Time to think again.

[Johnboy]

Why we need GM foods

- Michael Wigan, Daily Telegraph, June 2, 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/earth/mai ... gan102.xml

The Government is accused of having lost touch with reality.

No better example exists than agriculture minister Hilary Benn's insistence that domestic food production is unnecessary for food security.

Other countries across the world are protecting their populations from running low; even major food exporters like Argentina are beginning to restrict some exports. American rice rationing is a fact.

World leaders are starting openly to talk about food running out. The sharp commodity price hikes after 10 years of stagnation are causing alarm. China is now seeking to buy farm-land abroad further increasing alarm.

The arguments about genetically modified crops are being resurrected. When the price of a loaf of bread doubles, as it is on the way to doing, the public's pickiness about production methods will weaken.

GM can be seen as crop modification addressing contemporary problems. Take fuel costs and the carbon effects of heavy tractors churning over fields. On a crop of GM sugar-beet or oil seeds weeds are controlled with one 'pass', the tractor using an all-inclusive weed-killer to over-spray the crop which itself remains undamaged. Ordinary sugar-beet varieties require three to four sprayings. Not only is the labour cost quartered, and the cost of the fertiliser quartered, so is the wear and tear on machinery and the need for its replacement. This lighter impact agriculture clicks in down the whole crop cycle. As tractors traverse soil they compact it. Plant roots - wheat has a one metre root - cannot get water and nutrients from deep down. Along comes the sub-soiler, a spike dragged slowly, in low gear, deep into the 'pan', breaking it up again to aereate the soil.

If you only traverse the field once to kill the weeds, compaction is reduced and aggressive sub-soiling needed less often. Less time, less fuel, less labour, lower carbon, and less spray-drift for those who object to farm chemicals.

Fuel cost is one of the main drivers behind re-consideration of GM. We all know it costs more to fill the car. Less well-known is that in every budget since 1997 the taxation cost of red diesel used on farms has closed the gap on ordinary motorists' diesel. Farmers have been a conveniently mute target for the Chancellor's punishment. Added to the fuel spike the figures are dramatic. Accountants Grant Thornton say farmers spent £47 per farm hectare on fuel in 2006 and 2007 harvests. The crop growing in the ground now will have cost £74 a hectare. The urgency of cutting this cost is pressing. If using GM means three to four times less fuel consumption, along with the other environmental and economic benefits, how can British farmers be expected to compete with crops from biotech's cheaper systems on other continents?

Then there is disease. Last year a sizeable part of the potato crop was wasted by blight. GM can protect crops from disease; crops can also be designed better to resist drought, a food supply threat over southern Europe.

Last time GM crop trials were tried in Britain, with maize and sugar-beet, protesters pulled up the plants. Next time the public may view this sabotage of our survival strategy with less indifference. Last time public identification of the trial farms - and targets for the protesters - was compulsory under freedom of information legislation. With some food becoming expensive or unavailable, will we condone so readily this incongruous legal anomaly?

Over half of western Canada's enormous output of grain is grown using 'minimum tillage', a more natural soil-management system which tickles the ground rather than turning it over by ploughing, whilst retaining normal yields.

British farmers are increasingly using min-till on appropriate soils with encouraging results. But, surreally, on being asked about the promotion of min-till here at home, a method capable of addressing headline issues of flooding and soil erosion, the agriculture department seemed unaware of its existence.

Government departments need to wake up to what is going on and engage with the real world. Presently the fastest conversion to min-till is happening in eastern Europe, competitors in our market.

Science magazine, reporting on an international conference about the future role of biotech in agriculture, used the title, 'Dueling visions for a hungry world'. GM and anti-GM points of view are sharply entrenched.

However, if as opponents claim, GM leads to crop reduction and sterilised land, why is it that so many farmers are turning to it? GM is now grown on over 100m hectares globally. The USA has swept ahead with GM as an aid in maximising outputs of maize and soyabeans making food and animal feeds America's largest export. No harmful side effects on American consumers have hitherto been detected, or even claimed.

That is the trigger for a change of view in Europe, which is the world's only large food producer holding out against GM with the support of consumers. If damage to human health was proven, or suspected, Europeans are affluent enough, in the main, to continue as they are, with food becoming a bulkier living cost year on year.

But the refusal to use the biotech tool of modern agriculture, in essence the same as the plant development which has been going on since the first wheat-type plants were discovered by the Assyrians beside the Euphrates, will alter with non-availability of traditional foods. Will Italians prefer modified durrum wheat for their pasta to no pasta?

The small area of Spain, Germany and Portugal in which GM maize is grown today with EU regulatory approval is not controversial. Yet few consumers realise that in imported livestock and poultry they are eating GM-fed animals already.

Virtually all the Argentinian and American soyabean crop has been modified, and Brazil's is rapidly becoming so. This is used to feed chickens, cattle, and pigs prior to slaughter, protein which duly appears on supermarket shelves at lower prices than our home-reared meat fed a costlier diet. No wonder our livestock sector is collapsing.

The acceleration of Europe towards status as a major food importer is contrary to geology and geography. Europe has some of the best arable land anywhere. The cutting-edge revolutions in food production, like rotational copping, occurred here. China, raking the world for food-producing soils elsewhere, has limited arable land, and in the rush for infrastructure growth over ten per cent of the best ground has inadvertently been concreted over.

Soon cavalier attitudes to usable land will change. As was until recently the case, intelligent planning will assess land's ability to grow food before permitting it to be developed. The Council for the Protection of Rural England says we are losing 23 square miles of land a year. Natural England is actually proposing to flood good East Anglian farm-land in favour of creating salt-marsh, a policy viewed with stupefaction by the Dutch who have won back their country from the encroaching sea.

Food sufficiency, the argument will go, demands soil to work and the best of biotechnology to exploit it. The time is advancing when crop yields, at present arcane considerations only for the human earthworms, will be seen as an economic, environmental and consumer benefit.

*******************************

[alan refail]

And the comments---


Comments
Hooray - a sensible article, at last, pointing out the reality which ignorant people seem to prefer to ignore.

The recent food price scares around the World should be a wake up call to those who have blindly followed the Left's and " Greens'" propaganda - the cloning argument( Paul Eccleston Telegraph 5.6.08) too reflects naivety and head in the sand thinking ( or non-thinking).

As many of us have been pointing out for months,the crassness of the EU and the UN with their MM global warming alarmism, to not foresee what many foretold, namely that encouraging farmers to change use of land to fuel production rather than crops for food, would lead to shortages, especially of wheat, and thus price rises (ultimately hitting the poorest hardest) beggars belief.

The MMGW Left-wing religion has alot to answer for already - the coming price rise in UK electricity is 54% the result of "green" taxes. The myth of man-made CO2 causing GW, has itself already caused catastrophe.

EU Bio-fuel production requirements are based on the entirely false premise of MMGW,taking out much farm land from food production and potentially destroying rain forests, and that, along with increased demand for non-traditional, expensive meat foods in China and Asia, definitely requiring more grain and feed for poultry and meat production,will result in higher food prices, especially those reliant on wheat.

Many have been saying this for over a year now, but the fanatical left-Wing and "Greens" with their religion of MMGW and anti GM propaganda, seem intent on destroying Society through plain "pig"- ignorance.
Posted by Paul Butler on June 6, 2008 10:05 AM
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There are many pieces of mis-information in this article. Farmers now must apply herbicide more often (and more of it), hense increasing fuel use, due to the rise of herbicide-resistant weeds in GM crops. These now cover several million acres in the U.S., and rising. Although farmers initally needed fewer herbicide applications, and hense less fuel to apply it, these resistant weeds are reversing this equation.
Second, although the industry has been promising drought tolerant crops for over a decade, there still are none. Let's wait and see if they can actually produce them, and how well they work (a big question) before we extol them!
According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2002, GM soybeans did not contribute to reduced tillage - it was already on the rise well before GM crops. In Canada, most grain (e.g. wheat) is not GM, only canola (for oil) is.
And as to harm to people, without epidemiology studies (there are, and heve been, none) we do not know if current GM crops are causing harm. In any case, as everyone acknowledges, even GM supporters, each type of GM needs to be evaluated separately for safety. Therefore, even if the current few GM crops (there are only two types of genes widely commercialized) are safe, which is possible, that says nothing about the dozens of more complicated types in the pipeline.
So why do farmers grow them? Initially, they have saved labor. But this is changing with more herbicide-resistant weeds. Now, however, a few large companies - primarily Monsanto - have bought up most of the previously-independent seed companies, giving farmers fewer choices.

Posted by Doug Gurian-Sherman on June 3, 2008 3:09 PM
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Now then... you did such a good job that Monsanto even put this article on their website... Why not apply? Maybe their PR department has a job for you? Surely they must pay better than the DT for independent quality journalism...
But to the topic: Are you aware how Monsanto - you are implicitly referring to their "roundup" product package - goes about their business? That they break the tradition of farmers using their own harvest for next season by forcing them to buy anew or pay royalties? That this outweighs the - alleged but disputed - benefits of the GM crop? That Indian farmers commit suicide in large numbers because they see no way out anymore?
That many US farmers are by now all but happy with their adhesion contracts with Monsanto, as they are with long-term effects of roundup (resistancies of weed, crop fails to deliver the claimed gains).
Monsanto is trying to create a world monopoly for seed, plants and the harvest worldwide. Once they have it, this is permanent, because the crop has spread all over the place and cannot be gotten rid of. Do you really believe a profit-oriented US enterprise should be entrusted with solving the world's need for food? Think again. Or better: start thinking.


Posted by Tom Garland on June 3, 2008 10:40 AM
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[Johnboy]

Hi Alan,

Comments
Hooray - a sensible article, at last, pointing out the reality which ignorant people seem to prefer to ignore.

It would be nice, just for once, for you to put your own thoughts to pen.
JB.

[Cider Boys]

Yes, what an excellent article and the first comment says it all.

I have absolutely no fear that GM foods will not become established as the norm (along with nuclear power) in this country. Common sense will prevail, however my nagging concern is that this country will be too late and once again miss the boat.

Our politicians are gutless, they do not want to tell the facts to the electorate they just hide behind the truth and pander to the politically correct environment lobby whilst this once Great Britain sinks to an ever lower status.

I implore the doubters to wake up and smell the coffee, science is our future not 'green' wishful thinking!

Barney

[Johnboy]

Hi Barney,
I agree with you that the article says an awful lot and explains basically what is the fundamental problem in this country. An indecisive Government.
With GM there has been so much theory quoted as fact and so many lies told by News Papers and anti-GM lobbyist that the British Public at large has but scant knowledge of the benefits that GM can bring.
The last two comments that follow the article in the paper are from two well known anti-GM lobbyists and neither of them are exactly known for their accuracy in their explanations.
The government has allowed GM trials and many of these trials have been trashed by these so called anti-GM martyrs who rightfully belong behind bars.
I thought the article might attract some debate because it really says an awful lot but sadly I feel that this forum is no longer what it used to be.
It would appear that contributors to this forum will moan about high prices but are not prepared to even try and understand why prices are so high.
JB.

[Geoff]

Apologies for not responding, consider wrists slapped!
I read it all last night but started a reply but abandoned it and went to bed - I'll try again tonight. As you know from previous posts I am pro GM and science in general but still have some reservations about the way GM has gone, I'll try and write something.

[Johnboy]

Hi Geoff,
I appreciate your reply.
I feel that we all have certain reservations with regards to GM because we have been starved of the truth. Such things as herbicide resistance but when you try and find out which weeds they refer to you cannot find out. I feel that this can be put down to anti-GM rhetoric as a general damning of GM. The worse scenario is always used and in this country scare tactics played a very large part of the condemnation.
Europe says we can do without GM but then just at present Europe has an over abundance of food but is this always going to be the case? If global warming is to increase dramatically, as the politicians seem to think, then Europe will need GM and quite rapidly. If, as this present government seem to think that, farming is not really necessary in the UK and we can rely on others to supply us it means that they will find ways of us taxing us to reduce our carbon footprint and increase the carbon footprint overall by hauling our food vast distances. To me this is through grossly incompetent thinking.
The Farmers of this country have always responded to the call and now they are being cast aside. Given the opportunity and GM, reservedly, this country could be more self sufficient than we have ever been before in the past.
JB.

[PLUMPUDDING]

I'm not in favour of wide-scale GM production, but think the government should be looking at supporting and encouraging farmers to produce far more, both for the home market and for export. Many of my friends have stopped farming over the past few years as their children aren't interested in taking over their farms and they aren't making enough money for it to be worthwhile. So around here the farm buildings are being converted into posh housing and the land is being sold off to the local horse fraternity. It is really sad. The supermarkets cheap milk has finished off all the locally produced milk deliveries.

This was a flourishing farming area and could be again if the government changed its policies on farming. I'm not an expert, but suspect the E.U. has quite a lot to do with things, but other countries like France, with a huge number of small farms, are still net exporters, so it is time our government took things in hand and got us back on track.

As gardeners rather than farmers, you must know that you can increase the production and health of your gardens by looking after the soil and working with nature, so I see no reason why farms can't do the same without turning to genetically modified crops, particularly smaller mixed farms who can use their animal manure instead of tons expensive fertilizers and encourage beneficial insects etc by not blitzing everything with insecticides and herbicides.

I know you are going to say that GM will reduce the number of applications etc and fuel and labour costs eat away at profits, but it would be far better to get all the land back to farming, both small scale and large farms rather than just relying on a few massive farms in increasingly restricted parts of the country. Also if the sea levels are going to rise we are likely to lose huge areas of low lying productive farm land anyway.

Like I say, I'm not pro-GM, but I'm very worried about the lack of support from the government for our farming industry, and the supermarkets should be made to pay the farmers much better prices and not by putting their prices up to the customers, but by making less profits themselves. - Pigs might fly!!!