Originally from: Farmtalking
                        
Welsh amazement at Scottish ambivalence
 
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Originally from – http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/12228.html – Your Letters March 18 2004
 
Down in Wales we are amazed at the ambivalence shown in Scotland on the matter of GM crop commercialisation, and the apparent willingness of MSPs to believe whatever Mrs Beckett and her tame civil servants choose to tell them. Here are two facts.

1. Neither DEFRA nor FSA, nor any other responsible authority, has ever commissioned any research designed to examine the effect of GM crops or GM foods on human health.

2. With respect to Chardon LL, which is a GM fodder maize intended for cattle feeding, none of the responsible bodies has ever asked for or commissioned any research designed to test the physiological effects on animals which are fed on this material for extended periods.

The government simply assumes that there is no GM problem, because that is what the GM industry tells them. No epidemiological studies have been conducted anywhere in the world to demonstrate that GM foods are safe to eat. Now the Westminster government is proposing that thousands of beef and dairy cattle should be fed on Chardon LL forage maize, without ever having researched the transfer of transgenic DNA from feed into animal and human cells, or the physiological changes that might result, or the "knock-on" effects on humans who eat meat and drink milk from those animals.

Have we learned nothing from the tragedy of BSE and CJD? We now have a glimpse of a GM world inhabited by mad scientists and mad politicians. We hope that Scotland will join Wales in seeking to resist the madness of Whitehall and in showing that at least some of us are still capable of rational thought processes.

Dr Brian John, GM-free Cymru, Trefelin, Cilgwyn, Newport, Pembrokeshire.
 
OF course there are many useful things you can do with GM crops, as with any powerful technology. But as the decisions in Scotland reach the crunch point, one needs to repeat two over-arching matters. First is that the use of GM farming methods necessarily leads to yet more intensive farming with less choice and diversity – one more major step in a road already taken over the years that has made farming unsustainable. Secondly, that due to the concentration of GM techniques in very few commercial hands, the economic options are similarly constrained.

The farm-scale trials did nothing to answer these matters: they started from a narrow base and investigated only what the effects of the herbicides would be. It's easy to predict that killing weeds when growth is in full swing is more damaging that doing the same at the start of the season, unless you used a poisonous powerful herbicide at the start, as for the maize trials. The question of farming methods in general did not come into it. So the final decision has to depend on how much choice, biologically and economically, one wants to leave open for the future of farming in Scotland.

Dr Ulrich Loening, Ormiston Hall, Ormiston, East Lothian.