Scotland's irrational GM crop ban

The Scottish government has decided to ban genetically modified crops to ensure Scotland maintains its ‘clean, green status’. This phrase, symbolic of what we are supposed to want to preserve, has not been defined, and we have no way of discerning exactly how it relates to the consequences of GM crops. Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Scottish National Party Member, announced the policy as Scotland's stance, ahead of the government's request to be exempted from EU-authorised GM crops. None of the reasons given for the prohibition follow from the evidence we have about GM crops nor from countries’ experiences with them. One anti-GM-crop writer, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia, remarkably complained we are falling foul of an ‘expertocracy’ because of our ‘unswerving devotion to scientists’. He has also given a number of reasons why we should support the prohibition of GM crops in Scotland. Among those were that GM crops are a long-term economic disaster for farmers; do not increase yield potential; increase pesticide use; and have not been shown to be safe to eat. These claims are simply wrong.

If we take a look at a meta-analysis conducted last year of the impacts of genetically modified organisms we see that the agronomic and economic benefits of GM crops are large and significant. The positive feedback we hear from people in developing countries is reflected in the studies as we find that yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries. It concludes that, on average, GM technology has increased crop yields by 21%, reduced pesticide quantity by 37% and pesticide cost by 39%, and meant average profit gains of 69% for GM-adopting farmers.

The World Health Organisation has verified that all GM foods available in the international market have passed safety assessments and are not likely to present risks for human health. People have been consuming them for decades in the United States and in 2014 GM crops made up 94% of soybean acreage, 93% of all corn planted, and 96% of all cotton. For as long as populations have consumed them no resulting effects on human health have been shown in the countries where they have been approved.

While farmers in the rest of the UK are looking to take advantage of GM technology, farmers in Scotland are concerned by the Scottish Parliament's backwards policy; spokespeople for the agricultural industry say it will impede their efficiency and competitiveness. They are right: Scottish farmers will not be capable of competing in the same market as their neighbours if shut off from technological advances just as other countries are adopting GM crops.

To give any credence to Mike Small and similar superstitious claims would be to completely go against accepted evidence and rationality. So if Scottish politicians follow through with the GMO prohibition without any credible counteracting evidence that it would be harmful for Scotland, it will not only hold the country back, but the boundaries of scientific research will be redefined and Scotland might lose its leading research experts to more supportive political environments.

Farmers are milking it through state subsidies

Milk is now cheaper than bottled water in some UK supermarkets. So of course there is much wailing that our dairy industry is in terminal trouble and needs subsidy and protection from foreign imports. Wrong. One reason why milk is so cheap right now is that supermarkets are using it as a loss leader. They hope that while customers are buying cheap milk, they might be tempted by less cheap other stuff. They are not actually paying farmers any less.

The dairy industry is indeed in a sorry state, but not because of the lack of state support. Rather, the problem is too much of it. When you protect industries from foreign competition through tariffs (as EU countries like the UK do), and then go on to subsidise them, you kill off competition, both international and domestic. Subsidies and protections allow production to carry on in old, outdated, inefficient, expensive ways. The result is higher prices, lower quality and less choice for customers.

Cold, rainy Britain is not a good place to raise cattle. It's fine in the summer, but in the winter the cattle have to be brought into shelters and given heat, silage and hay, all of which adds to the cost. So other, warmer countries, inevitably have the competitive edge on us.

Dairy producers can compensate for this a bit by creating much larger farms, which can be sited in the sunnier parts of the country, and where large-scale winter housing can be run much more efficiently than countless small-farm cattle sheds. In large, modern facilities, new technology can be employed, such as dry bedding, using other farm by-products for feed, recycling heat, and recapturing methane. And while we are on the subject of greenhouse gases, how much more energy-efficient is it to collect milk from one 8,000-cow farm than from 100 with 80 cows?

But planning policy, that great UK obstacle to progress, is making it hard to build such facilities – a plan for one in Lincolnshire has recently been scrapped. And the existence of subsidies makes it less urgent for inefficient dairy farmers to leave the business, and for more efficient ones to replace them.

Some people argue that we should subsidise UK agriculture to cut down on 'food miles'. Tosh. 80% of food-related emissions are from production, only 4% from transport. So it is 20 times more important to make efficiencies in production. That means super-farms here, or importing products from countries where the climate is more suitable. We do that with wine, why not with other agricultural products? And in any case, domestic production is an environmental nightmare, what with the fertilisers, pesticides and heating that have to be used. DEFRA figured that the carbon footprint of Spanish-grown tomatoes is probably smaller than that of UK tomatoes grown under glass. Remember too that food is transported, efficiently, in bulk. Most 'food miles' are getting small quantities of the stuff from the supermarket to your fridge, which is not going to change even if it is grown locally.

If we scrapped the subsidies and protections, the market could do its stuff, weeding out inefficient production and diverting investment into something better. That would be good for the industry, good for customers in terms of lower prices, good for taxpayers in terms of lower taxes, and good for the planet.

So how does this work then?

It would appear that someone, somewhere, is confused. It could be us that is confused but we're a bit, umm, confused about that. For the claim is that if retailers are providing a subsidy to the consumption of milk then this could devastate the milk producing industry. Which is confusing:

The price of milk has fallen to just 22p a pint thanks to a fierce war between supermarkets. Farmers have warned the UK dairy industry faces extinction if retailers continue to drive down the price – now at its lowest level in seven years. Asda, Aldi, Lidl and Iceland are selling four pints of milk for just 89p, while Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose are not far behind at £1. Pint for pint, milk is now cheaper than mineral water in most supermarkets. Retailers insist they are funding the cost of the price reduction from their own profits, rather than paying farmers less. Many supermarkets have guaranteed the price farms receive will stay above the cost of production. But farmers say the price war is also devaluing milk as a product at a time when they are under unprecedented pressure.

It doesn't get any less confusing on consideration, does it? The retail price of milk is lower, given the supermarket subsidy to it, leading to higher consumption, while the producer price is "guaranteed" to be above production costs. And this is going to devastate the industry? We don't think it is us getting confused here. Of course, the real background to this is that, as has been happening for the past couple of centuries as farming techniques improve, milk has been getting cheaper and cheaper to produce. And as has been happening over that time the higher cost producers have been pushed out of the market by the lower cost ones. This is, after all, the universe's way of telling you to go do something else, when the price of what you produce is lower than the cost of producing it. That's what is devastating farming, we're in general becoming more efficient at it. And the supermarkets are, through their subsidy, restricting this process which is the very opposite of devastation, isn't it?

Modi’s development key: agricultural land rights liberalisation

Narendra Modi has stated that growth, controlling food-price inflation, improving farmers’ incomes and developing infrastructure are top priorities. Agricultural Land currently makes up ~60% of India’s total land area. Liberalising agricultural land usage laws has the immense potential to accomplish these, amongst other things: 1. Liberalising agricultural land usage rights increases both use and trade value for investors, developers etc. – farmers’ and landowners’ wealth will increase.

2. Enables farmers and landowners to develop their land and diversify their income and, since they know what parts of the land are relatively unproductive or infertile, they will be able to diversify their income (tourism, hospitality, factories etc.). At the moment, a lot of land remains uncultivated because agriculture is not financially feasible but undeveloped because of land usage policy.

3. Developing rural and semi-rural transport infrastructure becomes legally possible and, therefore, private entities will be more likely to invest in its development.

4. Further connecting the Indian hinterland via the aforementioned liberalisation of the private development of rural transport infrastructure.

5. Combating food-price inflation. Food-price inflation in India is not due to a shortage of food per se but, rather, the fact that the transport, storage and maintenance infrastructure is so poor or even non-existent in places. This means that close to 1/3 of the food rots or spoils before it even reaches the market. If it becomes legally feasible for interested parties to build and improve roads, storage facilities and so on, then this will efficiently preserve stock and connect the source of produce to the markets; food-price inflation will naturally decline via this supply-side reform.

6. Reducing farmers’ suicides and debt. Since farmers will have alternative sources of income, increased wealth and also increased income from actually being able to transport their food to market, more farmers will be able to service their debt and are less likely to commit suicide.

7. Economic counter-terrorism against Maoists. Maoists are scattered across rural and semi-rural parts of India and are particularly concentrated in areas that are rich in natural resources and where there is high unemployment. The aforementioned points in 3 and 4 will make it easier to combat them and alleviate the economic pressures in that lead to the violent backlashes.

8. Diversified employment opportunities. Opportunities for diversifying land use and earning through alternative sources of income means there is a chance to have jobs that require different skills and education in rural areas.

9. Easing pressure on urban India to accommodate migrant workers. From 7, there will be less incentive for younger migrants of rural origin to travel to cities for jobs (or at least the rate at which migration increases may not increase as much).

10. Increased private incentive to educate. 7 implies that there will be a greater need for certain skills and education to prepare workers for different types of employment.

But *which* right on and trendy thing should I be doing?

One of those lovely little conundrums is raising its head over in the right on and trendy food movement at present. The problem being, well, which part of being right on and trendy should people sign up to? This has actually got to the point that there's a New York Times opinion piece imploring people to, umm, well, ditch one principle in favour of another:

And yet, if you look closer, there’s a host of reasons sustainable food has taken root here in central Montana. Many farmers are the third or fourth generation on their land, and they’d like to leave it in good shape for their kids. Having grappled with the industrial agriculture model for decades, they understand its problems better than most of us. Indeed, their communities have been fighting corporate power since their grandparents formed cooperative wheat pools back in the 1920s.

For the food movement to have a serious impact on the issues that matter — climate change, the average American diet, rural development — these heartland communities need to be involved. The good news is, in several pockets of farm country, they already are.

"Sustainable" food here means organic. Oh, and small producer: you know, one who cannot get economies of scale because they're running too few acres. but, you know, if people want to produce this way, live on the pittance they can earn in this manner, good luck to them and all who sail with them. and if people want to buy their produce similarly good luck. However, there's something of a problem:

But just as these rural efforts started gaining steam, an unfortunate thing happened to the urban food movement: It went local. Hyperlocal. Ironically, conscientious consumers who ought to be the staunchest allies of these farmers are taking pledges not to buy from them, and to eat only food produced within 100 miles of home.

Montana has perhaps three people in addition to all those cows. And it's a lot more than 100 miles away from any of the hipsters who are interested in small scale organic farming. And those hipsters are all eating local. Which is, don't you think, just so lovely a problem?

Those urban aesthestes are simply missing the point of farming altogether. Which is that it's a land hungry occupation (organic even more so than conventional) so it makes great sense to do that work where there's no people. Farming right by the big cities of the coasts, where land is hugely expensive (because there's lots of people in those big cities) is simply not a sensible manner of using the resources available.

Just so much fun to see the fashionable being hoist on their own petard really.

There's a reason why we have farming you know

There are those out there who think that we should return rather to our hunter gatherer roots. Simply pick from nature's bounty rather than intensively farm the planet. There's really only one problem with this delightful idea: we'd all starve within months having stripped the Earth of everything edible:

Epping Forest, an ancient woodland straddling the border of greater London and Essex, is one of the best fungi sites in the country, with over 1,600 different species. But, like other fungi-rich sites such as the New Forest, it is being stripped out by illegal picking by gangs believed to sell the wild mushrooms to restaurants and markets.

“They leave a trail of destruction,” says Dagley, who has been head of conservation for 20 years at the 6,000 acres wood. “It has stepped up over the last five years. Sometimes people run away when they are challenged, but we have been threatened too. People pick using knives so they feel armed.”

He says pickers often take everything away and sort the edible from the poisonous later: “You can find people with 40kg of fungi, which is huge” but much is just thrown away.

Dagley says it is distressing to see the destruction, and it prevents the forest’s 4.5 million annual visitors enjoying the spectacular variety of fungi. The weird and wonderful shapes and colours of the fungi he points out revives his enthusiasm. “You have gills, frills and pores and the puffballs, they are like things from outer space,” he says.

The growing popularity of foraging for wild food may be part of the problem, says Sue Ireland, director of green spaces for the City of London Corporation, which manages Epping forest: “In rural areas, foraging is fine if you are picking for your own personal use.”

Quite: there's no problem at all with a couple of people going off for some ceps: nor with a bit of picking the hedgerow for some blackberries of the sloes for the Christmas Gin. But as soon as many people do it it becomes unsupportable. This is why we have mushroom farms of course. And farms for cows, because hunting the aurochs to extinction has already been done. And farms for what and so on. The truth is that, other than as a very marginal leisure activity, we just cannot live off nature's bounty. There's just too many of us to be able to do so.