GM: Friend or Foe?

“GM is a huge distraction. It is diverting a massive amount of time, effort and attention from the really crucial issues facing food and farming– like looking after our soils. We have already degraded 25 to 40% of soils worldwide and unless we work very hard to reverse this damage, it will be impossible to feed the growing population healthily. GM is dangerous because it allows us to accelerate in the wrong direction for a short while longer.

“Around 84% of GM crops are engineered to be resistant to Round Up (glyphosate), which kills all weeds and encourages continuous cropping until resistant weeds develop which is happening apace. Now these companies are applying to use chemicals like 2,4-D, which are so damaging that they have been banned in Europe for the past 20 years, in order to control these ‘superweeds’. This is all a madness that we predicted would happen, and we are seeing it starting again now with the Bt insecticide GM crops too.

“Many proponents of GM argue that while there may be problems with current GM crops, the next generation will bring social and environmental benefits. Yet we still have millions of acres of GM crops that are harming the environment, sprayed with a chemical that is now thought be to be carcinogenic, and have not made any progress on maintaining consumer choice, labelling and liability for contamination of organic or non GM crops, this just feels like propaganda to gain public acceptance of a technology that is doing such damage, and for which there is no recall button.

“Of course, plant and animal breeding advances are an important part of developing a nutritious, productive agriculture, and we have techniques like Marker Assisted Selection which is enabling rapid developments, often locally adapted, at much lower risk. Our Duchy Future Farming programme is working on the real problems that farmers have identified, with researchers supporting their experiments to find innovative solutions that work with our environment rather than against it, but the funding for this kind of approach is a drop in the ocean against the money that is spent developing GM products.

“For all these reasons and many more, the Soil Association is firmly committed to campaigning against GM.”