Summary

Histories of modern plant breeding traditionally begin in 1900 with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance and the subsequent establishment of genetics as a scientific discipline. Mendel had several key British supporters, including William Bateson and Rowland Biffen. Despite claims that genetics would transform plant breeding in Britain and the British Empire, however, the practical impact of Mendelian genetics on plant breeding has been hotly contested by scholars. In Britain, as in much of the Western world, the early decades of the 20th century saw the establishment of state-funded centers of plant breeding research. Following the Second World War, a so-called “silent revolution” occurred in British agriculture, driving up productivity. Crop varieties developed by these research centers and private companies played an important role in this revolution. By the 1960s plant breeding techniques such as hybridization and mutation breeding had produced popular crop varieties. In 1973 Britain gained membership of the European Economic Community (later the European Union), which provided new incentives to boost agricultural production. The post-war drive for production resulted in cheap food, but at the cost of quality and environmental damage. During the 1980s and 1990s, a series of food safety scares, notably salmonella in eggs and the bovine spongiform encephalopathy outbreak, rocked consumer confidence in British food regulation and government competence. In the 1990s and early 2000s, trials of genetically modified (GM) crops and sales of GM produce led to a consumer backlash and protests from environmentalist groups. Experiments on laboratory rats also gave the misleading impression that GM foods were harmful to health. Faced with growing public hostility, the British government imposed a moratorium on the commercialization of GM crops in 1998. A subsequent review by the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission reported that it was near-impossible for commercialized GM crops to be kept separate from non-GM agriculture and the environment. Following the 2020 departure of Britain from the European Union, the British government has passed legislation to enable the introduction of gene editing in crop plants. Simultaneously, attempts to abandon European regulations have simultaneously placed food standards in jeopardy. In the early 21st century, U.K. plant breeding and food safety are once again matters of public controversy.