NOTE: Two letters from today's Guardian. The second contains a curious comment, "GM is excellent if it does not have to accommodate the complexities of climate and the seasons." So how useful to farmers exactly is a form of crop breeding that "does not have to accommodate the complexities of climate and the seasons"????
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Oil, genetics and the end of cheap food
The Guardian, August 19 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/theguardian/2008/aug/19/5

You put your finger on the main cause of rising food prices and shortages (Millions could starve as fertiliser prices soar, says UN, August 13). The input costs for non-organic, hi-tech farming have increased dramatically because artificial fertiliser prices increase with oil prices. The "cheap" food of the last 50 years has been based on our incredibly wasteful use of oil. Industrial agriculture involves turning oil into food because oil and natural gas are used to get nitrogen out of the air and into a sack of artificial fertiliser. All current GM crops are just as oil-dependent as any other non-organic farming system, which is one of the reasons why Prince Charles was right to criticise them so strongly. Future food security depend on us using renewable, solar-powered, organic techniques to produce food, and scientific research shows that worldwide organic farming could produce slightly more food than we currently have. GM crops have the added disadvantage of introducing
completely
new risks into the environment without any benefits of increased yield.

Peter Melchett
Policy director, Soil Association
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Kevin Nolan's letter (August 14) is a typical outburst from a physicist who cannot cope with the realities of life, with whose complexities biology grapples. If the commercial realities of GM pose problems, it is a result of thinking of his sort, which says the world must be inherently simple, because that's all I can cope with. GM is excellent if it does not have to accommodate the complexities of climate and the seasons, and is not presented as a commercial take-it-or-leave-it set of options, formulated by businessmen and biochemists who have the same cause-effect mentality as Kevin Nolan.

Julian Vincent
Biologist, engineer, University of Bath