Vocal Voices

George Eustice that is, minister for agriculture.
It has dawned on Mr Eustice that the UK is not Food Secure - in other words we are very dependent on imports to feed ourselves. A situation not helped by the fact that we import a minimum of 300,000 net persons every year, whilst building houses on arable farmland.
We simultaneously create more demand for food by swelling the population and lessen out ability to supply that food by building on green fields.

We've got away with it for many years but now we have a growing world population, hence more competition for the food available, plus a war in the breadbasket of Europe, the Ukraine.

So now the penny has dropped with our MP's, and Mr Eustice has come up with an answer, a very typical solution of this government. They are in a hole so some bright chap will come up with a solution to save the day - Hail Mary politics.

The invention is GM crops, which Mr Eustice says will give us food security. Maybe so, maybe no.
I can't but help think though that there's an element of "Don't let a good crisis go to waste", and that GM firms are going to make hay out of this (no pun intended).

I think that there is a bit of confusion with all the acronyms.

GMO: that is the umbrella for all genetically modified organisms whether that be by synthetic genetic splicing of different organism's genes or by natural cross-cultivation or cross-pollination.

GM: this is genetic modification that nobody likes. This is the Frankenstein splicing of genes from the likes of plants with those from bacteria or even animals. In one genes from Antarctic krill were spliced into some crops to make them resistant to frost. This can never happen naturally.

GE: is gene editing and is closer to cross pollination or cultivation. These 'could' happen naturally, or by design, as horticulturists have been doing for centuries. Basically it speeds things up, though it is not that straight forward.

Tomatoes with extra Vitamin D have been produced by turning off a specific molecule in their genetic code. They are still only tomatoes. In other plants their own genes can be turned on or off to make them more drought resistant or heat resistant or to need less fertilizer.

From what I can gather the 25 year old regulations for GM are to remain but that the new regulations (Wednesday) will allow for GE commercial development in England under strict controls.

The controls are needed because they use gene based editing tools so quality control needs to be applied to ensure that we don't wind up with GM by the back door.

I'm good with that. Then there is the pollination and growing aspect. If it breeds true, then it can be grown in artificial environments with the seeds being harvested and used. If it does not, then it becomes an expensive grafting methodology.

That being said, I believe Tomatoes don't grow that well in most of the UK outside of a greenhouse.

The other concern is still there but less so. They still produce pollen and it will still spread, therefore the modified genes will go to other plants which can be pollinated with tomato pollen. Part of the annoyance on GM was that some of it is already out there the second they tested.

On the whole I'm for it. We are not going to solve food security with medieval farming practises. But caution is always warranted.

There are palaces in the world which could produce more food for the world. It was estimated that Rhodisia could feed the whole of Africa. Zimbabwe struggles to feed itself now.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Year Book of 1975 ranked the then Rhodesia second in the world in terms of yields of maize, wheat, soya beans and ground nuts, and third for cotton. In the combined ranking for all these crops, Rhodesia ranked first in the world.

As of 2019, according to Hilal Elver an independent UN human rights expert, 60% of the nation's population is "food insecure, living in a household that is unable to obtain enough food to meet basic needs."

With poverty rates being at the highest it as ever been, in 2008, life expectancy within the nation reached an all time low of 37 years old, as opposed to age 61 at independence in 1990

Food issues are not just about places to grow food or the quality of the crops. Sometimes they are about power and greed and fear.

Suff, at the gun club I attend two members used to work in South Africa.
Their views on the locals and farming are a long way from the liberal narrative.
One knew a farmer who was removed from his land in the eighties. The farmer said he had been back to his farm for a look and it broke his heart. The farmhouse had been smashed up for wood to burn on fires and the formerly productive land was choked with weeds.

From that first link

Early travellers recorded travelling often for days without seeing any human habitation. Commercial farming started in the 1890’s on what was for the most part virgin land. There were no roads or railways, there was no electricity or telephone, there were no fences, boreholes, pumps, windmills, dams, or irrigation schemes; there were no cattle dips, barns or other farm buildings.

These first commercial farmers had to discover how to contend with predators that killed their livestock plus other animals that consumed their crops and how to control diseases, pests and parasites of livestock and crops that were foreign to them. From this starting point, agriculture developed faster than it had anywhere else in the world.

From the second link.

The government sustained independence by improving expenditures on healthcare, education and infrastructure.

1.7 million people, 408,000 of those being women and 935,000 of those being children, lack the access to safe and clean water. Within rural areas, only 50% of water pumps are functional

To repeat

in 2008, life expectancy within the nation reached an all time low of 37 years old, as opposed to age 61 at independence in 1990

There seems to have been some vapid thought in the liberal democracies and the Africans themselves that the white farmers just waltzed into a garden of eden and they pressed the print button and it simply carried on printing money.

As Zimbabwe has proven and South Africa seems determined to prove, this was absolutely not true. The raw materials were there, fertile land, excellent climate, plenty of rainfall and plenty of space. What it needed was decades of hard backbreaking work then an attention to detail in farm management learned in the highly competitive European farming communities.

Whilst I do not condone, in any way, the attitude of the farmers to the locals black population, there was also a real problem. Lack of education, lack of ambition, in fact they lived in paradise with land that could support their needs. Child mortality was high but then child mortality had always been high and generated an attitude of "we can always make another one" attitude.

When white settlers came with their massively productive farms, food was still plentiful, OK they had to work a damned sight harder for it and the farmers got richer on the back of their labour. Eventually cities, education and healthcare got the local black population towards where the whites were. At which point they decided that there was no reason for the whites to have all this money from their land. So they took over.

Here it goes to pot quite a bit. Turns out the city locals thought about the same of their country brethren that the white farmers did. But they decided to do the 20th century the "African" way. Get rid of the interlopers, take their "wealth", then the African bit. Disburse it to the tribal leaders who helped drive out the whites. Of course these leaders were often little more educated than the farm hands, had no knowledge of farming or what it takes to operate a successful farm. Not understanding that fertile ground is only One of a series of ingredients. Fertile ground grows weeds better than anything because weeds are hardy survivors.

At the same time the healthcare is ensuring that child mortality falls to very low levels. But "make another one" is baked into the tribal consciousness.

And this is how we lose the ground which can feed the world and create starving, thirsty, multitudes who want the rest of the world to feed them because the rest of the world manages their own resources.

So a very long way round to say. "We need gene edited food". Because the places we could grow that food in the world cheaply and efficiently are full of starving thirsty people looking for someone else to solve their problems. Just as they looked to the white farmers they threw out.