2009 articles

1.Colin Tudge, "Feeding People is Easy," unless we use GM seeds
2.Colin Tudge: agribusiness presents a threat to climate adaptation strategies

NOTE: These are transcripts of videoed interviews with the biologist and award-winning science writer Dr Colin Tudge, the author of numerous works on food, agriculture, genetics, and species diversity. Among his more recent books on food and farming are "So shall we reap" and "Feeding People is Easy".
---
---
Colin Tudge: "Feeding People is Easy," unless we use GM seeds
Interview/video by Ann Danylkiw: http://vimeo.com/adanylkiw
http://vimeo.com/7260884

Author and journalist Colin Tudge shares his thoughts on the Millennium Seed Bank Project from Kew Gardens and GM crops. Interview took place at NEF's The Bigger Picture Festival 24 October 2009.

Colin Tudge: There's no doubt that if we are serious about our own long-term future, we have to have the maximum possible variety of genes, as it were, in store, from all possible crops. So you need a huge variety of potential crops to be kept in store, in the form of seed usually, and you need a great variety within each crop species. [”¦]

It has to do with natural selection and the nature of change. Because it's clear, we all know that the climate is going to change radically over the next hundred years all over the world, and nobody can predict exactly what's going to happen in what place. Plants gear themselves to day length because that's so reliable. With global warming you're going to have unprecedented combinations of day length, temperature and rainfall. It could throw present-day plants completely even if they survive, they won't know how to gear their life cycle flowering and seed setting and the rest. The dreadful thing is that we have no idea in detail what kind of crops we are going to need for which areas.

The trouble with GMOs is that you are immediately narrowing your base because you have to tailor-make a crop to fill a particular niche. If you have no idea where the niches are going to be, or what anywhere is going to be like, you could be climbing up a gum tree. You've got to have variety in there.

There's a whole vogue which is running in parallel with GMOs, of planting crops which on the one hand are high-performance but on the other hand are genetically very varied. They may be phenotypically very uniform but genetically they are very varied so the crops between them will be valid in very different conditions.

GMOs are the opposite of that. GMOs could really land us in trouble for the reason alone that they will narrow the genetic base available to us. So this movement, of conserving as much seed as possible, which has been going on in one form or other since the 1920s, is absolutely vital. It's probably the most vital thing there is at the moment.
---
---
2.Colin Tudge: agribusiness presents a threat to climate adaptation strategies
Interview and video by Ann Danylkiw: http://vimeo.com/adanylkiw
http://vimeo.com/7279631

Author Colin Tudge explains how the large agribusiness model has fundamentally changed the nature of how we feed ourselves and how this model threatens climate adaptation strategies.

Colin Tudge: The thing is, that everybody in the world these days is supposed to be in competition with everybody else. Maximum competitive economy. And they, the powers that be, make a huge virtue about this. It's meant to make us all work harder and concentrate the mind and all that kind of stuff. Success or failure is judged entirely by how much money you make. If you make a lot of money you are attractive to shareholders and if you don’t, you go bust. So we have this frantic competition in all walks of life these days to make as much money as possible in the shortest time.

And this absurd mentality, which is grotesque in most contexts, is applied equally to agriculture. If you are just selling something neutral, like computers, then maybe that doesn't matter. But if you are selling something that really matters, like food, and also something where the production itself is quite uncertain because of climate, it becomes an absolute disaster.

If you try to maximize yield in the short term in farming, you could find you make it impossible to produce anything in ten years' time. Because you wreck the soil, you waste the water, putting on too much fertilizer, etc. So this idea of short-term maximization of yield disastrous.

"Value-added" means you add a load of packaging and processing, which you don't really need to do, but even worse than that, you take your grain, which you could be eating as the basis of good traditional cuisine, and you turn it into meat because then you can really make money.

So we have this tremendous push towards livestock. Not because we need it, not because it makes great cooking, but because it's potentially very profitable. Cutting costs is the most disastrous thing of all in the context of agriculture. But even worse, it puts people out of work. There's this great drive, in the interests of cutting costs, just to throw farmers off the land. It's bad enough in this country (Britain), but in a country like India, where you’ve got 600 million people working on the land, if you cut down the amount of labour, if they had agriculture like we have, with only 1% of people working on the land, you would put half a billion people out of work, almost twice the population of the United States.