Kitchen Garden Forum

I personally think that the public view of GM might be a whole lot better if it were not for the vast gulf between the pro-GM rhetoric and what is actually delivered.

As an example, I attended a poster session where young scientists were presenting their work at the House of Commons. A prize was awarded for the best poster, which went to a young woman who had developed a GM plant variety. She gave an acceptance speech which used the platform to tell us of how GM could feed the starving of the world ... but her invention was a longer lasting GM strawberry !

All the talk is of feeding the starving and saving the world, or of growing drugs, etc. The reality has been glyphosate resistance to save farmers money, rock hard fruits to save the supermarket money, and varieties to lock already poor farmers into a cycle of buying fresh seed each year and the agrochemicals to go with them.

The saddest thing is that 40 years ago we watched the starving of Africa on TV, and today nothing has changed, but it is through lack of will, not lack of GM crops. The biotech companies will not feed the starving of the world, because they have no money to pay for it.

No matter what the arguments are today in ten years time we will have to consider new ways of farming when oil runs out, modern farming is heavily oil dependent, for ploughing and spreading fertilisers and pesticide. There is a perfect system, it is natures way, she has cared for us since we first appeared on this earth, and all the other creatures who share our planet, and she did it without fertilisers, without ploughs and machinery, adding to fertility instead of depleting fertility as we have done, and increasing diversity instead of depleting it as we have done, our arrogance simply amazes me. I know what I grow in my garden without fertilisers in harmony with nature, and with heritage seeds tastes a whole lot better, and is a whole lot cheaper, than anything I can purchase in the supermarket, it doesn't cost the earth, and helps conserve the oil resources we do have.

Nature's Babe wrote:No matter what the arguments are today in ten years time we will have to consider new ways of farming when oil runs out, modern farming is heavily oil dependent, for ploughing and spreading fertilisers and pesticide

The energy of manufacture of the agrochemicals themselves will outweigh the more obvious use of diesel by the tractor, too.

True Tony, it is just not sustainable.

Hi Tony and Nature's Babe,
Please remind me the difference in output ratio between the growing of Maize organically in Mexico and the growing of GM Maize in Iowa USA.
When you can give me the answer to this then you will realise your mistake! Mexico now grows GM Maize.
To me, neither of you really have a clue what it is to produce a crop to feed somebody else rather than just a crop to feed yourselves.
I appreciate what you do for a living Tony and take that into account.
Nature's Babe I suspect that you are talking about Permaculture which is I agree is a truly wonderful system but it simply is for individual families and not for mass feeding. You are one of the lucky ones who have the ground available. Millions in the world do not have the room.
JB.

Morning Johnboy

I admit to having felt more than a little trepidation in reviving this old thread of yours. The only reason I did so was to draw attention to more recent research into the potential toxicity of GM maize. I did comment that the paper was a long document but the abstract is worth a read. Here it is:

Abstract

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.

If GM foods are seen as a way to feed the world, it is as well that they should be safe to the people consuming them.

Hi Nature's Babe

It is impossible to disagree with your comment about new methods of farming being necessary when oil reserves are depleted, or at best difficult to access.
Where I would take serious issue with you is your assertion:

There is a perfect system, it is natures way, she has cared for us since we first appeared on this earth, and all the other creatures who share our planet, and she did it without fertilisers, without ploughs and machinery, adding to fertility instead of depleting fertility as we have done, and increasing diversity instead of depleting it as we have done, our arrogance simply amazes me.

To me this is simply not credible. Firstly I reject the concept of a personified, feminine “nature”. It has no more relevance than the “belief” that the earth was created in six days by a Hebrew deity. The earth and the life which emerged from it and survives as best it can are governed by the laws of physics and the related process of evolution. Humanity may indeed be arrogant, but it is agriculture, which came about as part of our evolution, that feeds us. There are of course different forms of agriculture, some more efficient than others, some more respectful of the environment in which we live.

Hi Alan,
I thank you for the abstract. Who are the 'We' who present the abstract? Remember that it is not only Monsanto who produce GM Maize.
At first glance they are a group simply gunning for Monsanto which is nothing unusual.
I once attended a meeting by a member of FoE who's whole condemnation of GM was the fact that originally the markers in the gene were viruses. When a Doctor of 40 years standing said that there are simply thousands of viruses that are totally harmless to humans.
The FoE woman told him he was obviously not in the know and that quite frankly he did not know what he was talking about!
Ultimately she fled from the hall leaving her handbag and all her FoE literature with three of her cronies. That was from a northern wing of the Hereford and Radnor Trust meeting. A group of nature lovers who got really miffed with her and then downright angry!
JB.

Hi Alan,
I thank you for the abstract. Who are the 'We' who present the abstract?

Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini is a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, team leader and author of books on environment and GMOs. He was expert for the French government (1998-2007) and the European Union at the WTO level and for the council of Ministers on GMOs (2003, 2008), president of the scientific council for independent research on genetic engineering (CRIIGEN), and receiver of Order of Merit for his scientific career (2008). Correspondence: criigen@unicaen.fr

Dr. Joël Spiroux de Vendômois is doctor in medicine, specialist in environmental pathologies and co-organizer of the first European meeting on environmental pathologies.

François ROULLIER is a statistician.

Dr. Dominique CELLIER is a researcher in bioinformatics, co-organizer of a Master 2 in bioinformatics and statistics at the University of Rouen.

Johnboy wrote:Please remind me the difference in output ratio between the growing of Maize organically in Mexico and the growing of GM Maize in Iowa USA.
When you can give me the answer to this then you will realise your mistake! Mexico now grows GM Maize.

Not quite comparing like with like. Iowa's maize production is exceptional (about 10.5t/ha). Worldwide average is more like 4t/ha. Mexican production is 2.5t/ha, similar to that of developing nations. But comparing very highly intensive production using irrigation, high N inputs and the best of conventional as well as GM varieties with peasant farmers is scarely fair, nor is the difference wholly to do with GM or organics.

Mexico has only this season allowed growing of GM trial crops, it will be interesting to see how they fare. It alone will not put them on par with Iowa, that's for sure.

Part of Con O'Rourke's article [inthe very first post on this thread] read:
GM potatoes would require no spraying and will not 'contaminate' adjacent conventional (and particularly organic) crops since, as every gardener knows, potatoes are propagated asexually by vegetative tubers rather than by pollination. It is ironic that current organic rules ban a GM variety which has such obvious benefits for the sector.[i]

Now that is what I would support about the development of GM technology: plants which do NOT need contaminating medication. But the opposite occurs in the matter of rape-seed growing: a weedkiller-resistent strain is grown so that the farmers can spray more and more weedkiller. Isn't it better to develop by GM a variety of rape which will out-compete the weeds?

I agree with Johnboy that growing commercially is far different from growing for oneself and that therefore different priorities have to apply. But I believe that in the two examples above we see the best and the worst uses of GM technology. I believe that a far higher priority must be to prevent the contamination of our soil and water.

But I'm no scientist. What do I know?