Biotechnology debate: The result

By The Economist online

"This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory"

THE voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic modification in its current form—carried the day with 62% of the votes, against 38% for supporters of the motion.

This is a subject that arouses strong passions on both sides, as can clearly be seen in the comments, but I hope you still found the debate informative. I certainly did, in particular because of the comments from farmers themselves, on both sides of the argument. Neither a rapprochement between the two sides, nor a resolution of the arguments one way or another, seems likely any time soon. Thank you all for participating.

Moderator's note: The result is being announced in this rather unusual way (in the form of this blog post, rather than on the debate microsite) for an unusual reason; a reason that also explains why the voting tallies have appeared to leap around rather erratically during the debate. Several commenters pointed this out and suggested that this was evidence of foul play. In fact the explanation is much less exciting, and rather complicated: we had a technical problem with our site. Non-techies can stop reading here, but here are the full details for those who are interested.

Our debates are hosted at economist.com/debate, and we also have a "staging" server, where we prepare material for posting, at preview-debates.economist.com/debate/. This second server is only intended for internal use, but Google's crawlers managed to find it during the past few days and added it to Google's index.

As a result, people who searched for the debate were directed to one of two different versions of it. The staging server is set up identically to the main debate server, which means it also has its own voting mechanism. Votes were thus being tallied on two entirely separate servers; anyone who visited one, and then the other, would have seen different voting tallies. During the last few days of the debate the address of the staging server was circulated on a number of environmental mailing lists, and on Twitter. This caused a sudden flood of "no" votes on the staging server, causing the underlying database to collapse because it was not load-balanced. That's why we've been unable to announce the vote in the usual way.

Instead, we have taken the votes from both servers and have added them up to calculate the final tally: 38% yes, 62% no. (For completeness, the final tally on the main server was 46% yes, 54% no; on the staging server it was 35% yes, 65% no.) This technical problem has not affected the outcome, then (the motion was defeated); but now you know what happened and why the voting tallies appeared to be behaving so oddly. We apologise for the confusion.

Tom Standage
Digital editor, The Economist

Update Nov 17th: The debate server is now back up, and our technical team has combined the two sets of votes so that the voting tally displayed for this debate on the overview page is now correct.