Rational Agriculture

I reproduce the following short article from the Financial Times in its entirety. It speaks for itself. This seems to be a victory of sorts for the anti-GM brigade but, in reality, a meaningless one. The problem is, of course, that it reinforces misleading information and unwarranted concerns.


Got milked?

Clay Harris

January 7 2006

There's been a lot of debate recently over how much choice consumers want but it's rare to find a retailer who admits offering a completely meaningless one.

J Sainsbury is "trialling" a new sort of milk: from cows raised on a diet that contains no genetically modified feed. It admits that scientific studies carried out by several "well-respected organisations" have found there is no GM DNA or protein in milk from cows fed on a GM diet. But it brags that it is the only big retailer to offer this choice.

No doubt sales will be helped by a garish flash alerting shoppers to the fact that its new product is from GM-free cows; just the sort of labelling to suggest there is something wrong with milk from GM-fed cows.

Raising doubt where there was previously none is the sort of marketing strategy that incenses government ministers trying to promote Britain as a place where science is taken seriously.

That must surely be the view of the science minister, Lord Sainsbury, who is still the supermarket chain's largest shareholder, although his shares are held in a blind trust.

We hear so much about the supposed problems associated with modern farming that the positive news is often given a low profile. It's good, then, to see a report in the Farmers' Weekly telling us that Pesticide residues in water show significant decline. According to this, there was a 19% reduction in the number of surface water samples failing to meet the drinking water quality standard in 2004, following an 18% decrease the year before. The vast majority of groundwater samples in the UK also fall below the limit.

And the limit in question? That's 0.1 part per billion: 1 part in 10,000,000,000. Or, to put it another way, the equivalent of 1 second in 317 years! Since residue limits are set in a highly precautionary way, we are talking about very remote theoretical risks from water, even before suppliers have spent large sums of money removing the tiny residues of pesticides.

This also shows that farmers are adopting a sensible and responsible approach to pesticide use. The message: don't worry unnecessarily about things which really are no problem at all.