Well, I am reproducing here what Prince Charles had said from New Scientist as published in Aug 2008. I request you all to read his outburst (emotional) and the comments some of us left for a better understanding of GM crops.
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Many of us in the UK woke up this morning to
hear Prince Charles ranting about genetically modified crops on the radio, or to see this ominous headline in The Daily Telegraph: "Earth faces GM crops catastrophe, warns Prince".
The sub-headline: "Multinational firms conducting a gigantic experiment that has gone seriously wrong'."
So far, so predictable, given the prince's well-known passion for organic farming and trenchant opposition to anything that smacks of tinkering with "realms that belong to God and God alone" (from an earlier anti-GM rant in 1998).
Yes, Charles does have another pop at genetic engineering. And yes, Charles does have a very big and justifiable pop at the multinational corporations and supermarket chains that dominate food production and distribution, especially in rich countries.
But listen to the interview and you can hear his voice rise to a pained crescendo when he says: "What we should be talking about is food security, not food production - that is what matters and that's what people [raises voice considerably] will not understand."
Food for all
How right he is. What matters most is not how much food we produce (although that is self-evidently important), but whether people everywhere can be confident of always having enough to eat, whatever the state of the world economy, whatever the climate locally and wherever people happen to live.
He is also correct in saying this objective of achieving food security for everyone can't be solved either by global multinationals or by "one form of clever genetic engineering after another".
Multinationals don't exist to feed the poor. They exist to generate profit for investors. And genetic engineering isn't a saviour technology that can feed the world, although some scientists and commentators have made the mistake of saying as much.
No. The main obstacles destroying Charles's dream of food security for all are of a political and economic nature, as underscored by a global initiative recently launched which sees poor farmers as the saviours of the planet.
Ambitious goals
The
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), launched in April, sees poor farmers as the agents to achieve everything that Charles wants: using farming to raise the world's poor out of poverty, to even out the share of resources between rich and poor, and to reverse the decimation of forests and natural resources on which the future of the world depends.
Ambitious goals indeed. But importantly, the backers of the plan argue that the strongest tools to bring this about are economic and political, primarily through altering world trade rules to stop rich countries from providing their own farmers with subsidies that effectively exclude poor farmers from world markets.
Other goals of the IAASTD sure to please Charles are to rein in the power of the multinationals through global anti-monopoly rules, and to provide buffers against drought and famine by encouraging poor countries to stockpile surpluses regionally, so spare food is always at hand locally to compensate when harvests fail.
Even building roads and railways could have a much bigger impact on food security than improving yields per se, according to nutrition and policy professor
Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He says that countless successful schemes to improve agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have ultimately backfired because farmers have lacked the roads and transport links to transport and sell surplus produce in neighbouring villages and towns. Instead, they went broke because the introduced efficiencies improved surpluses for all farmers locally, flooding the market and depressing prices. Again, the message is that food security relies as much, if not more, on economics, politics and infrastructure as on agricultural productivity. So again, Charles is right.
Disaster guaranteed?
Charles is wrong, however, to reserve so much of his bile for genetic modification which, he says, will "be guaranteed to cause the biggest environmental disaster of all time". Really? Charles bases this damning prediction on examples from India and Australia.
In India, the
wells started running dry long before GM cotton arrived on the scene. Most of the water was sucked out by poor farmers to irrigate new, non-GM strains of rice, sugar cane and alfalfa; the richer farmers with the most powerful pumps exacerbated the crisis by sucking shallower wells dry. Again, GM was not to blame, but the edge that the rich invariably have over the poor everywhere on the planet.
In Western Australia, where Charles reports having witnessed "huge salinisation problems", GM crops are not even grown, although a moratorium on cultivation in the state could be lifted this year. Most
problems in Australia occur in the most populated areas as a result of prolonged lack of rainfall coupled with general over-consumption of water.
Damning reports
Then there is Charles's anti-GM talk of "corporate monsters" engaging in "an experiment that's gone seriously wrong, causing untold problems which become very expensive to undo". Has it really gone "seriously wrong"? The answer, it seems, depends on who you ask.
Organisations that oppose genetic engineering are never going to say anything complimentary about it. So it's little surprise that
Friends of the Earth, for example, has condemned GM crops. Much of the data in anti-GM reports, though, has not been peer-reviewed, but is frequently cited without independent scrutiny.
Can seemingly independent environmental assessments of GM crops be trusted? A
study of the global impact of GM recently published by Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot of the UK consultancy
PG Economics, concluded that globally in 2006, the technology reduced pesticide spraying by 286 million kilograms, decreasing the environmental impact of herbicides and pesticides by 15%.
Similarly, by reducing the amount of ploughing needed, GM technology led to reductions of greenhouse gases from soil equivalent to removing 6.56 million cars from the roads.
Cherry-picking the facts
The problem is that a dispassionate assessment of the green credentials of GM crops is almost impossible to come by at present, given the ideological baggage, mistrust and value-laden prejudice that have accompanied the technology throughout its tortured existence. It is clear that Prince Charles simply ignores or completely distrusts any data that challenges his own prejudices, or his contention that fiddling with nature is wrong.
He is to be congratulated for highlighting the importance of food security, even though the message is buried beneath a mountain of bile on the more peripheral question of whether GM crops are to blame for everything bad on this planet.
He should remember, however, that all farming - including organic farming - interferes with, and steals resources from, his beloved nature.
A key question is whether de-intensification of agriculture in rich countries simply transfers intensive production to other parts of the world, perhaps resulting in even worse environmental degradation overall. Whatever the answer, it would be interesting to know where Charles himself gets his data to support his assertions.
Some of the comments were..
Don't Let A Good Rant Hide Good Sense.
Thu Aug 14 01:15:21 BST 2008 by Jeremy Thomson
"I Think Auckland's rich Volcanic soil would have rather more to do with agricultural productivity. My grandmother tells the story of her grandparents arriving in Auckland from Scotland "and everything they planted grew, they though they'd found heaven on earth".Could someone please explain to my why GM is so much more dangerous than selectivel breeding? As far as I know the result - genetic changes in plants, is the same, GM is just quicker."
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Don't Let A Good Rant Hide Good Sense.
Tue Aug 19 03:49:07 BST 2008 by Soylent
"Particularly in the case of GM cotton, where the botulism toxin (nasty!) has been introduced to kill boll weevils, if this were to get out, by plasmid transfer into bacteria for instance, and then to get into crops it would be a really big disaster - and guess who's stumping-up the insurance for that one...?"That's a flat out lie. Botulism toxin has never been introduced in crops.BT cotton uses a toxin which is not known to cause any harm to human(only insects have the required receptors in their stomach) from B. Thuringiensis.Coincidentally, this toxin is widely used in "organic" farming."
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Don't Let A Good Rant Hide Good Sense.
Sun Aug 17 04:37:30 BST 2008 by Rajalakshmi Swaminathan
I fully endorse Jeremy's view on GM crops. GM crops are no different from many accepted strategies for varietal improvement, namely, plant breeding through mutation genetics, conventional breeding between selected parents. What we must ensure is that each transgenic event is carefully studied and tested before approval as is being ensured in all GM crops
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