Farming Voice of reason on GM crops should really be cultivated
Comment Fordyce Maxwell
Iwas recently invited to come off the subs’ bench and take part in a radio discussion on genetically modified (GM) crops and plants. Feeling that I was no longer closely involved enough with current thinking on GM I said thanks, but no thanks.
Too late for second thoughts some background reading and listening since then and the recent endorsement of GM by Princess Anne convinced me that I could have taken part effectively in the radio debate for the simple reason that it has barely moved on in two decades.
Like leaving the European Union or demanding independence for Scotland and, of course, religion, the GM argument is almost impervious to logic, research or science. The anti-gm movement seems as solid as it was almost 20 years ago when Monsanto started its hard-sell and the Daily Mail in a moment of journalistic brilliance called GM crops Frankenfoods.
To my mind, and the mind of many scientists and ‘feed the world’s growing population’ realists, GM crops should have been grown in the UK for at least the past decade.
Their usefulness has been proved entirely to my, and their, satisfaction, as has the fact that such crops are now grown on millions of hectares round the world and have produced not one recorded ill effect on the tens of millions now eating food with at least some GM component, including in Britain.
But opponents of GM refuse to accept that science should over-rule emotion and fear of the new. A review about two
0 Princess Anne says genetic technology has real benefits years ago of more than 140 separate research findings on GM crops indicated that they reduced pesticide use by a third on average and increased yields by a fifth.
Did that make antis, or the Scottish government, think again? Will Brexit, or potential independence see GM crops appear in Scotland? Will the intervention of Princess Anne on the side of GM’S usefulness sway any thinking? Or will the antis, and government, stand proudly alongside that bastion of reactionary thinking and hankerer for the good old days that never existed, Prince Charles?
All questions above are rhetorical. I listened to Princess Anne being interviewed on Radio 4 and she said in her common sense, if snippy, way that if the world is going to produce enough food for its growing population ‘surely we have to accept that genetic technology is going to be part of that’.
That technology, she said, did not have many downsides as far as she is concerned. What is the problem of trying to grow better, more cost-effective, crops? Producing as much food as we can in our own country is not an optional extra, she said, and GM is one way of making sure we do that.
Prince Charles in his cheery way has warned that GM could produce “the biggest disaster of all time”. Princess Anne said in the Radio 4 interview: ‘To say we mustn’t go there, just in case, is probably not a practical argument. In the future, genetic technology has real benefits.’
In the same series of interviews, Sir Tim Smit of the Eden Project in Cornwall, said that “of course GM is acceptable,” it’s simply a system of transgenics. He suggested calling it “fast breeding” instead of GM to reduce opposition and saw refusal by politicians to accept it as part of Britain, and Scotland’s, reluctance to invest in agricultural research. By implication, we are becoming the research backwater and in the international slow lane where Professor Mike Wilson warned we would be almost 20 years ago.
It is fact that the public reaction to any scare story is to panic. Think of MMR vaccine, BSE, bird flu, swine flu, flu flu. And in the case of GM and BSE what always made me either laugh or shout, depending on mood, at the latest scare was the amount of unhealthy rubbish and processed food so many shovel in daily.
We know the probable side-effects of eating and drinking like that. Getting fat, becoming ill and dying early. We ignore that, but panic about GM because a newspaper called them Frankenfoods. Good try by Princess Anne, but I fear increasingly that Prince Charles’s Luddite views will prevail.