>
>"So how do we feed the world? When I suggest that the answer lies in a
>combination of land reform and organic or semi-organic farming, you'll
>think I've gone soft in the head. But Jules Pretty of Essex University
>has documented a quiet revolution across the developing world, in which
>peasant farmers have doubled or tripled their yields by modern organic
>techniques. They require lots of labour, no debt, and no help from
>predatory corporations. Only by such means can the world's poor maintain
>control over their food supply ...."
>
What we need are techniques that require less labour. For me that is a fairly basic measure of "progress". Peasant agriculture is a tough life, certainly nothing to be celebrated.
>His column today (text follows) makes a number of interesting points
>also, questioning whether field testing of GM crops really can be
>conducted without contaminating other plant life:
>
He questions and speculates, but does he give a definite answer?
>It's rape of one form or another
>
>By George Monbiot
>
>The genetically engineered poplar trees hacked down by protesters on
>Sunday night posed, according to Zeneca, the company which had planted
>them, "minimal risks" to the environment. It should know. For six years
>its "regulatory affairs manager", Nigel Poole, sat on the government
>committee which approved their cultivation.
>
These trees are designed to be made into paper, so the idea is to make them with less fiber. Zeneca claims that if it works then less environmentally harmful chemicals will have to be used break down fibres to produce paper. But Monbiot seems absolutely and unconditionally unable to concede any potential benefit from this technology.
Objectors have claimed that the genes from the populars will infect wild trees causing them to turn into matchsticks.
So what is George's evidence about the dangers posed by these trees?
>
>When the poplar tree application came up, Professor Poole left the room.
>So many of the committee's members had commercial interests, Friends of
>the Earth reports, that its meetings must have looked like a game of
>musical chairs: members would get up and leave, then return to consider
>the next application, for which someone else would have to depart.
>
>The public outcry over the composition of the Advisory Committee on
>Releases to the Environment (Acre) has forced the government to replace
>most of its members, but its dubious decisions litter the British
>countryside. While the poplar trees Zeneca planted were all female, so
>produced no pollen, campaigners point to means by which genetic material
>can be transferred to other plants without pollination.
So Zeneca have a commercial interest. The Guardian has a commercial interest in selling papers. What does that tell us? On its own, very little.
>Trials of rape
>and maize in Britain pose more immediate threats of contamination. Some
>of the GM experiments Acre has approved could precipitate precisely the
>problems they are designed to investigate.
>
>Experimental plantings of GM crops, the government, the companies and
>even some environmentalists argue, are essential if we're to determine
>whether or not they will damage the environment and contaminate other
>fields. Without a quantitative means of assessing their potential
>impacts, no sensible decisions can be taken.
Of course experiments *might* precipitate the problems it was designed to investigate. How could it be otherwise? The idea of an experiment is to do something on a small scale to see what happens before you do it on a large scale. And the idea of an experiment is that you do not know what will happen in advance. But accoding to George
>This is evident nonsense.
Remember, these experiments are not to see whether GM crops are harmful, just to see if the material would spread. From the evidence that we do have it would not be a problem if there were contamination.
>
>On Sunday, hundreds of protesters will gather in a field near Watlington
>in Oxfordshire to demonstrate against a 10 hectare "farm-scale" trial of
>genetically modified rape. The rape has been engineered for resistance
>to a herbicide called "Liberty", which kills all other plant species.
>Liberty-resistant rape enables farmers to eliminate everything from
>their fields except the crop they are trying to grow.
>
>The government and the companies which have jointly commissioned the
>trial want to know whether this crop will hurt wildlife. They could have
>saved themselves the trouble. The technology is designed to hurt
>wildlife. Either it works, in which case its widespread deployment will
>be environmentally catastrophic, or it does not, in which case it will
>not be used. So what on earth is this experiment for?
>
What does George think farming is about? Unless you want to gather wild berries you have to kill off the plants which are in competition with the crops you are growing. You can do this by weeding by hand you can do it by weedkiller. Presuming that the proposal is not that we gather food from wild meadows there is a job to be done here. Even if you want to claim that you need "the right balance" and it is a bit harsh to kill off all wild plants, surely GM provides a tool which can be used to design more precisely the sort of agriculture that we want. Or is there something in about genetic engineering technology which makes it qualitely "more hostile" to nature than every other tool that humanity has ever developed?
>It seems to me that trials like this have precious little to do with
>science, and everything to do with politics. Like "scientific whaling"
>in Japan, they are the means by which the corporations keep a foot in
>the regulatory door. They are forbidden to start full commercial
>planting in Britain, but farm-scale trials are a major step towards that
>destination.
>
Of course they were driven by politics. It was the anti-GM protestors who demanded them as a political tactic to delay growing of GM food. For Monbiot these trials have never had anything to do with science. He is not interested in the outcome. They are just another staging post in his campaign for a ban on GM food.
I have no time to deal with the rest of this right now, except to say that problems raised with particular GM projects simply miss the point about the potential of this technology. Here is a quote from newscientist's review of Freeman Dyson's new book "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet". I think the reviewer is "naive" to see in GM "nothing" but problems and profit.
"Photo-voltaic cells are only one way of using sunlight. The traditional ways--growing crops for food and trees for fuel-- have been used from time immemorial. And here, too, Dyson sees reason for hope. Genetic engineering could conceivably make possible crops which convert sunlight to fuel not with a paltry 1 per cent efficiency but with 10 per cent efficiency-- crops, furthermore, which might not need harvesting at all. Dyson envisions a permanent forest of trees continually turning sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel and delivering it directly through their roots to a network of underground pipelines.
But visions like these may create more problems than they solve: I wonder how fuel forests might affect the delicate balance of the planetary ecosystem. Would we see the adaptation of new creatures to fill this artificial niche? Fire-breathing beetles, perhaps, feeding off the lighter fuel sap?
When it comes to genetic modification or basic biotech, Dyson sees only wonderful possibilities. Perhaps he has lived in the US too long and swallowed the line of the big agribusiness companies. An emeritus professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, Dyson is a hugely respected scientist and visionary and yet, incredibly, he sees today's genetic manipulation of organisms as nothing more than a speeded-up version of what farmers have been doing for millennia, a strangely naive position for someone of his intellectual grasp.
Yes, Dyson is probably right to say that genetic engineering could feed the world, if that is, all genetic modification effort goes towards this goal. But isn't he ignoring the present, that profit not altruism is the driving force of the world economy?"
Joe.
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