True greens know GM is the answer

A more dispassionate examination of Rothamsted’s GM wheat points to a different conclusion. The crop in question has a gene inserted that enables it to produce a natural pheromone to repel aphids, an agricultural pest. If it works in the field, this could mean fewer toxic pesticide sprays would need to be applied — a big environmental benefit which true greens should support.

The anti-GM campaigners prefer scaremongering to science. Claiming the aphid- deterrent genes came from cows, they rallied behind a logo of a cow-shaped loaf.

However, as Johnathan Napier, the chief scientist on the Rothamsted team who did the gene splicing, told me at the Geeks in the Park counter-protest last Sunday, the new gene is synthetic — it bears some resemblance to genes found in cows, but similar aphid-deterrent genes occur naturally in hundreds of other plants, too, including garden mint and hops.

The protesters also hyped up the supposed danger of “contamination” by wind pollination — until it was pointed out to them by the scientists that wheat is self-pollinating. Hardly any pollen gets out and any that does travels a few metres at most. Not exactly The Day of the Triffids.

Another myth doing the rounds (which Joanna Blythman, an organic food-obsessed journalist, never tires of repeating) is that farmers in India have been driven to suicide by the introduction of GM cotton. The none-too-subtle implication is that anyone with an open mind about GM is complicit in orphaning Indian children.

In reality the tragic occurrence of farmer suicides in rural India is a complex social phenomenon that long predates the introduction of GM. Indeed, the new GM insect-resistant cotton has boosted yields and helped farmers to reduce their use of insecticide sprays.

What of the accusation that GM seeds force farmers into “slavery” because they need to be bought anew each year? This has already been the case for decades with hybrid seeds, which don’t breed true by definition. Yet farmers prefer them because they deliver better yields and are more reliable.

A variant of this myth is the “Terminator technology” that delivers sterile seeds, thereby further enslaving farmers. Yet the technology was never brought to market.

Opposing GM is, for many protesters, just another front in their wider war against big corporations. Last Sunday Monsanto, the GM company, was invoked constantly like a pantomime villain to rally the troops. The hacker network Anonymous, which brought down Rothamsted’s web servers for 12 hours on Sunday night in apparent revenge for the failed Take the Flour Back action, sent out a tweet accusing the scientists of being “Monsanto in the UK”.

This is, of course, a lie. Rothamsted is a publicly funded agricultural research institute whose scientists have pledged that, if it works, their GM wheat will be available patent-free. Those who worry that GM technology is dominated by big corporations should surely be supporting this public sector research, not trying to vandalise it.

Blanket opposition to GM causes real harm in developing countries. Originally inspired by aggressive campaigning by western green groups, many African and Asian governments still have de facto bans on GM crops. Yet GM opportunities now exist that could revolutionise African farming, bringing drought- resistant, disease-resistant and nutritionally enhanced crops to the people who most need them. If Africa could improve its agricultural productivity by 50%, the continent would become a net food exporter.

Not for nothing did Norman Borlaug, the late Nobel peace prize laureate who saved the world from famine in the 1970s and 1980s with his Green Revolution, spend his final years warning that anti-biotech activists would bring starvation back into the world if they succeeded in stopping GM.

To feed a population projected to exceed 9 billion by the 2050s we will need to utilise every option to keep improving crop yields in line with population growth, while protecting scarce ecological resources such as land, water and biodiversity.

None of this outside-world reality punctures the romantic bubble occupied by the green idealists. Jyoti Fernandes, who appeared recently on the BBC’s Newsnight on behalf of Take the Flour Back, is an American hobby farmer who lived for years without electricity in a Somerset eco-commune and now fancies herself as a real-life “peasant”.

Hector Christie, charged with causing criminal damage after breaking into Rothamsted’s wheat trial site two weeks ago, is an Old Etonian who joins anti-capitalist protests in Europe and opened his stately home at Tapeley Park in Devon to wandering hippies.

That these people claim to speak on behalf of farmers worldwide is laughable.

Yet the greens have successfully set public policy on the GM issue in Britain and Europe. Last week I was in “GM-free” Scotland listening to Richard Lochhead, the Scottish government’s rural affairs minister, wax lyrical about his country’s venerable tradition of promoting science and reason.

As a speaker at the same conference I was able to point out that the “GM-free” tag is not only a betrayal of the values of the Scottish Enlightenment, but also an active hindrance to scientists in Scotland who want to use modern agricultural technology.

One of the most sensible developments would be that of a GM blight-resistant potato — crops are sprayed weekly throughout the growing season to combat this highly infectious fungal pathogen. Yet for a farmer to grow a blight- resistant GM potato needing no chemical sprays would be illegal in Scotland because of the pandering of the Scottish National party to green- inspired public superstition.

As a lifelong environmentalist, I did not realise until I started writing science books how wrong the anti-GM movement was. I now look back on my crop-trashing days with shame.

More than 15 years after the first wide-scale commercialisation of GM, there is not a single substantiated case of harm to man or beast anywhere in the world. This is not for lack of research: hundreds of scientific papers have been written on the subject.

As Mark Henderson writes in his excellent book The Geek Manifesto: “By so transparently rejecting scientific consensus on [GM], greens invite the charge of hypocrisy when they urge politicians and the public to listen to the scientific consensus on climate change.”

To this day, green groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth still refuse to accept the worldwide scientific consensus that GM food is just as safe to eat as any other. This denial of science unfortunately undermines the environmental agenda across the board.

If the green movement is to recover its place as a guardian of the environment, it will have to rediscover the value of science-based policy and stop ignoring inconvenient truths. The scientific method should not be pressed into the service of ideological ends and the most important attribute of any scientist is being able to admit mistakes.

Yet the green groups apparently claim infallibility like a medieval pope. Human society — and the Earth’s environment — deserve better.