AgBioView & The Scientific Alliance
Original Publish Date: August 15, 2008
This week saw the UK Daily Telegraph publish an interview with Prince Charles which, even by his standards, was pretty extreme (Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest ever environmental disaster) To quote from the report:
He accused firms of conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong. Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?". Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food, he said, would result in "absolute disaster". "That would be the absolute destruction of everything- and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future," he said.
"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand. And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."
Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of "gigantic corporations" taking over the mass production of food. "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."
Well, that's a pretty comprehensive shot at a whole raft of things disliked by HRH. Some of his comments are fairly predictable, and hardly surprising. But risking the absolute destruction of everything? Linking genetic engineering and climate change? In the interview he also highlights the falling water table in the Punjab, and salinisation of farmland in Western Australia. None of these have anything to do with crop biotechnology.
The prince clearly has strong beliefs. Until he ascends the throne, he is perfectly entitled to have his say about these in public. But as Charles III, he will be constitutionally bound not to say things which are at odds with the policy of what will nominally be his government. In years to come, he may even have to compromise his principles in giving royal assent to legislation which eases the unnecessarily burdensome restrictions currently placed on GM crops. But, in the meantime, if he is to defend his view of the world, it behoves him to get his facts right. By not doing so, he seriously weakens an already flimsy case.
At one time his rant might still have chimed with the public mood, but he seems not to have realised that the tide of public opinion has turned. In the late 1990s, coverage of GM foods was nearly all of the "shock, horror" variety. More recently, particularly in light of two bad harvests and rising food prices, crop biotechnology has a higher profile once more, and this time round stories and comment are far more balanced. There are doubtless many reasons for this, but people who care to follow the news will be increasingly aware that GM crops are continuing to show double-digit growth around the world, with no human or animal safety issues and no environmental disaster of the sort Prince Charlesseems to regard as inevitable. If the dire predictions of the activists fail to be fulfilled, rational people will draw their own conclusions.
Farmers are keen to make their own choice of what to grow, scientists are prepared to stand up and defend biotechnology, and editors are willing to print the facts. Field trashing incidents are being reported as the acts of vandalism they are rather than as something akin to protecting whales. We can only conclude that putting a high-profile anti-GM spokesman up for a major interview is an act of desperation on behalf of the environmentalist and organic movements. Prince Charles was guaranteed to get plenty of coverage on this issue, so it was possible that he would have swayed public opinion against crop biotechnology.
Instead, he blew it. Passionately defending your beliefs is one thing, but lashing out indiscriminately was ill-advised and will have put the cause back rather than forward. Most open-minded people will have recognised a heartfelt expression of the deep anti-science, anti-business - and ultimately anti-human - pessimism which drives so many of the more extreme environmentalists. In follow-up interviews, the prince's allies must have given their support with a heavy heart, knowing that their most powerful weapon had spectacularly backfired. As Nicholas Whitchell, the BBC's royal correspondent put it rather diplomatically "Even for a prince who's a long-established champion of organic farming and critic of GM crops, these are comments which verge on the extreme".
At the root of all the supposed evil lie the "gigantic corporations" which are out to get us. It never ceases to surprise us that so many people are so viscerally opposed to the commercial world. They seem to believe that the profit motive itself inevitably taints companies' activities and leads them to foist unwanted products on an unsuspecting (and presumably stupid) public. In the absence of a monopoly - and the agricultural supply business is actually quite fragmented - companies make profits by providing what their customers want. Organisations which don't do this, or which do it less well or more expensively than their competitors, ultimately fail.
And as for driving farmers off the land into some urban hell, history shows that there is an inevitable rural depopulation and reduction in the number of people involved in agriculture as economies develop. Farming, which is the springboard for further development, becomes a smaller and smaller part of the total economy, though nevertheless still vital, of course. Romanticising rural poverty does not change the facts. It's simply not possible to plan and organise such a transition so that no-one gets hurt in the process, and attempts at social engineering often have far worse consequences.
To return to the anti-GM movement: this rant by a senior activist may not be quite their last gasp, but it is surely a sign that the tide has well and truly turned. Crop biotechnology is here to stay and it is now down to scientists, regulators and politicians to make sure that it is used wisely for the benefit of all.
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