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Even Mother Nature hates GM crops
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index....ID=1&subID=772
Even Mother Nature hates GM crops The second generation of GM products is as unpalatable as the first, says robert matthews With the tenacity of triffids on steroids, the cheerleaders for genetically modified (GM) crops are back. And this time it's personal. They want you and me to give them a second chance to prove GM is A Good Thing. Their media campaign got off to a flying start last week, with a primetime piece on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, in which scientists talked up revolutionary new GM crops. If that sounds familiar, it shouldn't - because they really have changed their tune. Back in the late 1990s, agrochemical companies focused on convincing farmers of the benefits of GM, while ignoring consumers. That worked fine in the US, where consumers seem happy to eat anything as long as there's lots of it. But over in Europe it proved disastrous. PR initiatives worked in America, where consumers seem to eat anything as long as there's lots of it - but not in Europe Environmentalists seized on the idea of faceless multinationals foisting 'Frankenfoods' on us, while supermarkets paraded their green credentials by refusing to stock GM products. The market collapsed, leaving GM scientists to howl about the public's 'ignorance'. Not any more. Now even Lord May, former president of the Royal Society and a staunch advocate of GM techology, admits he got it wrong. The public, he concedes, acted entirely rationally. They may have been mistaken about the potential health risks, but they were dead right about one thing: GM crops offered them no tangible benefits. So why should they accept them? Hence the new tune being sung by the GM industry, which is keen to show off 'second generation' products with supposed consumer benefits. The Agricultural Biotechology Council, a GM lobby group, told the BBC that its member companies are now hard at work developing crops with better nutritional qualities. Some are already available in the US, such as cereals with zero 'trans' fats, implicated in heart disease. So will this new hearts-and-minds campaign work? Don't bank on it. Even if the new products do offer genuine consumer benefits, the public still has to be convinced that nasty side-effects won't turn up years from now. The case of irradiated food is salutary. First suggested a century ago as a way of boosting shelf-life, exposing food to intense bursts of radiation has been repeatedly given a clean bill of health. Even the notoriously twitchy World Health Organisation has declared it safe and effective. Yet you won't find irradiated food for sale in your local supermarket, because none of this matters. Shoppers just won't touch it. Getting them to rethink their attitude to GM food is clearly going to be tough. But now an even more awkward customer is becoming a problem for the GM lobby: Mother Nature. In 1992 Chinese farmers became the first to plant GM crops, in the form of cotton modified to produce a protein lethal to the notorious bollworm pest. At first the crop seemed to live up to its billing, allowing farmers to cut pesticide use by 70 per cent. But earlier this year, reports revealed that the demise of the bollworm has simply encouraged the rise of other pests, which require regular treatment with whole new pesticides. And the extra expense has all but wiped out the economic advantage of the GM crop. The speed with which this pioneering GM crop has been undermined has shocked scientists. Far more shocking is their belief that Mother Nature was going to just sit there and do nothing while GM crops were planted across the world. Evolution is all about adaptation and survival of the fittest. Weaklings don't get a second chance. And it's far from clear why the GM industry should be an exception. FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 26, 2006 |
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