GM? We just don't trust them.

I've no idea what Monsanto has done specifically to annoy so many Austrians, but the very word was a curse amongst almost everyone I met there recently; the agrigiant was held liable for everything from bee-deaths, declining wildlife, nitrate contamination and aphid infestation to the poor weather. Needless to say they're firmly against GM foods - but not for the reasons that Boy Dave and his trusty sidekick Owen Paterson are campaigning against. 

Cameron has gone on the offensive in defence of GM foods. Emulating the great Gummer, who force-fed his daughter Cordelia with minced horsemeat to prove that beef was safe to eat, Dave has invited the world's press to his table to witness him feeding his family with a plethora of GM foodstuffs. He's addressing the food safety aspect  as though this is where the public objection lies. Which is utterly pointless.

The reason most people oppose GM is that they simply don't trust Monsanto. Their grain is sterile by design in the F1 generation, meaning farmers can't simply retain 1/10th of each crop to sow for the following year, they have to buy each year's seed from Monsanto. Any firm whose business model is based on establishing a monopoly supply position can't be trusted. And until the US has been growing the stuff for 50 years and all the negative environmental effects become apparent there why should we pollute our own farmland?

Sorry, we simply prefer the alternative that has already improved crop yields a hundred times more than Monsanto could ever achieve. By selective breeding. 

The idiot boy clearly has a political death-wish in lining himself up with yet another issue utterly antipathetic to the public view. What on earth will he support next? Free broadband for kiddy-fiddlers? Early release for Ian Brady? Banning the flag of St George from churches?

Guns or butter applies to crops, too

The Indie on Sunday's Environmental Editor writes in the Mail this morning on GM crops to do a pretty thorough demolition job on the biotech firms' claims. GM crops are not higher yielding, and are not the answer to third world hunger. There are no overall advantages in pest or disease resistance. The plants are sterile in the F1 generation, meaning farmers have to buy seeds every year from the biotech firms. And most damning of all, traditional methods of natural interbreeding have proved far more effective in producing cultivars with given characteristics than GM has.

If oil prices rise to $200 and beyond the cost of fertilizers and pesticides becomes prohibitive, and the choice may vector to cultivars with greater natural disease resistance but lower yields, or lower quantities of high yield cultivars. Guns or butter. Either way, the phenomenon of past few decades in which world agricultural productivity has matched extraordinary population growth has ended. And it doesn't matter if wheat is used to make biofuels, feed beef cattle or make bread; guns or butter again. It's the overall quantity produced that's critical, not the end use.

Those of us who grew up with the battle against famine in China, India, Africa and even the USSR - and remember, the cold war was won not with nuclear missiles but with US and Canadian wheat - need no reminder how fragile is our ability to feed ourselves. There was a comment from an old City man in last night's Standard to the effect that few of those now in the Treasury and the Bank were old enough to have had experienced a recession and were running about like headless chickens. The same applies to many now in government never having experienced the gutwrenching helplessness as millions in other nations faced starvation, disease and death.

I've written here before that my generation, a generation never called upon to go to war, never hungry, never having faced epidemic disease, and having enjoyed half a century of unprecedented economic and technological advance fuelled by cheap oil, may represent the fin de siecle of the 20th century, an extended Edwardian summer, and that as in August 1914 all this is about to fragment and disappear for ever. A government that makes a priority of both energy security and food security in all its actions is now more critical than ever; Brown and Labour are simply incapable of this. Getting them out of office is no longer a matter of Political preference but a matter of the gravest and most compelling importance for our national future.