The Labour Party Oversteps the Mark on GM

This week saw Prince Charles doing his job by speaking up about the dangers of GM crop production and what do we get?

The Labour Government, full of little boys and girls who get fed fat in the House of Commons on food grown by machines and a few lonely farmers, has overstepped the mark by suffocating the debate with a feeble call for science.

Scientists whose jobs depend on Genetic Modification obviously only have one motive: the need to keep their jobs, get rich, and puff themselves up by making themselves famous.

The Labour Government, whose jobs depend on espousing humanitarianism, obviously only has one motive: appear to be directly helping human beings all over the world to live.

Both Scientists and the Labour Government will delude themselves and us with all sorts of lies to achieve these motives. Who is supposed to keep a check on them? Friends of the Earth? Greenpeace? The Press?

Obviously Prince Charles recognized that his help was needed. He has a background of wealth and privilege, and now considerable maturity, that has given him an overview of the world, and its planetary ecosystem, far above the usual self-serving ambitions of a few specialists (scientists and politicians) in the Global Human Economic Machine.

A bunch of democratically elected children prancing around the House of Commons, none of whom will every bother to look for an earthworm in an industrially farmed field of Genetically modified crops, are putting not only the planet, but democracy itself, in danger. These twits think that because they have a moral case, that they have the overview of the moral case. They will not bother to count the pitfalls of GM:

- Breeds and varieties of crops that have been developed over centuries and continue to be developed to suit local conditions, will be driven into extinction in favour of the adoption of the quick fix of a globally marketed GM variety.

- Local economies and hence cultures destroyed as they are moved from local market farming to international industrialized agriculture.

- And the worst: Vulnerability to catastrophic crop failure by using monoculture varieties of GM, which in the face of a changing climate, will be challenged by new varieties of fungi, viruses and pests. New diseases arise more quickly and in a globalized world, new diseases spread like wildfire, so there is no way that new GM varieties could be developed in sufficient time to avert unforeseen disease catastrophes.

Consider the scenario of when half the world's wheat production is grown from the same single variety of GM wheat. Suddenly a new strain of wheat rust arises and spreads within a year to half the crops in the world. There you lose instantly 25% of the crop.

On top of all this, in a changing climate, there is no ability of Genetic Modification to adapt a crop to a climate that varies wildly from one year to the next.

Even if GM food production turns out to be successful for the first ten years, there lies the danger that the global food economy will become complacent and the global human population will be allowed to multiply to yet higher levels, at which even GM food production no longer can provide any solutions.

There is only one sustainable solution to world hunger: putting a limit on the number of human beings on Earth.

China has a one-child policy, and the rest of the world should have the courage to implement its example all over the world. The one-child policy is the most moral and sustainable of humanitarian solutions.