- The Observer,
- Sunday June 8 2003
Pause as you spoon that sugar into your coffee this morning, and contemplate the source of those glistening white crystals. They may seem like the essence of pure sweetness but their origin is somewhat cruder than you would expect.
In fact, much of our sugar comes from beet grown by farmers working to a basic routine: they zap their fields with massive doses of powerful herbicide in order to kill virtually every plant and seed in their soil. Then beet seeds are sown. Not surprisingly, with all competition blasted out of existence, the resulting plants thrive in a weedless world. The end result is a bag of sugar. It's an effective, but not very romantic process.
Now consider GM beet. There is no massive zapping of fields with it. Instead, modified seeds are grown with weeds springing up around them. Then, later in the season, the field is given a light dusting of herbicide. The GM beet, fitted with a gene to protect it against the herbicide, continues to thrive while the weeds wither. The farmer saves money on his herbicide bill, while wildlife benefits from reduced inundations of chemicals.
Sounds good. Just the thing to cheer up the greenies, you would have thought. But of course, it doesn't. They hate GM food. That gene-in-the-beet will escape as pollen and make every weed and nasty plant in the landscape immortal; the farmer will become the slave of the GM seed-maker; foodstuffs made from crops with added DNA will kill us. Hence all the protests, attacks, trashing of fields of crops, and dressing up in Frankenstein masks.
And of course, one must acknowledge that every technology has its bad - and good - uses. Fire kills thousands every year but is the bedrock of civilisation, while even derided nuclear power has helped save thousands of lives through its application as radiotherapy for cancer patients. Fire is indispensable to civilisation, nuclear power more debatable. The question is: where does GM food come on this risk-benefit continuum, high or low?
Well, for a start, no one has ever been able to show that it is bad for our health. Despite one or two claims, invariably shot down, not a single, authoritative study has ever indicated the stuff is dangerous when eaten. Americans have been munching the GM food for a decade, after all, and are still not falling face down in their burgers.
Then there is the environmental impact, a trickier issue to answer given the fact that every time GM crops are planted, campaigners rip them up. But some trials have survived and, based on these, UK scientists will shortly pronounce on the effects of herbicide-resistant crops on the nation's wildlife. Early Danish studies suggest these effects will turn out to be beneficial and that GM crops actually boost numbers of local wild birds and insects. So much for Frankenstein foods. (Nor has anyone observed America being smothered by super-weeds, created by GM pollen, by the way - another doomsday image that the green movement claims is real.)
And finally, there is the political and economic argument. Farmers will become dependent on big corporations for GM seed supplies, like drug addicts on a pusher - though why this should happen, I really don't know. If GM seeds save money for the farmer, he will buy them. If they don't, he will go back to zapping his fields with powerful herbicides.
In short, there may be risks posed by GM plants, but at present none of them looks anywhere as potent, imminent or real as greenies would have us believe. Which leaves us with the issue of benefits. Making farmers a little richer is not a major bonus or argument in favour of GM technology, I agree. Improving the environment, albeit gently, is worthy, but not sufficient, given current levels of antipathy.
The trouble is that these nations are now too scared to grow modified plants for fear that their GM rice, rubber or cotton would be blackballed in Britain and Europe as tainted and unworthy of our status as privileged nations. As Mark Tester, of Cambridge University, says: 'Imposing our values like this is immoral. We are patronising the world.' Or, as Professor Johnjoe McFadden, of Surrey University, puts it: 'Third World farmers cannot afford expensive pesticides, so you either clear weeds with your hands or use GM crops. By imposing our precious Islington standards on the whole developing world, we are sending children back into the fields. It's as simple as that.'
In short, you might reasonably argue that GM crops matter a great deal to the rest of the world, but perhaps not that much to our country. I do not agree. Their introduction here - even if only on a limited scale - has huge importance, mainly as a bulwark against simple ignorance. The double helix - revealed 50 years ago in Britain to be the structure of DNA, the stuff of our genes - is being turned in front of our eyes, into an object of hate by eco-warriors when it should tower as a symbol of hope. (And don't forget, drugs made from GM organisms began saving lives decades ago and no one muttered very much then.)
In short, I object to the fact that DNA is being transformed into an invidious, invisible threat - much like radiation was 20 years ago, a deliberate ploy by those who hate all scientific advancement. As the late Peter Medawar, the British Nobel laureate once put it: 'To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.' Time to fight back, in short.
