GENETICALLY modified crops are back in the news again, but many farmers will reckon that it is for the wrong reason. Recently the British Potato Council, the organisation to which all commercial growers must subscribe through a levy, announced that it was not going to support research into the development of GM strains of potato resistant to blight. That has to be an own goal if ever there was one.
Blight is a foliar disease of potatoes which, if untreated, eventually rots the tubers. This was the disease that halved the population of Ireland in 1845-6, either through starvation or emigration. In the modern era, blight can be tackled by sprayin
g at roughly ten-day intervals using a compound containing tin and manganese. If the disease takes a real hold then the farmer is left with no alternative than to burn down the crop using sulphuric acid, which is certainly not the most pleasant of chemicals to work with.
Blight is found in most years throughout the UK, especially when humidity levels are high. Global warming is forecast to lead to more warm soggy summers, so the threat from blight will be exacerbated.
Surely then it is better to research the possibility of introducing a gene which will render the potato resistant to blight rather than spraying crops with some pretty noxious chemicals. Scientists are confident that it can be accomplished, so let's get on with it. It would certainly be a huge benefit to the Scottish seed potato industry. On the broader front, GM crops are increasingly being cultivated around the world. Vast areas of soya and maize are grown in South America, the US, India and China with no apparent harmful side effects. Europe is being left behind in developing the technology and the crops specifically suited to a largely temperate climate.
It is estimated that the world will need to double its food production over the next half century. GM crops will be needed, so let's end this talk of "Frankenstein Foods" so beloved of certain ill-informed sections of the popular media. For those who remain unconvinced, let them consider that, in the early 1960s, a new and highly productive variety of barley called Golden Promise was developed.
The breeding process involved using gamma radiation on an outclassed variety called Maythorpe. If that is not a form of GM, then what is? Incidentally, almost 50 years later, Golden Promise is still being grown in Scotland, albeit on a limited scale. A certain distillery in Easter Ross uses virtually no other variety of barley to produce a very fine malt whisky!
Science and agriculture have gone hand-in-hand for centuries, and always must if people are to be fed. It is almost 11 years since the onset of the BSE crisis. It cost the farming industry billions of pounds and, tragically, the lives almost 150 people who succumbed to variant CJD. So the efforts of scientists in both the US and Japan who have succeeded in breeding cattle lacking in the prion, which is thought to be cause of BSE, has to be welcomed. However, it will be several years before it can be said with absolute certainty that BSE has been eliminated.
Dolly the Sheep, had she still been alive, would have recently celebrated her ninth birthday. Dolly was the world's first clone, but that process has been repeated frequently since and now scientists in the US have managed to clone cattle. The flat-Earth brigade will wring their hands and say that is both dangerous and immoral. Nonsense, because, if it can be done commercially, the consumer will be the eventual beneficiary.
In the early 1950s, there were those who said that artificial insemination of cattle would never work. Time has proved them wrong, but the livestock industry has moved on from those days and now eggs are frequently flushed from superior cows and used in embryo transfer programmes. One cow can produce not just a single calf, but a veritable litter. History has proven time after time that scientific advances cannot be ignored.
Farming needs that progress and the world will need it too.
