About Me
- Name: Martin Livermore
- Location: Cambridge, United Kingdom
I work as an independent consultant in the science communication and policy areas. My clients come mainly from the private sector, with a current emphasis on agriculture and the food supply chain. I'm keenly interested in promoting a rational, evidence-based approach to decision making. That doesn't mean that there's only one right answer to any question: people's interpretation of the same facts will vary. But I do believe that facts are facts and that we can all be objective, no matter what our beliefs or who we work for.
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A forum for people interested in promoting rational choices in agriculture. There are no simple answers, but people in all parts of the world should be free to choose the best combination of seed technology, crop protection and management for their needs.
Monday, March 28, 2005
What do the Farm Scale Evaluations really tell us?
Inevitably, the results have been spun by those with fixed views. The BBC's on-line story was headlined GM study shows potential "harm": when quotation marks start being used, this is a sure sign that the interpretation is nuanced. To quote Les Firbanks, who led the scientific team: "It's one of those issues where you can look down either end of the telescope".
The important thing to realise is that these trials were about crop management rather than genetic modification. The GM oilseed rape was tolerant to the broad-spectrum herbicide glufosinate, and this was used to control weeds. The conventionally-bred rape used alternative crop protection products.
The result was that the GM crop had fewer broad-leafed weeds, and hence fewer weed seeds available for farmland birds to eat. This is the "harm" which was demonstrated, which highlights the question: why do we grow crops? The answer is, of course, to feed ourselves, not to encourage weeds and feed wildlife. Farms provide unnatural environments which, nevertheless, provide ecological niches exploited by some species.
Does this mean we should put the needs of these species first? In practice, growing food efficiently (ie, with little competition from weeds) means that less land need be actively farmed and more managed as wildlife habitat. "Harm" is often in the eye of the beholder. Fortunately, we have moved away from the paradigm that farmers should be encouraged to produce the most they could on every square inch of arable land. Today's farmers are able to grow high yields of crops while managing field margins and other unproductive areas for the benefit of wildlife. But they also need to make a living, so will only continue to manage their land in this way while they are rewarded for it.
The lesson from the Farm Scale Evaluations is surely that farming is a complex system, within which a range of desirable outcomes need to be balanced, while focussing on the primary intention of producing safe, affordable food.
