and post some thoughts next week.
The questions asked on the voting slip, which were part of the discussion on the night, were: “How acceptable is the use of GM technology to generate crops that
1. Benefit human health? Example: Rice enriched with iron
2. Benefit the environment? Example: Cereal crops that use less nitrogen fertiliser
3. Benefit the Australian economy? Example: Cereal crops that can tolerate salt
They voted on a scale of 0-5
Audience votes on acceptability of 3 GM crops. 0 = no never; 5 = yes definitely
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| Iron-Rice | 2 | 1 | 3 | 9 | 20 | 25 |
| Nitrogen efficient cereals | 2 | 1 | 2 | 12 | 13 | 30 |
| Salt tolerant cereal | 3 | 3 | 3 | 14 | 15 | 22 |
| Total | 7 | 6 | 10 | 38 | 52 | 82 |
The graphical version
Who are they?
Without doubt there is overwhelming support for these three crops, at least. But who is our audience? What demographic slice decided to come to our event and how representative of society as a whole is this data. Without pestering those who came to answer more questions or participate in a focus group it will be difficult to know, though I can tell you some basic stuff.
The event was fully booked (100) registrants, but just over 80 turned up on the night. Apologies for those who wanted to come, but were told they couldn’t. We could have squeezed a couple more in.
Ages
47% were between 19 and 35 years of age
14% were between 55 and 64 years of age
26% were 65+ – An interesting number of retirees, but then I had sent invitations to all of the University of Third Age groups I had done presentations with and I know a few people from them came.
male-female ratio was roughly equal
Occupation
25% were full-time tertiary students
All the 65+ people were retired
Most of the rest were in full-time employment
40 % of those working or students were in the field of Science/Technology. Another 25% said they were in the agriculture sector. Evenly spread amojng the rest were those in hospitality, art/design, education, finance/accounting and government.
What does it all mean?
The voting slip used to judge the acceptability of the crops was different from those determining demographic factors – an oversight on our part. Otherwise we would be able to say if occupation, age etc, had any influence on GM crop acceptability. For example, there were a large proportion of people in the Science/Tech sector. How did they vote? Is their greater knowledge of scientific methodology or the actual science behind a GM crop making any difference to their vote? Does having this background simply make them more trusting of the scientific process or of the scientists themselves, regardless of the science itself?
Values before science
In the past I have said that the actual science has only minimal influence on the judgements people make about this plant breeding technology. Most are values-based. For example, who owns the patents to the technology; will it lead to greater corporate control of my food; who will get access to the technology; will their be equitable distribution; how will it affect those in developing nations/small farmers/etc. None of this has anything to do with the science and many of the questions and discussion at the event itself reflect this. Short of having individual chats with each audience member it is hard to know just how influence science or values was having in their voting. This values-based judgement, however, was more evident at the two other events I mentioned above, and which will be discussed in more detail in the next post.
But it is all food for thought.
There was more discussion happening on the discussion board on the event website