PETER Melchett and the organic-farming Soil Association continue to mislead about GM crops (“Growth in the organic food market shows non-GM is the right choice”, Agenda, The Herald, April 23).
Over 16 or more years, billions of GM meals have been consumed with no health effects. In Hamburg in 2011, 54 people died and 3,500 suffered kidney damage from eating organic beansprouts. In Germany in 1996, nine children were damaged from eating organic parsley and one died. Other cases have been reported in the medical journals. Which then is safer?
The yam or sweet potato found on supermarket shelves acquired two genes from a bacterium 8,000 years ago which induced the swollen root eaten today. These genes are in all yam varieties and have been eaten by billions of people safely for thousands of years and grown with no environmental impacts. Is the yam unsafe? It certainly legitimises GM technology.
GM crops have led to the large scale adoption of no-till agriculture that conserves soil, benefits wild life enormously and whose greenhouse gas emissions are half those of organic farms; which is greener?
But organic farmers do use GM crops. Renan wheat, popular with organic farmers and constructed
in the 8190s by cell fusion, X-rays
and chemical treatments contains foreign resistance genes from wild grasses.
The word “choice” doesn’t enter Mr Melchett’s article. Mr Melchett is a former head of UK Greenpeace, some of whose members destroyed crop experiments they didn’t like; similar to burning books before they are read. Greenpeace continues to destroy essential experimental crops needed to better the poorer part of mankind. The Soil Association needs to appreciate that scientists see more widely than the elitist consumers they cater for.
Feeding 11 billion by 2100 on the same area of land demands creative agricultural and scientific solutions of which GM is only one.
Getting world yield increase back on track from its hiatus would be helped if Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Food and Environment, and the Soil Association recognise that acceptance of GM here, as an issue of choice rather than narrow self-interest, would enormously help GM adoption and yield increase elsewhere.
Professor Tony Trewavas,
Scientific Alliance Scotland,
7-9 North St David Street,
Edinburgh.
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