Vocal Voices

Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, is on a crusade to allow GM plants to be grown in the UK for food purposes. He says that GM crops are "probably" safer than conventional plants. Well now, that is a pretty big claim to make and yet on the R4 Today programme he was given a very easy ride on the subject.

In some cases he might well be right: there is GM and there is GM. But there needs to be a debate, and the debate needs to open and honest.

I am not totally against GM, depending on how it is done. Splicing a section of DNA from one strain of potato into another to make it resistant to blight is little more than we have been doing for centuries. It speeds up the lengthy and costly process of hybridisation as it does away with generation after generation of intermediates till the final hybrid is produced, which might well turn out to be a dud anyway.

However I am against splicing DNA from one organism into a totally different evolutionary line. This has been done already where the DNA of deep sea shellfish (shrimp) was introduced to a food crop to make it more resistant to frost. That, to me, is the nightmare scenario and the one we, and the environment, need to be protected from.

Capitalism depends (or seems to) on an ever-growing world population. More people means more potential profit. But with this comes problems; this country has put so much land under concrete that we can't feed ourselves, we have to import food.
Extrapolate that onto a world stage and we need much more food to feed more mouths, with the land available to produce that food reducing year on year.
Politicians are always looking for the magic bullet to solve a question which is beyond them and hey presto! Here it comes - GM food. More food can alledgedly be produced using the same amount of land. Well, we'll see about that and what happens to the state of that land in ten or twenty years time.
It would be interesting to know how many of our MP's have shares in the GM giant, Monsanto.

The GM producers already make crops to take advantage of what were once marginal lands. The yields are not great, but at least there is a crop. However, producing plants to take more advantage of current arable land will eventually turn it marginal. It has already happened in large parts of India. The overall yield is little better than it was a decade ago.

One of the most reprehensible aspects of GM is that seed producers now only supply sterile seeds. Gone are the days when a farmer could keep back a few bags to sow for the next crop, it now has to be bought in. It is also nigh on impossible for some farmers to break out of the stranglehold. If their land is marginal it will only produce a crop if seeds capable of growing there are used: Catch 22. A nice little earner for the seed producer though.

I do remember that Monsanto produced a 'mule' seed years ago, I think it was rice. So your peasant farmer doesn't get any more seed from his plants unless he goes back to Mansanto and pays them for it.
The thinking behind this is not far short of evil.

cromwell wrote:I do remember that Monsanto produced a 'mule' seed years ago, I think it was rice. So your peasant farmer doesn't get any more seed from his plants unless he goes back to Mansanto and pays them for it.
The thinking behind this is not far short of evil.

I meant to say seed for sterile crops - those that produce seeds which cannot germinate. What sort of monster came up with that scam?

What happens to that farmer if he cannot afford to buy the seed? It is likely that the old seed, the natural one that produced poorer yields, will have become extinct unless he, or someone, put a stash away for a rainy day, so he will not be able to return to that.

Or course the real question is whether or not the seed blocking gene can replicate across species.

Now there's a nightmare made in hell as our last crop becomes, truly, our last crop....

Of course DNA is cross species because it's the building blocks of life. All life started from somewhere on Earth and therefore we all share parts of it.

Humans share half of their DNA with bananas