It’s propaganda to say GM has been proven safe
The Independent, 7 June, 2013
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/letters-its-propaganda-to-say-gm-has-been-proven-safe-8649439.html
Steve Connor’s uncritical regurgitation of GM propaganda (“If GM crops are bad, show us the evidence” 3 June) does little justice to a debate of fundamental significance to future human welfare and planetary impact: global agricultural policy.
Industry claims of reduced pesticide use have been challenged in peer-reviewed literature, which indicates the opposite. Lower carbon emissions (primarily through no-till agriculture) are misattributed, since adoption of the latter mostly pre-dates the introduction of GM in 1996. And, of the much-vaunted productivity gains, there is precious little evidence.
What is evident, however, is that the headline-capturing improvements secured in recent years have all been achieved through conventional plant breeding, and at a miniscule fraction of the cost of GM: the NIAB super-wheat (30 per cent potential gain in productivity); Nerica rice (four times as productive as traditional varieties, with higher protein levels, pest, disease and drought resistance); and flood-resistant Scuba Rice to quote just three examples. Non-GM breeding continues to be far more successful for all of the traits for which the GM industry claims indispensability in meeting future food demand.
The argument that no one has died or fallen ill as a result of GM food is misleading and premature. Epidemiology attests that it can take decades for negative health impacts to be recognised in morbidity and mortality statistics.
It is not necessary for GM activists to “put up or shut up”. Their arguments have been articulated over decades in a now comprehensive case against the corporatist industrialisation of agriculture which has proven so consummately detrimental to our landscapes, biodiversity, soil integrity, plant, livestock and human health, socio-economic welfare, and food security; and for which GM represents the latest manifestation of long-discredited, ultimately unscientific, reductionist thinking.
Nigel Tuersley, Tisbury, Wiltshire
Steve Connor is quite right that it’s “put up or shut up” time for GM, but he’s got it the wrong way around. It’s high time that those who are so keen that we buy and become dependent on this expensive ‘“technology” put up proof that it’s safe, before we undertake yet another massive and unpredictable experiment with our one and only ecosphere, in addition to global warming.
The idea that something be considered “safe” just because no one has yet shown it otherwise would not wash with Airbus or Boeing; why should it with Monsanto or Bayer? Thalidomide, Lindane and DDT were declared safe on this basis, as were many other similar products which later turned out to be anything but. If the benefit is great enough then perhaps we may take the risk, as with, for example, a polio vaccine, but not otherwise.
Then there’s the issue of choice: if Mr Connor is happy to eat these products then he is free to do so, but others must have the freedom not to, and to know when their food is tainted.
Dr Ian East, Islip, Oxfordshire