Good Food Blog
The prince and the pea
Posted at 11:36AM, 15 August 2008 by Graham Holliday - blogger
The GM crops debate rears its head again. This time Prince Charles weighs in warning of environmental disaster should the GM scientists be let loose on England's green and pleasant land. There's a lot of debate about whether or not the Prince was right to speak out - as if he can't have a voice like the rest of us - but he is obviously very passionate about the subject.
"I think it's heading for real disaster," he said. "If they think this is the way to go... we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."
The crux of the Prince's argument is, as Graham Harvey says, the threat to food security,
"The widespread adoption of GM crops may well threaten the world's food supply. While GM technology may not be the direct cause of such horrors, it will perpetuate the system of industrial agriculture that makes them inevitable."
I understand these arguments and I can worry with the best of them over what it all means for the future of food supply, the environment and all the rest of it. However, my own concern is who the hell will want to eat this stuff?
Organic goods are already the preserve of the middle classes.
It sure won't be the rich. Organic goods are already the preserve of the middle classes and I very much doubt price slashing GM greens will find a way into the pantries of Mayfair and Kensington. It'll be the poor who eat them and the poor they get exported to.
The same goes for cloned meat. Given a choice, what would you rather slip into the supermarket trolley? A cloned T-bone and a bag of GM spuds or Mother Nature's own fair produce? The fact that consumers in the EU are really not that enamoured with eating GM crops should at least go some way to discouraging the farmers to start producing it. However it appears some farmers, at least in Wales, are more open-minded to the idea of farming GM than you might imagine.
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