#20 Should we embrace GMO food?

JM: I’m John Johnjoe McFadden from the University of Surrey. I am a firm believer that we should embrace genetically modified crops and food. And the reason I believe that is I think they have the potential to provide an enormous benefit to mankind. They have more resistance to disease the crops and they can produce higher yields. And there’s a potential now of generating fortified foods. And fortified crops that can really tackle some important diseases in the world. The most famous of these, of course is the Golden Rice, which has been shown to be able to provide the daily requirement for a vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for making half a million children each year go blind and within a year a third two-thirds of them are dead. 

NB: But I mean I’d like to like to go back a little, and you know vitamin A deficiency around the world is an enormous problem. But we need to go back and ask questions about what kind of agricultural systems we want. And how we want them to operate. These are economic and political questions. They’re not scientific questions. And at the moment, we have a system of giant industrial agriculture of monocultures, of huge quantities of basically a very small number of crops, that are coming through a very small number of sources. At the moment, 53 percent of the world’s seeds come from three companies. What we need is diverse multicultural type crops. All sorts of different crops happening together, not the big monocultures. And not the situation where it’s controlled by big companies, that farmers have to buy their seed every year fresh, you know, at a considerable cost. And also, crops that are engineered in a way that relies on those companies selling agricultural chemicals to them. So, you’re looking at a high cost high input system that’s controlled by you know three companies.

JM: But this is not specific to GM crops. This is the situation in agriculture around the world today. And it’s a situation in lots of other industries. Most of our pharmaceuticals are produced by two or three or four or five different companies. Everything we our clothes are made by multinational, our computers. And on today… 

NB: We’re talking about our food supply. This is the most absolute, absolute, essential thing. Now, in the green party we’re not opposed to GM research, very much so. But the fact is we’ve had three decades as John Vidal of the guardian said, we’ve had three decades, and we’ve only got a handful of crops from GM. And you know the evidence is that in terms of yields that GM crops aren’t keeping up with conventionally bred crops. That’s the evidence. So, we have a situation where this is technology that really hasn’t worked after three decades.

JM: There are 14 million farmers in the world today who are using GM crops. 90% of them are in the developing world. Most of them are small farmers. Now, you either have to believe that they’re all stupid, or that they are getting some benefit from them. And all the studies that have been done, and really a lot of studies have been done, show that farmers make rational decisions. Nobody forced them to choose to young crops, they do. But as well as that, there’re potential…..

NB: But they are realizing advertising campaigns…

JM: There are the potential health benefits of crops, such as Golden Rice, which are unarguable. They are potentially huge. And it’s a, it’s a catastrophe every year they’re half a million children are dying of vitamin A deficiency every year when for at least a decade this solution has been available but has never been allowed to be tried out in field trials, proper field trials, because of the opposition of ecological groups.

So actually yes, you say there would need to be proper field, so therefore, we haven’t, we’re not going to do this next year, so that’s a very simplistic explanation.

JM: There are trials going on at the moment in the Philippines and in other countries. Field trials are going. 

NB: We’re not talking about a magic solution next year.

JM: But the field trials should have been a decade ago. And they haven’t, weren’t a decade ago because people like the Green Party, and everyone else opposed.

NB: Because the general public is concerned.

JM: Because if people are jumping up and down and saying this is going to kill you, people will get concerned 

NB: Well, that’s absolutely not what I’m saying. There are concerns.

JM: They’re at work with reason and logic, I think, in this world. And if you want to stop people from doing something, there should be good reasons. And you’re seem to be ideological on the basis of that you’re against capitalism. 

NB: And again well, I think, lots of people are against Monsanto.

JM: In most parts of Africa, for instance, people use organic farming because it’s all there is. And 30% of their crops get eaten by insect. When they switch to GM crops, that goes down to a much smaller fraction. That’s why farmers in India, Africa, and places, are now taking up GM crops. What you want to say is they are stupid. 

NB: No, no, that’s absolutely not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is we want to provide them with a wide range of alternatives.

JM: You want to ban it. You want to ban it. That’s different. You don’t want, you don’t want to give them the choice. Isn’t that correct? 

NB: What we want to do is see that, you see that, there’s no release of these without the proper control. Which isn’t there at the moment. And what we want to do also is see that if there is GM crops out there, that it’s labelled, so that consumers have the choice of knowing what they can choose