There is no effective campaign against the ‘back door’ introduction of GM or GMO foods in the UK. The government seem hell bent on getting it in and is supported by organisations like the NFU (National Farmer Unions.)
Biotech company executives were reported to have said that it is the ideal time to get their products accepted as NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) were too preoccupied with climate change. They were exactly right.
Having spoken to Greenpeace UK and the Soil Association recently there is little evidence of effective opposition to GM. Greenpeace are not actively campaigning and have adopted a ‘watching brief’. The Soil Association say they are opposing GM but there is little evidence of that as their GM web page was last updated in 2008. It seems that updating it is a low priority.
Should we care? A resounding YES is the answer. You might think that there are ways of avoiding GM food but once large scale imports are allowed into the UK and UK GM crops are approved we will not have a choice. It will not be a case of going to the supermarket and selecting non-GM products as it will be everywhere. Bread often contains soya flour as do many other manufactured foods and recent comments from supermarkets confirm that they want to use GM versions to reduce costs. If the UK follows the US there will no requirement to label food products that contain GM ingredients.
There are good independent studies to show that eating GM food does cause problems for humans and farm animals. The biotech companies will refute that and say that their research shows otherwise. In the US GM food does not have to undergo any safety checks and is approved on the say so of the companies producing it, the same could easily happen here.
Growing your own will not be a guarantee of staying GM free. Pollen travels considerable distances and will inevitably cross pollinate any neighbouring crops. Forget about growing sweetcorn if you live within a few miles of miles of fields of maze.
Then there are bees. Honey bees will easily travel up to 5 miles for good nectar or pollen. If they happen to stop by your garden on the way back to the hive they will exchange pollen with anything they visit. That is their job. Bees are in enough trouble as it is without introducing other unknown and untested pollutants to their food.
What bothers me most is that we are being scared into believing that GM is the only way to avoid starvation or ‘feed the world’ as the PR people say. There are many objections to this but it takes a long time to debunk the myths and spin.
The other worrying development over the last few years is that biotech companies have been buying up seed companies. It is extremely dangerous to have the world’s seed supply in the hands of a few very large multinational companies. Why do they want to control international seed supplies?
The good news is that there are better ways to grow food. There are already very highly blight resistant potatoes around, I have been growing them for five years and have never suffered any losses from blight, more of that later. Then there is the recently developed strain of rice that can survive total submersion in flood water and still produce a crop. Both of these examples were developed normally without biotechnology although the GM companies seem to be so incensed that conventional breeding has beaten them that they falsely claimed the new rice strain as theirs!
My appeal to you is to lobby Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association to redouble their efforts to campaign against GM food. Write to your MP, Gordon Brown and anybody else you can think of saying that you do not want GM food. Please do something or we will wake up one day to find GM food everywhere.
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I had this response from Friends of the Earth:
“1. The GM issue is very much a part of the Food Chain campaign. The most widely grown GM crop in the world is soy, mostly grown for animal feed and largely exported to Europe. Therefore although we are campaigning against soy imports more widely, the impacts of GM soy are also explicitly dealt with. In particular, the Food Chain campaign will soon be focussing on the massive increases in the use of pesticides that occurs as a result of GM soy.
2. The import of GM animal feed into Europe is one of the biggest threats to Europe’s strong stand against GMOs. Pro-GM governments and biotech companies are using animal feed shortages around the world to aggressively campaign for weakening European Union GMO law. We are working alongside Friends of the Earth Europe to keep these laws strong.
3. We are also working internationally to counter the biotech companies aggressive pushing of GM as a solution to the climate and food crises.
So although we don’t have a ‘GM campaign’ as such, we are still very much working on it in a variety of ways!”