Genetically Modified Crops. Some facts you ought to know

The theory goes that if we are to feed the world as the population grows, seemingly inexorably, we need to apply science to food production in order to increase yields, reduce the effects of disease and contamination, weeds and so forth and we need to reduce our reliance on pesticides by developing crops that are naturally resistant to predators.

That's all good then. And farmers and growers have been doing this for millennia. Cross breeding crop varieties in order to produce better, more productive and robust crops, breeding animals from the fittest or in order to develop better growth, quality of meat, hardiness; breeding much of the fat content out of varieties of pigs for example making the meat healthier for human consumption.

So why not now involve a more scientific approach in order to make this process even more effective and to short-circuit the time-frame from generations at least, to more immediate improvements to yields?

Why not indeed? So long as it is provably safe to do so? And so long as the science does deliver higher yields. Oh, and also, so long as the process does result in better - and sustainable agricultural outcomes and results in the third-world countries where these things are so important.

And my final 'oh'; so long as the process is about feeding people rather than exploiting them for the profit of privately-owned conglomerates.

And it is in these areas where the problems arise.

Are GM crops provably safe for human consumption?

 Quite simply no they are not (provably safe).

When, over the centuries, farmers have cross-bred crops and animals in order to make improvements to their productivity, they have done so by working with nature. They have 'helped' to create a new strain of plant or animal by encouraging 'mutations' that could have happened naturally as part of the natural selection process. By which I mean cross-breeding plants or animals in a natural way which could have occurred in nature. It has been about combining positive genes from one organism into another in order to produce new properties that are, hopefully, beneficial to the resulting foodstuff. This has been done on a trial and error basis, taking time and care and resulting in a 'new' plant or animal whose 'production' is entirely natural.

What the GM industry is doing is chemical engineering. It is changing the DNA of organisms and creating an entirely new 'product' that is effectively 'man-made'. Instead of this development being done with nature, it is being done entirely outside of the natural evolutionary process. It is tinkering with nature and it is being done for profit and not for the stated aim of improving food production. And so short-cuts are taken in the interests of profits. Of which more later.

Take the example of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) - a chemical insecticide which emerged in 1945 and was promoted as being entirely safe for decades before being banned in 2007 when a direct causal link between DDT and breast cancer in women was established. I mention this because every genetically modified crop is effectively a different chemical solution. Every single one is potentially a DDT disaster waiting to happen. It is simply, therefore, impossible to make the case that they are all provably safe.

And Monsanto, Beyer and Syngenta (the three multinational giants behind almost all GM food products on the planet) know this very well. It is why they successfully lobbied in the US for protection against class action legal liability in the event that any GM foods are found to be harmful to humans in the future.

If you knew your products were 100% safe why would you want and need to do this? To my mind this single fact effectively closes the case. They simply cannot know that their products are safe and this legal action is a clear admission of this situation.

Does the science deliver higher yields

 Despite the theoretical promotion of GM foods as delivering higher crop yields for more than 20 years, there has not been a single example of the commercial farming of GM foods that has delivered higher yields. Not one, anywhere in the world.

Do GM crops deliver sustainably better results in the third world?

See above - there is no evidence that GM crops deliver better results in the third world. Indeed the opposite is provably true. Because GM crops are almost invariably a 'single season' crop which means they change (and irrevocably damage) the very systems of agricultural production that they seek to improve: Because they are effectively 'sterile' crops, the farmer cannot harvest some of the seed for next year's crop. Instead they have to go back to their supplier - Monsanto, Bayer Syngenta - and pay again for next year's crop.

That's not sustainability; it is effectively taking ownership of what should be a 'natural' product that produces seed to provide next year's crop with no cost (other than the time required to harvest the seed for this purpose) to the farmer. Taken to its extreme this could mean that Monsanto et al, would come to own a natural product and have the ability to charge farmers to use it in order to feed people. How does that sit with your view of the goals of GM as being to help to feed the growing global population?

Is it about feeding people or exploiting them?

I think if you've read the above, the answer to this question is blindingly clear. The whole GM food scam - and I am convinced that this is an accurate description of it - is about Monsanto et al making money out of a hungry world. Not in a way which delivers value for money, but in a way which sees them owning entire swathes of foodstuffs wherever in the world they are grown. This is about commercial, privately owned corporations actually owning commodities like wheat or maize or barley etc in a way which means they get a cut of the price of the final crop wherever in the world it is grown or consumed.

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Three final points if I may?

First is that the only large scale farm trials of GM crops took place right here in the UK between 1999 and 2004. The trials found that GM crops were detrimental to wildlife - birds and insects. As crops which have pesticides effectively engineered into them, is this really a surprise? And if they're measurably detrimental to the health and habitat of wildlife, what are we? Are we not semi-domesticated wildlife too?

The second is that despite an ongoing campaign from consumers around the world to have clear GM labelling on foodstuffs (the jury FSA {Food Standards Agency} is still out on this but consumer power is decidedly anti GM), most non-organic meat products in our supermarkets are from animals that have been fed on GM feeds.

So we are already consuming GM products whether we want to or not.

And thirdly. China recently decided not to produce any GM food crops in the country, as has Kenya. The UK agriculture sector recently announced that it has increased yields by 30% in the last decade without using GM technology.

The correlation between GM foods and the equally profit-rather-than-reality driven climate change scam are striking. Neither is about actually improving people's lives but about exploiting people for profit and funding. Both are really about controlling people, their behaviours and lifestyles and maximising the profitable returns to be taken from exploiting and monetising the natural environment.

Both are utterly cynical and damaging to the very people they claim to be trying to help.

So, in conclusion, do we need to produce more food to feed a growing global population? Yes we do.

But is GM a safe, sustainable and successful solution? No it most certainly is not.

People who have recently been deriding the SNP for banning GM in Scotland, suggesting that this stance is retrograde or anti science or Luddite in its nature clearly do not have the first clue about the reality of the global GM food scam.

Thanks for reading.