Vandals! No, not protesters trashing crops but the GM lobby still trying to force increasingly discredited Frankenstein Food down our throats

By Joanna Blythman

PUBLISHED: 18:14 EST, 28 May 2012 | UPDATED: 02:28 EST, 29 May 2012

Genetic modification was supposed to be the ground-breaking science of the future. Its magic wand would feed the world and make toxic pesticides redundant.

But, in reality, it has dismally failed to live up to the expectations of its cheerleaders.

The high crop yields the GM lobbyists promised us just haven’t happened. Farmers are having to use more pesticide, not less, on their GM crops.

Field day: The peaceful protest at the weekend against the experimental trial of GM wheat at Rothamsted

Thanks to GM, vigorous new superweeds stalk the fields in countries such as the U.S., where controversial GM crops have been forced onto the market — against the wishes of citizens — at the behest of profit-driven corporations.

What’s more, we now have evidence that GM crops can cross-pollinate with non-GM crops, contaminating land for miles around.

Mercifully, in the UK and throughout Europe, GM ingredients in foods must be labelled by law. Concerned consumers have made it clear in poll after poll that they do not want to eat GM food.

And since no one wants to buy products with GM ingredients, retailers have refused to stock them.

Unfortunately, a hard core of pro-GM evangelists won’t accept the democratic opinion and take no for an answer. They are determined to ram GM down our throats, whether we like it or not.

And this is what lies at the heart of the reckless open-air experiment with GM wheat being conducted near Harpenden, Herts, where a once-respected scientific institute, Rothamsted Research, has become a centre for this bankrupt technology.

This research station has used an astute PR campaign to convince us that this experiment is just harmless ‘research’. But in using our countryside as an open-air laboratory, this trial could trigger dire and irreversible consequences for other crops and species.

The GM lobby has attempted to characterise anyone who dares to challenge its right to endanger farmers’ fields neighbouring Rothamsted as ‘witless vandals’, ‘zealots impervious to scientific reasoning’ and, even more ludicrously, by likening them to ‘book-burning Nazis’.

Anti-GM demonstrators join hands as they protest near Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, southern England

The hysteria of the language reflects only the weakness of the pro-GM case, and after this weekend it looked deliberately misleading.

The good-humoured crowd of 400 peaceful protesters who turned up on Sunday to register their opposition to this provocative experiment, was akin to that of a village fete and bore no resemblance to a gang of thugs.

These were not the fanatics of green activism so luridly portrayed in GM propaganda, but rather ordinary farmers and concerned citizens who recognise the appalling damage that could result from GM contaminating the food chain in Britain.

Such a situation would not only alarm the public but also spell economic ruin for our agriculture, since opposition to GM technology is so powerful throughout the world.

The pro-GM lobby behaves as though it alone understands science, and portrays the rest of us as morons wallowing in simple-minded ignorance and prejudice.

Even when independent scientists produce research that demonstrates the dangers of this inherently risky technology, their results are rubbished by the GM bully boys.

Research in Switzerland has shown that some GM wheat varieties have sprung up almost two miles away from where they were grown in trials and that, in the field, they cross-pollinate six times more than conventional varieties.

Have a heart: The demonstrators want the closure of a site containing an experimental crop of modified wheat in a field

Just as worryingly, in the United States, trials of genetically modified rice ended up contaminating the nation’s entire rice crop, with disastrous results for U.S. farmers whose sales were hit on a global market which shuns GM crops. When this technology was developed in the late 1990s, the GM pioneers argued that all the public’s fears about it were baseless.

But it has hardly worked out like that.

Studies in 2011 in Canada revealed traces of pesticides that had been implanted into crops using GM techniques were present in the umbilical blood of 83 per cent of pregnant mothers who were tested.

The GM industry had always argued that if these GM toxins — designed to kill crop pests — were eaten by humans, they would be destroyed in the gut and rendered harmless.

But the fact that they had reached umbilical blood meant not only that they survived the gut but could pass across the placenta to the growing foetus.

The Canadian research team warned: ‘Given the potential  toxicity of these pollutants and the fragility of the foetus, more studies are needed.’

The threat to animals is just as worrying, for a number of trials show kidney, liver and reproductive damage in animals fed GM foodstuffs.

There is also growing evidence that herbicides used on genetically modified crops could increase resistance in more than 20 different types of weeds. The fact is that, for all the blithe rhetoric of the GM companies, we simply do not know enough about the potential consequences of tampering with nature.

Rothamsted research centre is one of the country's largest agricultural research stations

The risks involved in genetically modified crops are compounded by the failure to deliver their promised benefits. In India, there is deep bitterness among cotton farmers who were encouraged to buy GM seeds on the basis that they would raise yields and reduce the need for costly pesticides.

Yet the yields have been severely disappointing, with the result that many Indian farmers have been driven into debt.

So widespread is the despair that, today, one Indian farmer commits suicide every half hour — and there is every possibility that the false promise of GM is a contributing factor.

At Rothamsted, the GM wheat grows daily in our sunny weather now that the weekend’s protesters have been rebuffed, and the risk of unintended cross pollination remains. But hard questions need answering where this misguided GM wheat trial is concerned.

Rothamsted Research is backed by more than £1million of taxpayers’ money, while the bill for the unprecedented security around the site defending this unpopular experiment — also funded from the public purse — must also be considerable.

The aim of the trial, says the company, is to find out if the GM crops can repel insects such as greenfly and blackfly and thereby reduce the future use of pesticides.

Members of the 'Take the Flour Back' protest close to the Rothamsted site

But UK farmers rarely grow the spring wheat used in the trial and already have other well-established ways of controlling aphids. Why should UK taxpayers fund a trial for a product that farmers don’t need and consumers won’t eat?

Increasingly, GM looks like a discredited technology, one that is being superceded by skilled conventional plant-breeding methods and more advanced but less arrogant scientific approaches.

One of these, called Marker Assiste d Selection, focuses on using the best genes in a crop for an intense programme of crossbreeding to enhance its future productivity.

This means working with the grain of nature rather than challenging or distorting it, as happens with GM.

The GM companies might condemn their opponents as vandals, yet they are the ones who show the real irresponsibility towards the natural world.

That, after all, is the lesson of the GM saga so far.

The experience of GM-contamination incidents, involving long-grain rice in the U.S. and flax in Canada, shows that GM companies refuse to accept liability for their products and are extremely reluctant to compensate farmers and companies in the food chain, without court action compelling them to pay up.

Police officers prevent anti-GM demonstrators from reaching land surrounding Rothamsted Research

So if contamination does occur in fields around the Harpenden wheat trial site, or even further afield, can we assume that Rothamsted Research will compensate those left to carry the can — farmers with contaminated fields, millers with GM residues in their flour or manufacturers who have to pay for expensive tests to establish that their products are GM-free?

Of course not. Any recompense seems unlikely, since Rothamsted Research has already shown a cavalier disregard for both environmental safety and democracy. And if there is no compensation, you can be sure no insurance company would be prepared to cover farmers near the site against GM contamination, when the risk of that contamination is so clearly present.

The real bullies here are not those who oppose this deeply unpopular, risky and unnecessary technology, but the pro-GM fanatics, who just can’t accept that they preside over a losing, discredited cause.

Joanna Blythman is the author of What To Eat, published by Fourth Estate.