British Says Farms Should Produce More Weeds, Less Food
October 29, 2003
The British government has just completed extensive three-year field trials of genetically modified rapeseed, sugar beets, and corn. The journal Science reported that “Cultivation of [genetically modified] beets and rapeseed clearly had deleterious effects on wildlife and native plants” in the trials. The Guardian of London headlined: “Two GM Crops Face Ban for Damaging Wildlife.” Commentator John Vidal said the trials provide “a legal basis for banning the two crops under European Union rules.”
They’re talking about weeds. The field trials found somewhat more weeds and weed-dependent insects in the conventional rapeseed and sugar beet fields than in the biotech fields-where weed control was more effective.
Clare Oxborrow from Friends of the Earth said, “Weeds are a crucial part of maintaining farm land diversity.”
This is absurd. Weeds compete with crops plants for water, soil nutrients and sunlight. The more weeds in the field, the lower will be the food production per acre. The more weeds in the fields, the more acreage we’d be forced to take away from forests and wild meadows to grow our food.
Leslie Elmslie, in a letter to the Financial Times, wrote that the British government had apparently spent $8.6 million Euros “on conceptually silly but well designed and meticulously implemented trials that demonstrate what any Neolithic farmer scratching the soil with a stick could have told it: that the more weeds there are in a crop, the more animals there will be that feed on those weeds. . . . The Neolithic farmer might have explained that the definition of a weed is a plant out of place and that his aim was to grow crops, not weeds.”
The UN Environmental Program’s recently published Atlas of Biodiversity says wildlife species extinctions in the last third of the 20th century were only half as numerous as extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. Because high-yield farming systems tripled the yields on the world’s best farmland, we haven’t had to clear significantly more cropland in the last 50 years. Even though the human population grew from 2.5 billion to 6 billion and hasn’t quite stopped growing yet.
Any farm is an insult to Nature. Any farm suppresses wildlife within its confines. Organic farmers kill weeds with such “bare-earth” tools as plows and hoes and hand-weeding. Should plows and hoes be banned? Conventional farmers use herbicide sprays to kill the weeds because it’s hard to find many workers who’ll spend their days whacking weeds with short-handled hoes. Should herbicide sprays be banned?
Humans have already cleared for farming half the global land area not covered by deserts and glaciers. Without biotech, we could still lose the wildlands that still occupy nearly half the planet’s land area as world food demand doubles in the next 40 years. The only visible strategy for wildlife conservation in the 21st century is to grow the food we need on the smallest possible amount of land.
In addition to suppressing pests, biotech crops have encouraged a massive increase in no-till farming, which cuts soil erosion by more than 90 percent, precisely because herbicide-tolerant crops help farmers suppress weed competition more effectively.
If the British government is now ushering in a mandate for weedier fields, it is prima facie evidence that its costly farm subsidies have made Europe a serious danger to the world’s wildlife.
The British conservation movement has apparently been driven slightly insane by the decline in its birds and small wild creatures in the 30 years of Britain’s EU membership. Thousands of miles of thick, ancient hand-laid hedgerows that once sheltered songbirds, butterflies and other small creatures have been torn out because high EU farm price supports pushed UK farmers out of grazing (and hedgerows) into field crops. But mandating more weeds in the fields won’t bring back the hedgerows, which were the critical habitat.
The New York Times told its readers on Sept. 21, “Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries . . . if properly developed, disseminated and used, genetically modified crops may be the best hope the planet has got.’” Britain, please take note.
Posted in Commentary |