HRH speaks out

[alan refail]

There seems to be a lot to consider in THIS

It will be interesting to hear the responses from the GMO industry and scientists. Telegraph website readers seem to be on his side largely.

[oldherbaceous]

Fair play to him for speaking out on such a controversial subject.

[Stephen]

I do think he is wothy of admiration because he has thought out his views and sticks to his guns.
I am certainly against GM crops but would put a different emphasis within my opposition.

[Geoff]

You don't have to be for or against GM crops to see the errors in this latest outburst. He cites environmental damage in the Punjab and Western Australia to support his case. This damage has been caused by striving for quantity with the variety of crop grown having little relevance, if they had grown organically but raised the irrigation levels to increase yield the damage would have been the same. It is the quantity of food required that is damaging the environment; unless we control population the environment will, as he says, control it for us. We can lessen and delay this impact by raising yields and GM has a place in that objective but medieval agriculture does not.

[Colin Miles]

Agreed Geoff. And the crops he referred to weren't GM.

[Geoff]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... griculture

[Johnboy]

Hi Geoff,
Have a gawp at this!
JB.


The Prince and the Paupers

- Emily Hill, Guardian - Comments is Free, August 15 2008 09:00 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... hy.gmcrops

'If Charles had his way, vast tracts of the populace would be toiling in the fields all day, simply in order to have enough to eat'

The Prince of Wails is at it again. Ten years ago Prince Charles announced that scientists were entering "realms that belong to God and God alone" by dabbling in GM crops (and having been appointed by God to rule over us - he should know). Now, in interview with the Daily Telegraph his Royal Highness revisits the subject - throwing over the God references in favour of Philip K Dick.

"Throughout our conversation he has been calm, measured and disinclined to rubbish the supermarket chains," the Prince's interviewer Jeff Randall revealed. "But my suggestion that Big Food, industrial-scale operators, are the way ahead sends him whizzing off piste. Jabbing his finger at me, he lets rip: 'What, all run by gigantic corporations? Is that really the answer? I think not. That would be the absolute destruction of everything and -- the classic way of ensuring that there is no food in the future'."

This is, of course, cracked. The classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future is to grow it all by hand on small inefficient farms without pesticides, leaving matters entirely at the mercy of a bad harvest. But his Royal Highness warms to his theme nevertheless.

"Bouncing in his chair, the Prince sets out his nightmare vision, a world in which millions of small farmers 'are driven off their land [by global conglomerates] into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness'."

Sod the farmers. What about the rest of us? Are we to be driven back into the fields because the future king likes the patina of farmyards? As a result of ditching lots of small farms for fewer and bigger ones, society has come on in leaps and bounds.

While Charles' great-grandfather spent his life in a similarly cosseted state to Charles himself (having a valet iron his newspaper, put toothpaste on his toothbrush; occasionally exhausting himself having people bow at him) my great-grandfather was an agricultural labourer. (I'll hazard a guess, and suggest yours probably was, too.) After toiling away all day - on a farm he had no share in - to produce food that would be sold in the village, he came back home and tended to the vegetables he was growing for his family in both the front and back garden.

Apart from a four-year sabbatical in and around Passchendaele and Mesopotamia, Walter Hill spent his life in a routine of never-ending food production - raising a family in his spare time. If Charles had his way, all food would be produced in this way again, and vast tracts of the populace, who currently buy things from supermarkets and don't have to spend the better part of their lives growing it in the fields, are freed up to enjoy all the opportunities for which we have mass production to thank.

Note that you have never seen Charles digging up a vegetable in his life. He may have spent the 1980s talking to his plants ("Just come and talk to the plants, really," he once advised to universal derision. "Very important to talk to them, they respond, I find.") But it was all talk - just foreplay - at no point did his Royal Highness actually get down and dirty in the soilbeds, sweating and back-breaking, with a fork and a spade. When he says we need to farm sustainably, he means us --- not him.

As the Times science correspondent, Mark Henderson, explains "few of [his claims] are based on data from the real world. While some of the agricultural and environmental problems he highlights are clearly genuine, his explanations for them are long on bombast and short on evidence." There is no scientific evidence implicating GM crops in climate change - which predates their invention. Not is there any evidence that biotechnology is a "gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity that has gone seriously wrong".

"Hundreds of millions of consumers in the United States have been eating GM food for 12 years, with no evidence of any health problems." The salination problems in Western Australia - which Charles lumped at the door of GM - are nothing to do with GM at all: "GM crops have not contributed to the problem, but they may help to offer a medium-term solution. Scientists are working actively to develop new crop varieties that require less water and that grow in more saline soils, using both transgenic and conventional breeding techniques."

What's really "unmentionably awful" in this scenario is the respect society is still according to the royals. Prince Charles, dense even by aristocratic standards, and with a history of prescribing coffee cures for cancer, should have no influence on the GM debate whatsoever. To update Willie Hamilton, why do we continue to tolerate a status quo in which a farm worker or a factory worker can work a lifetime without earning "as much as we pay that twerp in a year?" I'm not so churlish as to claim that Prince Charles has never done anything for our society (he has of course invented a new vowel all by himself "aieeeeeyyyyy") but he hasn't done enough to start firing off self-important claims that we can "count him out" of future scenarios that involve a plentiful food supply.

If only Prince Charles would confine himself to his former principal ambition -- to become Camilla's tampon - he could finally do something useful: in sparing us the insult of being sporadically bashed about the brain with nonsense by a living anachronism.

[alan refail]

"GM won't solve the food crisis, at least not in the short term."

(Martin Taylor, chairman of Syngenta)

[Johnboy]

Just another example to how unpopular this silly little prat is!
JB.

The Prince is entitled to his views - but not his ignorance

It's shocking to hear this millionaire Gloucestershire farmer denounce the 'Green Revolution' in India

- Dominic Lawson, The Independent (UK), Aug. 15, 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 97493.html

There are any number of reasons why someone such as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales should be passionately opposed to genetically modified crops. For a start, his own position - and future one as head of state - is based entirely on genetic purity (formerly known as "royal blood").

One characteristic he might have inherited from his grandfather, King George VI, is a propensity for sudden, almost incoherent, rage. This week, that excellent journalist Jeff Randall gently suggested to the heir to the throne that the future of farming might be with industrial-scale production, rather than the sort of methods he practises. "What?" exploded the Prince. "All run by gigantic corporations? That would be the absolute destruction of everything!" Randall went on to report that "bouncing in his chair", the Prince set out a nightmarish vision in which millions of small farmers "are driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness".

The Prince, predictably, continued his rant by attacking GM technology - although Randall had never raised it - which he said was: "Guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time. Snakes, some of them thousands of miles long, will roam the countryside." Well, I made that last sentence up, but you get the gist: the world as we know it will come to an end if wicked big business is allowed to introduce GM crops on an industrial scale. The main empirical problem for this argument is that GM crops have already been grown for more than a decade across the globe, providing trillions of meals, with no observable malign consequences for humanity or the environment. Quite the reverse, in fact: many types of GM crops have been designed to produce high yield with minimal soil tillage; others require much lower use of pesticide than conventional crops, thus saving vast amounts in agricultural fuel use.

Now that the area covered by GM crops has reached more than 100 million hectares, involving farmers in countries as varied as China, Uruguay, South Africa and Iran, it is possible to assess the truth of the various "Frankenfood" scare stories promulgated by the likes of the Daily Mail (which yesterday was alone in publishing a leading article endorsing every word of the Prince of Wales's outburst).

Such a study has recently been published by the European Commission. This is especially significant because the member countries of the EU have been more nervous about the consequences of GM technology than any other developed nations. The report, ominously titled "Economic Impact of Dominant GM Crops Worldwide", gives the lie to the notion that GM is somehow only designed for large-scale agribusiness. It states that "analyses show that adoption of dominant GM crops and on-farm economic gains have benefited both small and large farmers... Moreover, detailed analyses show that increases in gross margin are comparatively larger for small and lower-income farmers than for larger and higher income farmers." In other words, Prince Charles's notion that such methods will in themselves cause the extinction of small farmers is simply refuted by the experiences of real people in the real world.

One of the most persistent complaints of the anti-GM lobby is that the owners of transgenic technology will make huge profits at the expense of the farmers. On general grounds alone one might question this: farmers are not known for persisting with methods which reduce their own income. The more innovative among them will try out new methods, and if it improves their business, they will continue with it. If not, they will dump it.

The European Commission report shows how in practice the increased profits are divided, based on an analysis of the adoption on Indian farms of Bt cotton, a cotton modified by the insertion of a bacterium resistant to the blight known as bollworm. It observes that "Indian farmers adopting Bt cotton were the main beneficiaries of adoption, capturing 67 per cent of generated welfare, followed by seed companies with 33 per cent". You might argue that 33 per cent is a pretty big royalty for the GM seed salesmen, but the point is that the farmers would still be well ahead of the game: the Commission's report shows that "in a sample of 157 farmers from three Indian states, the average yield gains of Bt cotton were up to 87 per cent over the non-Bt counterpart". So everyone's happy - except for the Prince of Wales .

It is undeniable that the technology which produces these transgenic strains is dominated by a small number of multinational companies. But if you object to that, you might also wonder why it is: after all, there is no theoretical reason why experiments should not be successfully carried out by much smaller companies. The reason lies in the very neurosis of European consumers and governments about the potential dangers of GM. The number of trials required and the regulatory hoops are so many that only very large companies have the stomach - and the wallet - for the fight.

It's not just a matter of regulation - which is obviously necessary. Groups such as Greenpeace take pride in destroying field trials of GM crops; almost all of the 54 crop trials attempted in Britain since 2000 have been vandalised, a record which would completely deter any small-scale investor from even contemplating such a venture.

These vandals share the Prince of Wales's quasi-religious belief that transgenic technology - presumably including that used in insulin for diabetics - runs counter to the divine order of nature: he has argued that they interfere in matters that are "the realm of God and God alone". With such metaphysical self-assurance, these people have no conscience about wrecking trials which are designed precisely to assess the environmental impact of GM technology: even if such experiments produced no observable adverse impact, ever, they would not alter the mindset which puts "blood and soil" mysticism above mere evidence.

Prince Charles would argue that he is motivated by a concern for humanity - and I don't doubt his sincerity or passion. Still, it was shocking to hear this multi-millionaire Gloucestershire organic farmer denouncing India's "Green Revolution" - the plant-breeding precursor to GM pioneered by Norman Borlaug. It was these techniques that saved millions in the sub-continent from the famines which slaughtered so many of their ancestors, and for which Borlaug received a Nobel Prize. I can do no better than quote Professor Borlaug's remarks about those who denounced his work as destructive of traditional methods: "They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

[alan refail]

"Why Prince Charles is right – and wrong on GM"

A calm look at both sides of the argument from New Scientist

It seems to me to be a better contribution to the debate than personal insults and offensive comments, which usually mask the lack of any genuine arguments.

The New Scientist comment rightly draws attention to one important point made by HRH - namely that food security is in the long term more important than food quantity.

[PLUMPUDDING]

Here is a quotation from a person who studied genetic engineering at the Department of Plant Sciences in Cambridge with reference to the latest push by the GM industry as GM being the only way to solve the food crisis:- "This is complete and utter rubbish. It is a line that has been put forward by the GM public relations people in the newspapers ... The reality is that these faceless corporations have sunk billions and billions of borrowed dollars developing these things, and whether they work or not, they are desperate to get some profit from them any way they can.

So they are lobbying the government to allow them to sell GM seed in the UK, using whatever the latest worry is. (Last year it was the need for higher vitamins in rice, then cheap drugs from corn, now the 'food crisis'). Once we plant GM crops there's no going back - the genes will escape into wild plants and other food crops.

We must all resist this cynical sales push. Genetically modified crops are the agricultural equivalent of what has been going on with the banks. The parallels are striking:

- developed to create a profitable 'new market' where none existed before
- massively hyped as a 'new way of doing things'
- hard to understand by regulators
- so regulators accept industry assurances at face value
- not investigated or tested for safety before use
- potentially very dangerous to the public
- designed to be costly to large numbers of 'little people' worldwide
- designed to be profitable to just a handful of corporations in USA
- very difficult to contain once the effects get out of control (a systemic risk)"

He also goes on to say that because the GM plants are made up of a proportion of bacterium that the toxic gene is attached to, the actual amount of food within it is less than a normally grown plant. (That is my interpretation of what he says anyway)

He finishes by saying "GM crops won't solve any crisis - they just want our money, and they don't care if they poison us and destroy the eco-system in the process. GM crops pose a huge risk to the food chain and should be resisted at all costs."

I'm not suggesting everyone turns back into farm labourers, but we can produce enough to feed everyone using modern farming methods and sensible sustainable means. Organic is good for small scale production, and if everyone wasted less there wouldn't be such a problem in the first place.

[Johnboy]

Hi Plumpudding,
Prince Charles should read this paragraph and pause for reflection.

"They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Half those who make comments because they have never ever known anything but total food security.
Those who are organic have campaigned in third world countries and I heard a disturbing report on the BBC Radio 4 from a doctor on home leave. "The Greenpeace representatives are informing Pregnant women and young mothers that if they feed GM maize to their children that they will all die of cancer."
I appreciate that you want organics to feed the starving millions but sadly this would never work. It doesn't work here and third world countries have been organic for years and that in my opinion is why they are starving!
JB.

[alan refail]

As Geoff has mentioned in other discussions, third world hunger/food shortages have a direct link to uncontrolled/unsustainable population growth. Add to this lack of infrastucture and incompetent/corrupt government and a few other factors and you have a catastrophe which agriculture of any kind will be hard pressed to solve.

[Weed]

A fellow I worked with almost forty years ago, sadly no longer with us, had a saying...."you can't play around with nature and get away with it"... I have tended to agree with him in most instances

JB...Can I take it you won't be sending HRH a Christmas card this year then?

[PLUMPUDDING]

Hi Johnboy, I didn't say I thought organics could save the starving millions. My point is that using a wide range of modern and organic methods most suited to the area concerned would be much more practical and productive and therefore more likely to feed everyone than having GM crops imposed on people who have no say in the matter.

GM would prevent people saving their own seed and they would be completely at the mercy of the GM companies, having to buy only their expensive seed (which contains a terminator gene so saved seed will not re--grow)buy their expensive herbicides and their costly fertilizers as part of the package. People are more likely to be able to provide for themselves with soil improvement (building up the water retention and nutrients with compost and manure rather than purchasing fertilizer) and the use of good seed suited to their own climate.

I'm glad Prince Charles has spoken out, he may be in a priveledged position and hardly likely to starve, but he feels very deeply about this subject and am sure has researched it fully before speaking out. At least he isn't in the pocket of America and big business like most of our MPs, who seem afraid to say anything.

Most people with a bit of common sense can see that tampering with the genetic make up of our crops is very likely to have a detremental effect on either our health or the nature of a wide range of related plants or both.

Look at what has happened with the chemical companies mucking about with herbicides on land used for grazing. So it doesn't actually kill the animals eating it - so it is "safe". It just poisons all the crops grown in the animals' manure for a couple of years afterwards.

It is really much too important to let these companies introduce GM here. We are much too small a country to keep it within bounds.