Archives for July 2008

GM's knocking at the door gets ever more insistent. Depending on your point of view the global food crisis offers either another great opportunity to promote this exciting and much maligned technology, or is being cynically exploited to line the pockets of farmers and the agri-chemical industry.

Either way it looks like we're in for a long hot summer.

We covered the issue before the Rome Food Summit last month, pointing out just how widespread the global adoption of GM technology had been.

At the time I quoted figures published on the Natural Environment Research Council's website showing that over eight million farmers in 16 countries were growing GM crops....making biotechnology the most rapidly adopted technological innovation in the history of agriculture.

Boy, did that stir up a hornet's nest! First to respond was Monsanto's former press officer, who pointed out that the figures were woefully out of date: The real stats were closer to 12 million farmers in 23 countries.

Then came Friends of the Earth who demanded to know my sources. Interestingly when I told them, it all went a bit quiet....until I got a triumphant e-mail claiming the page on NERC's website had been taken down. I checked again last night, and it has.

So what about the second generation of GM crops - ones with attributes aimed at the consumer rather than farmers or the agri-chemical industry? Could a vegetable oil that contains Omega-3 fatty acids (the so called "good fats" that help to reduce cholesterol), or a purple tomato that's rich in anthocyanins and isoflavonoids switch you on to GM food?

Or perhaps you'll be like the producer in our morning meeting who said: "Ugh, I don't want to eat fishy bread" - thereby putting back the argument by a decade.

It's inevitable I suppose, but the few minutes we get to discuss the burning science stories of the day rarely seem like enough. And that's just the ones that make it to air...on a busy news programme like Today, where ideas have to compete for space, a science story needs sharp elbows.

And that's where this space comes in. I hope you'll use it to debate the stories we cover, and to raise others that may have slipped through the net.

You might want to talk about the use of animals in medical experiments - the latest Home Office figures (for 2007) will be published this week and I understand they'll show a 6% increase on 2006.

Or perhaps you want to talk about climate change, or a possible renaissance for GM crops?

I'll be writing here regularly and responding to the comments that come in, so let us hear what you've got to say.