Shock, horror: the GM industry uses advocates

Smoking kills, as cigarette packs helpfully inform smokers. For once, it’s not just scaremongering: the link between smoking and cancer, first established by Nazi scientists, has since been amply proved.

Yet no one, apart from professional pressure groups, seems to be worked up about the numerous lobbyists defending the tobacco industry in every country that has one.

Alcohol kills thousands every day, but we happily watch commercials advertising various brands that alone can enhance the joy of life. Yet apart from a few Muslims here or there, is anyone bothered? Not so you’d notice.

Cars, though not lethal in theory, will always kill people in practice. Yet the motor trade is amply supported in general-access media. Does this give you sleepless nights? Of course not.

However, the discovery that many scientists who support GM crops are actually paid by biotech companies has created a huge splash in today’s papers. Yet there is no dearth of real news, what with a major European war a distinct possibility courtesy of Col. Putin.

I’m not going to go into the ethics of it all. Suffice it to say that such advocacy is routinely used in support of all sorts of causes, including such sinister ones as global warming.

First the UN, whose role in life ranges from useless to subversive, declared that the earth is dangerously overheating, which is the first scientific discovery ever made by a political organisation. Then the UN laid grants and salaries on a platoon of scientists ready to cross their hearts and hope to die for the cause.

I suppose the way we respond to advocacy largely depends on how we feel about the cause advocated. So is GM technology as impressionistic as anthropogenic global warming? More important, is it as dangerous as smoking?

Not at all. A 2013 review of 1,783 studies dedicated to the effects of genetic modification showed not a single one that as much as hinted at any health risks.

Nor are such risks flagged by reputable organisations. Quite the contrary: the World Health Organisation, the American Medical Association, the US National Academy of Sciences, our own Royal Society all testify to the safety of GM crops.

Yet someone skimming newspaper headlines may get the impression that what’s being advocated here is OTC cyanide. But that impression is utterly false: no one has ever come up with even a hypothesis of any mechanism whereby GM crops may cause harm.

It’s not as if we haven’t had time to find out. In 2012, 16 years after GM was first used commercially, 17.4 million farmers in 29 countries were growing GM crops on an overall area 1.5 times greater than the USA.

And what do you know? While we’re still waiting for any reports of health risks, the evidence in favour of GM is irrefutable: the technology delivers greater, safer, cheaper, more profitable crops – and food that’s as safe as anything produced by any other method. There are also unique benefits.

For example, maize blight can be combated by spraying the plants with insecticide, which is expensive, time-consuming and possibly unsafe. Alternatively, adding to maize the insecticide gene derived from Bacillus thuringeinsis does the job in an instant and without any unpleasant chemicals.

Or look at rice. In 2005 a deficit of Vitamin A, mainly derived from beta-carotene, affected 190 million children, killing 250,000 of them.

The problem is that people in many poor countries rely on rice as their principal food and, wonderful as this cereal is, it’s short of beta-carotene. This potentially deadly problem can be solved simply by splicing into rice a gene of dandelion, a plant that produces beta-carotene.

This isn’t to say that GM technology doesn’t change the ecological balance at all. It does. The Monarch butterfly, for example, may die out as a result, joining about 98 percent of all the species that have ever inhabited the earth.

However, much as I enjoy butterflies, I have more sympathy for those people who die of hunger, malnutrition or vitamin deficiency. Why, I even sympathise with farmers struggling to make a living. Call me old-fashioned but, given the choice, I’d say to hell with the Monarch butterfly.

Let’s face it: every technological or scientific breakthrough changes the ecological balance almost by definition.

Agriculture, for example, is a major factor of atmospheric warming – turning the soil releases heat. Leaving arable lands in their primordial virginity would lower ambient temperature more effectively than any ban on deodorants. Of course, such a commitment to bucolically pristine nature would create a deadly famine.

Mining hydrocarbons unquestionably has adverse effects. Yet without it we’d all freeze in the dark, which effect would be considerably more adverse.

Anyone who has ever visited Pasadena, Texas, knows how awful the air smells there, encircled as the town is with chemical plants. The same can be said about any area housing such installations – yet without them we wouldn’t have life-saving drugs. When the drugs were nonexistent and the air pure, life expectancy was half of what it is now.

Not that I think for a second that any rational arguments or scientific evidence would deter either the rent-a-mob fanatics who scream ‘GM kills!’ or, more critically, those who rent the mob.

These are the same type of people, and often the same individuals, who emulate the Monarch butterfly by happily floating from one subversive cause to the next.

They are the same chaps who protest against nuclear energy, which is the only safe and viable alternative to hydrocarbons; march against ‘fracking’, which is the only way to eliminate dependency on Middle Eastern oil or Putin’s gas; clamour against river dredging that may endanger some avifauna while preventing murderous floods.

These chaps are driven not by any noble impulses but by Luddite hatred – of everything the West stands for, including scientific and technological progress. In the past they joined the communist party; now this is unfashionable, they pour their excess venom into voguish substitutes.

I’d suggest that, by poisoning the atmosphere with their effluvia, they present a far greater ecological risk than just about anything else. And certainly GM crops.