GENETICALLY modified food was first sold in the UK in 1996. Californian-produced Flavr-Savr longer-life tomatoes were bought by British firm Zeneca, turned into a tomato paste and sold with little ado in supermarkets throughout the country.
The fi
rst whiff of hysteria didn't come until a few months later.
The tabloids alarmed us with headlines about "Frankenstein foods" and, as far as some people were concerned, a monster had been born.
Over the following years, a small number of GM crops were introduced into the UK and have caused no ill-effects to those who consume them. However, the EU still takes more than two years on average to license a perfectly safe GM product. In the US, the average approval time is 15 months. Now the EU is once again in the news for delaying its approval of GM foods – two maize crops and a potato with extra starch – by passing the decision on to the European Food Safety Authority, causing consternation amongst those waiting for their authorisation.
As consumers, we do not feel the impact of such time delays. But farmers, who are falling further behind in the world market as they are forced to feed their animals more expensive non-GM foods, are feeling this delay dearly. Scottish farmers are losing on average £20 for every pig slaughtered because of rising fuel costs and lack of access to cheap feed. There is a real danger that we will soon have no UK pig industry left. In the ten years from 1996 to 2006 the UK pig herd has fallen from 7.9 to 4.9 million.
On the other hand, farmers across the world are feeding their animals GM foods and, due to lower costs, selling to our supermarkets for a much lower price.
We import vast quantities of chicken, pork, lamb and beef reared on cheap GM feeds, which are outlawed in the EU. UK consumers happily munch away on this stuff while voicing their approval of "zero tolerance" policies in respect of GMs in Europe. It makes "zero" sense!
Purists say that we must not have beef, lamb, poultry or pig meat produced with GM feed, but the end result will be that we will have lost our industry to cheaper non-EU competitors, while we will continue to import meat from animals that have been fed on precisely the same GM feed that we have denied our producers access to. This is the politics of the madhouse!
If we really want to feed our citizens on Brazilian pork and Thai chicken, both of which have been fed on GM and are easier on the British purse, the present policies of zero tolerance on non-GM feed and the appallingly slow licensing of GM feed within the EU are exactly the way to go about it.
But if we want home-reared, healthy meat that comes from successful Scottish farmers, we need to relax laws on GM foods before it is too late.
•
Struan Stevenson is a Conservative MEP for Scotland and a member of the parliament's Committee on Agriculture.The full article contains 539 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
