QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The GM industry is simply using the heightened interest in food prices as a vehicle to promote its products. This is evidenced by a new partnership between Monsanto and other agribusiness giants - the Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy. The group has been set up to promote biofuels - which drive up the price of food - with one hand, while offering GM crops as the solution to the price rises with the other.

Prince Charles and others concerned about the proliferation of GM crops are not seeking to 'limit food production at a time of growing hunger,' but to prioritise the needs of the world's billion or so small farmers over those of big business.
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Charles is right to back organic farming
The Observer, August 24 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/24/gmcrops.food

Nick Cohen repeats the usual misconceptions about small-scale organic farming in his attack on Prince Charles ('Charles, a very modern Marie Antoinette', Comment, last week). As someone who traded a white collar profession for running a vegetable box scheme, I can assure him that the backbreaking drudgery of farm work is as nothing compared to the mind-numbing drudgery of modern office work.

Cohen's implication that capital-intensive agribusiness has been a liberating force for the Latin American poor is also a serious misreading of the facts. But the real cloud on the horizon for modern agribusiness is its utter dependence upon fossil fuel for transport, traction and agro-chemicals. For this reason, there will probably come a time when small, local, organic agriculture will be the only game in town.

But Cohen is right about one thing - there will be no place in such a future society for a parasitic landed aristocracy, however correct the pronouncements of some of its current members. Onward, then, to a republic of peasant proprietors, where we can grow our cake and eat it!

Chris Smaje
Frome, Somerset

GM seeds are programmed to withstand the heavy doses of pesticides that kill weeds efficiently, so that high doses can be used. Yet the seeds also absorb these chemicals. Most of America's corn is GM and it ends up in corn oil, tacos, cornstarch in soup, so that even if you watch your labels you're probably getting some. And it's so new, so radical, that we really don't know how our bodies will react to these innovations down the road. Remember, DDT (the pesticide now banned worldwide) was once considered a miracle boon.
Christopher Logan
Ilan, Taiwan

Regardless of GM technology, farmers have been getting phenomenally high yields for 50 years by 'selectively breeding' wild crops such as maize or wheat. On the other hand, GM crops contain DNA from different animals and plants; a GM wheat crop can contain genes from fish, fungus or bacteria to enhance a particular resistance, whereas 'selective breeding' between two closely related species is a common occurrence in nature.

Whenever GM crops are grown on open fields, there is a risk that they can contaminate 'selectively bred' or organic crops and that is why GM technology is so carefully controlled.

Rupert Eden
Seville, Spain

Prince Charles might be rich but he does try to think holistically and focus on what makes life worth living. Our complex global problems need science and brilliant organisation to be solved but also, vitally, an awareness that life has more dimensions than the purely practical.

Christine Avery
Plymouth

Nick Cohen missed the most thorough and relevant research into the use of science in agriculture - the recent UN International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development. In the report, 400 scientists conclude that GM crops offer no panacea to future food needs and fail to increase crop yields.

The GM industry is simply using the heightened interest in food prices as a vehicle to promote its products. This is evidenced by a new partnership between Monsanto and other agribusiness giants - the Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy. The group has been set up to promote biofuels - which drive up the price of food - with one hand, while offering GM crops as the solution to the price rises with the other.

Prince Charles and others concerned about the proliferation of GM crops are not seeking to 'limit food production at a time of growing hunger,' but to prioritise the needs of the world's billion or so small farmers over those of big business.

Clare Oxborrow
Food Campaigner for Friends of the Earth
London N17