GM Potatoes - Not in the Top 10

national | environment | opinion/analysis Saturday January 28, 2006 19:26 by Jack Ryan jackjack at z6 dot com

A response to 2 newspaper articles about our environment and GM

The Irish Independent published 2 stories this weekend. The first concerning the planned trials for GM Potatoes in Summerhill, Co. Meath. The second, a self-congratulatory piece about how well we're doing in international environmental tables.

Dear Sir

Browsing unison.ie today on January 28th 2006 I felt compelled to point out an anomaly between two articles relating to our environment. The first, a piece documenting Irelands’ advancement up the Green Ladder (Top 10… Ireland climbs up world greenest list) appears contradictory one day after ‘GM Potatoes to be grown here for first time’ (27 Jan). Historically where GM crops have been planted environmental standards fall due to increased use of pesticides, genetic mutations with surrounding organisms, cross-contamination of GM crops with conventional or organic crops and the unpredictable health consequences of GM entering the food chain.

BASF claims that its patented potato, being resistant to blight, will result in a decreased use of pesticides. What chemical company interested in making profits for its shareholders would attempt to introduce such a product? Another pesticides corporation branching into biotechnology, Monsanto, created Roundup Ready Soybeans and Canola GM plants which were engineered to be resistant to their own brand of pesticide, thus encouraging more use of the chemical, not less, with the added negative factor of the pesticide being sprayed directly on the crop. Monsanto’s GM cotton plant devastated India’s cotton economy after promising higher crop yields with fewer applications of chemicals when in fact the exact opposite scenario transpired, with an increase in pesticide use and lower yields, forcing many poor farmers into bankruptcy, often leaving suicide as the most honorable departure from the ensuing debt.

BASF, Monsanto and other Biotechnology corporations often tout GM food as answer to ending world hunger. Now, as in the time of the Irish Famine, mass starvation is caused not by a shortage of food but rather by an inefficient method of distribution that places profits above feeding the hungry. While hundreds of thousands were starving in Ireland in the 1840s and 50s countless tons of grain were exported to Britain and Europe. Similarly, many African nations on the brink of famine today provide European supermarkets with the cheap food we have come to expect. In times past our over-reliance on one particular breed, the Lumper Potato, should have taught us the lesson that increased genetic diversity through organic farming rather than the genetic monoculture offered by GM crops is our best defense against potential Famine.

The potential effects of genetically engineered DNA entering the food supply are highlighted in studies such as those overseen by Dr. Arpad Pusztai at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen. Pusztai, a formerly pro-GM scientist, was convinced of the dangers of consuming GM foods when lab rats in his clinical trials developed stomach lesions and cancers after eating Genetically Engineered potatoes. The forced inclusion of antibiotics in the genetic structure of these new ‘foods’, and our subsequent resistance to life saving drugs is but one more reason to refrain from allowing GM to enter our diet further.

No corporation should be allowed to patent a life form, least of all that great icon of Irish survival, the humble spud.