In his recent piece for The Times newspaper in the UK, Viscount Matt Ridley argues that a new report from the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

Ridley – publicly disgraced for his role as chairman of the failed Northern Rock bank and his support for climate change denialism – adheres to the belief that GM technology reduces insecticide use and speculates that future GM crops will be even safer, better for the environment and better for human health.

He says that it is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that backers claim could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year – but which is emerging as a costly failure that delivers low yields and no proven nutritional benefits.

According to Ridley, opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, which he argues restricts the spread of GM technology. In discussing the labelling of GM food in the US, Ridley argues this leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong.

He argues that the NAS report makes the point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop, and it makes no sense to single it out for special labelling because regulation should be based on traits, not techniques.

Ridley implies, therefore, that GM is no different from food that is boiled or roasted as its actual content remains unaffected. He finishes by saying the NAS report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend.”

With a good dose of industry-inspired PR flurry, he concludes that because gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that critics highlight, if Europe does not embrace biotech plants now, its agriculture will wilt.

Ridley basing his piece on a flawed NAS report

Unfortunately, for readers of The Times, Ridley’s piece is the usual concoction of misrepresentations, falsehoods and blunders we have come to expect of pro-GMO puff pieces that rely on flawed sources and reports. His major blunder is to have accepted at face value the NAS report.

The NAS is compromised by the serious conflicts of interest within the NAS and its research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). Even studies relied upon by the NAS to show GMO safety are authored by people with conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the new report by Food & Water Watch ‘Under the Influence: The National Research Council and GMOs‘ highlights the millions of dollars in donations received by the NAS and NRC from biotech companies.

On its website, GMWatch discusses the Food & Water Watch report, which documents the one-sided panels of scientists the NRC enlists to carry out its GMO studies and describes the revolving door of its staff directors who shuffle in and out of industry groups. The report also shows how it routinely arrives at watered-down scientific conclusions based on industry science.

Some 11 out of the 19 members of the NRC committee listed in the NAS report have ties to the GMO industry or to pro-GMO advocacy. The two reviews of animal data relied on by the NAS to claim GMO safety are authored by people who also have conflicts of interest (an analysis of these reviews and why they are misleading is here).

Readers are advised to read the Food & Water Watch Report to see for themselves the massive conflicts of interests that Ridley either remains ignorant of or wishes to gloss over in order to push a pro-GMO agenda.

‘False and misleading statements’

GMWatch notes that the NAS committee member chosen to speak about the food safety aspect of the report to the online magazine The Conversation was Michael A. Gallo, emeritus professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Rutgers University. Gallo is a regular pro-corporate commentator who in 2004 defended farmed salmon in the wake of research showing it contained high levels of toxic PCB chemicals.

In his piece for The Conversation, Gallo makes false and misleading statements, which are apparently designed to reassure the public about the safety of GM foods. For example, he says that any changes seen in GMO feeding experiments were “within normal ranges”.

GMWatch states that this is an unscientific statement of a type often used to dismiss significant differences found in GM-fed animals compared with the non-GM-fed controls and goes on to highlight how pro-GM scientists make “a nonsense of the scientific method” and to come up with conclusions designed to mislead.

GMWatch concludes: “It is well established that conflicts of interest affect scientific outcomes and conclusions in every field that has been investigated, from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to GM crops and foods. The public deserves better than the NAS’s biased attempt to convince the public that GMOs are safe.”

It is not the first time advocates for GM like Matt Ridley have used flawed reports to push for this technology and to attempt to pass off tainted sources as ‘independent’ and thus beyond reproach (see this and this). Readers may also wish to read these commentaries on the NAS report.

Rosemary Mason’s 44-page open letter response to Ridley

Matt Ridley’s piece in The Times may be regarded as part of the government’s on-going push to get GMOs into Britain and a timely intervention as the debate about glyphosate in the EU reaches a head. The final vote on renewing the licence for glyphosate use in the EU will take place on 6th June 2016. The British Government is supporting the European Food and Safety Authority’s assertion that it doesn’t cause cancer, despite the WHO saying it is “probably carcinogenic.”

In her 44-page open letter (1/6/2016) to Ridley and the editor-in-chief of The Times, Rosemary Mason responds to Ridley’s piece by saying, “I think I smell an industry rat.”

While Ridley takes about the safety of GM crops and reduced chemical use, Mason rubbishes such claims by referring to Charles Benbrook’s paper on the massive increases in glyphosate use in trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally (2016) which states that:

“Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called ‘Roundup® Ready’.”

If recent evidence demonstrates anything, it is that GM crops and glyphosate use are joined at the hip where industry profits are concerned. GMOs drive the sales of glyphosate.

As if to underline this, referring to Monsanto, Jack Kasky on Bloomberg reports: “Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16 percent, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24 percent.”

In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co states that “Glyphosate really crushed it”, implying it was a major boost to Monsanto’s profits.

The bottom line is sales and profit maximisation – and the unflinching and defence of glyphosate despite the cover up of its harm and the effects on communities in Latin America, where cancers, birth defects, infertility and DNA changes since being exposed to GM Roundup Ready Crops are reported.

An unstoppable global momentum against GMOs and glyphosate

Mason draws Ridley’s attention to a recent piece in the New Eastern Outlook in which William Engdahl discusses the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU:

“What is amazing about the entire ongoing battle over glyphosate re-approval is that opposition and awareness that the EU Commission is willing by any means possible to bow to the chemical industry glyphosate weed-killer cartel and approve a probable carcinogen, is growing by leaps and bounds, and internationally.

“That awareness is in turn bringing light to the very dark corners of the world of GMO itself, something that Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Monsanto, Syngenta and friends are none too able to withstand. To date the EU Commission has received a staggering 1.5 million citizen petitions demanding they not re-approve glyphosate.

“The opposition to EU Commission approval of glyphosate has taken on a self-expanding character and that has the agribusiness weed-killer cartel alarmed. The process is exposing to the general public, for the first time in such a clear manner, the degree of corruption in not only Brussels but also in the so-called scientific bodies that advise it on what is safe and what not.”

Signed by individuals and groups representing 60 million US citizens, Mason also brings the Letter from America to the attention of Ridley, which warned David Cameron (and the rest of the EU) not to authorise GM crops. It confirmed the devastating effects on human health and the environment.

Feeding the world? Who cares? This is about corporate profit

GM is not about public good or feeding the hungry as lobbyists claimed, but about corporate control of the food system. It stated: “Studies of animals fed GM foods and/or glyphosate, however, show worrying trends including damage to vital organs like the liver and kidneys, damage to gut tissues and gut flora, immune system disruption, reproductive abnormalities, and even tumors …

“These scientific studies point to potentially serious human health problems that could not have been anticipated when our country first embraced GMOs, and yet they continue to be ignored by those who should be protecting us. Instead our regulators rely on outdated studies and other information funded and supplied by biotech companies that, not surprisingly, dismiss all health concerns.

“Through our experience we have come to understand that the genetic engineering of food has never really been about public good, or feeding the hungry, or supporting our farmers. Nor is it about consumer choice. Instead it is about private, corporate control of the food system Americans are reaping the detrimental impacts of this risky and unproven agricultural technology.

“EU countries should take note: there are no benefits from GM crops great enough to offset these impacts. Officials who continue to ignore this fact are guilty of a gross dereliction of duty.”

Most of the countries in the EU apart from Britain took that advice and opted out of GM (including Scotland, Wales and Ireland).

Mason argues that glyphosate is a biocide: it kills life. She knows this from her direct experience on her nature reserve in the UK and cites various sources of evidence to highlight a correlation of the huge loss of biodiversity with GMOs and glyphosate use in the US, the massive adverse impacts on human health and links between herbicide use (including glyphosate) and antibiotic resistance.

In citing a wide array of sources throughout her letter, Mason also highlights the ongoing collusion between academia and biotech companies, not least Monsanto, resulting in fraudulent practices intended to deceive the public and fool it into accepting harmful but highly profitable products.

Readers are urged to read Mason’s open letter to Ridley in full. In it, she outlines how GMOs, glyphosate and the increasingly globalised system of chemical-intensive food and agriculture have led not only to academic fraud but also to an increase in congenital anomalies in the UK, decreased mental acuity and adverse impacts on fetal and child development and a wide range of diseases and illnesses.

And she also takes apart Ridley’s claim about GM crops and new techniques being no different from conventionally bred crops and safer (as have others), highlights various conflicts of interest within prominent bodies which shape policy and public opinion and addresses the issue of Golden Rice that Ridley also misrepresents in his piece (see this as well).

Ideology and self-interest driving the pro-GMO lobby

Whereas Ridley offers a short but prominent newspaper article based on a flawed report, industry-inspired clichés and falsehoods, Mason is compelled to respond with a 44-page, comprehensive and fully-referenced text that pulls together relevant scientific research on GMOs and glyphosate. At the same time, she highlights the corruption and deceptions that have made it possible for powerful commercial interests to destroy the environment and human health for profit.

A privileged viscount like Ridley, affluent biotech company CEOs, politicians and well-paid career scientists spout public relations rhetoric and deride critics for denying GM to the hungry poor. However, the pro-GMO lobby relies on fraud, regulatory delinquency, opaque practices, smear campaigns, dirty tricks, the debasement of science and PR messages such as a trillion meals containing GMOs have been eaten and no one has died or become ill as a result and that ‘the debate is over‘.

Aside from well-funded slick PR, it also relies on secretive studies and makes baseless claims wrapped up as scientific facts. And yet it is their critics who are dismissed for supposedly being emotive, unscientific, ideologues driven by self-interest.

In making such accusations, pro-GMO figures attempt to deflect attention from their own self-interested motives, their hypocrisy concerning their policies towards the poor or their massive political influence.

These people tend to be part of an enclosed world that promotes allegiance to a corporate-dominated paradigm that is intolerant of alternative views. And the result is a certain self-righteousness that leads them to impose their will and neoliberal ideology on the rest of humanity in collusion with the machinery and active backing of national states, while they set out to denigrate models of agriculture that could sustainably feed much of the world and ignore those factors (largely fuelled by the neoliberal system they support) that currently create poverty, hunger and food insecurity.

When saying that Europe’s agriculture will wilt if it rejects GM, Ridley mirrors the claim made by Owen Paterson that Europe will become a museum of world farming if it does not embrace GM crops (and, by implication, its chemical inputs). The evidence indicates that this is nothing more than fear-mongering. Ridley’s tone reflects Paterson’s baseless attacks on critics of GM.

Finally, for those who may not be aware, Owen Paterson is a British MP and former the former environment minister. Due to his ongoing promotion of GM, fellow Conservative Party MP Zac Goldsmith described him as a puppet of the biotech industry. He is also Matt Ridley’s brother-in-law.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

Support Colin’s work here.

EDF and China General Nuclear Corporation (CGN), the two companies set to build the UK’s Hinkley C nuclear power station, have just ‘sealed’ their twin reactors at Taishan, China – disregarding widespread fears that they are unsafe and may crack in operation.

The discovery has emerged in drone footage obtained by the Hong Kong-based China Free Press (see video, below), which found that the concrete shells surrounding the reactors have now been closed ruling out any future replacement of the vessels and heads. The news is causing alarm in Hong Kong which lies just 130km east of the Taishan plant.

The Taishan nuclear site near Chanxi is isolated and entry is strictly forbiden to all non-accredited persons. Little information on construction progress or safety is released by CGN and EDF, the two companies building the power station, or by Chinese authorities.

The two 1.75 GW reactors at Taishan are of the same ‘EPR’ design to be used at Hinkley C, and already installed at Flamanville in France, where both reactor vessel and head were found to suffer from severe metallurgical defects that could cause the reactor’s failure.

Areas of very high carbon in the Flamanville reactor vessel and lid, both forged at Areva’s Le Creuset works, have caused that reactor’s construction to be placed on what appears to be indefinite hold. France’s nuclear safety inspectorate, ASN, is demanding ever more tests to be carried out on these two key components.

The danger posed by the high-carbon anomalies is that the reactor vessel and head will become brittle, crack under pressure, and release large amounts of radiation into the environment.

The Flamanville project is already running at €10.5 billion, over three times its original €3.3 billion cost. Originally scheduled to be generating power in 2012, it is now scheduled to be operational only in 2020. The faulty components having already been installed, it is very possible that they would have to be removed and replaced adding further huge costs. So large, in fact, that the project would probably be abandoned altogether.

Do Taishan reactor vessels share the same problem?

It is widely believed that the twin EPR reactor vessels and heads at Taishan suffer from precisely the same defects as those in France. Following the discovery of the problems at Flamanville in April construction at Taishan was halted for an extended period – from mid-2015 until at least October.

The two reactors were expected to be operational in December 2013 and October 2014, according to a report in Power Technology, which stated: “The Chinese nuclear project is benefiting from the experience gained from the Finnish and French NPPs, with significant savings in cost and construction time.” Reports from the site indicate that the current completion target is 2018 “at the earliest”.

In April 2015 the South China Morning Post ran a report stating that the Taishan reactors had not been subject to tests before installation, and could therefore suffer from the same defect.

CGN Power spokesperson Wang Xiaofei stated on 18th May that Areva had performed a comprehensive review of the manufacturing process of the parts in the two units at the Taishan plant according to the requirements of the “relevant regulations”, and that nothing was found to be sub-standard.

However Wang said nothing of the non-destructive tests that the Chinese National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) had ordered on the units last year – leaving open the possibility that some problems may have been detected.

Fears not yet dispelled

The Taishan EPR vessels and heads were not forged by Areva, but were instead made in China and Japan under Areva’s direction and using the identical manufacturing process, as reported by China Free Press.

The vessel for Taishan 1 was made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan), which delivered the unit to site in 2011. Dongfang Electric Corporation (China) began to make the vessel in December 2009, and delivered it from its factory in Nansha, Guangzhou to Taishan on 22nd October 2014. 

Professor Woo Chung-ho, a Hong Kong nuclear energy expert and former senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada, told CFP of his surprise that a Chinese factory had forged the reactor: “I didn’t know China was able to produce a pressure vessel. This component is quite special, it’s large. Every step in the manufacturing process requires strict control. The welding of the pressure vessel is highly complex because it is very thick and must be able to withstand high pressure, raising serious safety concerns.”

Lai Kwong-tak, policy convenor of the Professional Commons think tank, added his own serious safety concerns: “Areva has repeatedly had problems with product quality, even falsifying quality control tests, which China completely overlooked when they received the components. It shows that China lacks real regulatory power and has always relied on safety measures carried out by the French.”

And as an anonymous nuclear energy expert told CFP: “No one takes money out of their own pocket in this kind of company. All funds are borrowed, whether from banks or bonds, so there’s interest on everything. No profit means money lost on interest. You can work out the massive sum they’re losing daily if you go back to the average amount of electricity the plant is projected to generate each day.”

So while the sealing of the Taishan reactors in their concrete shell might demonstrate that the vessels and heads were found to be completely sound, it could also reflect an economic decision to press ahead regardless of known problems.

A French nuclear engineer with over 20 years’ experience and who specialises in nuclear reactors confirmed to CFP that the Chinese operators had been anxiously pushing for construction to speed up, so that the plant could come into service next year. “They want the plant to be the first in the world to use third-generation nuclear technology”, he said.

Hinkley C fears

The Taishan project is being carried out by Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Co (TNPJVC), in which CGN has a 70% stake, while EDF has 30%.

The same two companies are also at the heart of the UK’s nuclear ambitions. The Hinkley C nuclear plant with its twin 1.6GW EPRs is to be shared between EDF and CGN with 66.5% of the joint venture company and 33.5% respectively.

CGN is to take the lead at nuclear sites at Bradwell in Essex and Sizewell in Suffolk, taking 66.5% of the two projects leaving 33.5% for EDF. Instead of the EPR, CGN is looking to use its own (never built) ‘Hualong’ reactor design at these two locations.

The big question raised for the UK is whether EDF and CGN are ‘fit and proper’ to be conducting major nuclear power projects here based on huge taxpayer guarantees and electricity market subsidies when their joint operation in China remains so questionable and opaque.

Areva, the company due to forge the reactors for Hinkley, also looks like failing the ‘fit and proper test’. Last month it was found to have ‘falsified’ the safety certificates on 400 key nuclear components. Now the French government is forcing EDF buying the near-bankrupt company.

Oliver Tickell is Contributing Editor at The Ecologist.

Survival International recently hosted a visit from Tonico Benites Guarani, one of the leaders of the Guarani Kaiowá people in southern Brazil. Few of us who work here have ever met a more measured, determined, or quietly courageous man.

Despite the sheer horror of the situation facing his tribe who, following the theft of their land, suffer constant violence, terrible poverty, and a growing sense of despair, Tonico remained calm when discussing his people’s plight.

“Our young people’s only choice is to work for pitiful wages in atrocious conditions in the sugar cane plantations that now occupy our ancestral lands”, he says.

“If we cannot plant, what is our future? Begging is no future. If people do leave the communities the only work they can get is on building sites or in sugarcane plantations. Our young people have no choice but to do degrading work.

“We suffer from racism and discrimination. Until 1988 indigenous peoples in Brazil were not considered human beings in the constitution. This created racism and prejudice. It suggested Indians could be killed, were a free target … If nothing changes many more young people will kill themselves, and others will die of malnutrition.”

A dark and bloody history

The Guarani have had to endure a lot over the past five centuries. They were one of the first tribes in what would eventually become Brazil to be contacted by Europeans, suffering all the violence, enslavement, plunder of their land and infectious disease that that entailed.

But being far from the coast, on land that was difficult to exploit on a large scale in the early stages of colonization, the Guarani Kaiowá were saved from the wholesale genocide inflicted on other peoples. Until the 20th century, they had a relatively tranquil relationship with mainstream Brazilian society.

In the 20th century all that changed. Eager to seize the rich red soil of the Guarani’s land, ranchers moved in, cleared the tribe’s forests and opened it up for cattle ranching and agri-business. Now rather than nourishing the tens of thousands of Guarani people, as it did for generations, the land is turned over to profit. Vast quantities of soya, sugar cane, and other cash crops are forced out of it every year.

Despite the wholesale destruction of their environment, the Guarani remain, though their lives are more difficult than ever before. They are forced to live in overcrowded reserves, in makeshift encampments on roadsides, or on tiny patches of surviving forest, drinking water that is polluted by pesticides, and scratching out a living any way they can.

If they try to return to their ancestral land, which they are cruelly partitioned off from by wire fences, they are attacked by mercenary gunmen. That any of them remain on the land at all is testament to their courage and resilience, and to their profound sense of connection to the land.

A profound connection

Land is more than just life to the Guarani, it is central to their entire conception of themselves. Their history revolves around it, and it is a central tenet of their religion. They call it “the land without evil“ and their ancestors wandered for centuries searching for it.

Generations of their people are buried there, and they cannot countenance the idea of leaving. As far as they are concerned, there is no future without their land, no matter what condition it has been left in by outsiders.

From what was once millions of hectares of dense forest in the central core of South America, the Guarani are now reduced to tiny patches of land, islands they have claimed in a sea of chemically-enhanced plantation agriculture.

A strong sense of connection to the environment is a common feature among many tribal societies around the world, and this is particularly true of the Guarani. Land is not just a food source, a home, or a commodity to them, it is a totality, a universe to which they belong and towards which they have a deep responsibility.

Sadly the loss and destruction of their land has translated accordingly. Depression is rife among the Guarani, and Tonico’s people, the Guarani Kaiowá, suffer the highest suicide rate in the world. Faced with the prospect of a life of poverty and perpetual struggle on the margins of a society they did not create and which offers them less than nothing, hundreds have tragically taken their own lives.

Terrible threats, simple solutions

The solution is clear. Map out the Guarani’s land and return it to the tribe, as Brazilian and international law demand. But waiting for Brazil’s government – wracked by political chaos – or the country’s courts, in which Guarani land cases are paralysed, to rule in their favor, has taken its toll on their morale. A deep sense of misery has set in.

Tonico spoke candidly about this terrible problem: “So many young Guarani people commit suicide. It’s around one a week. The time comes when you have had enough of waiting [for change]. You work yourself up with hope, then the courts dash your hopes. Your family suffers with hunger and malnutrition, the despair increases, there is no security, no hope, you are not sure of life improving. It is very sad.”

For speaking out and campaigning for their people’s basic right to dignity and self-determination, Tonico and other Guarani leaders are harassed, intimidated, and attacked. He continued:

“A slow genocide is taking place. There is a war being waged against us. We are scared … They kill our leaders, hide their bodies, intimidate and threaten us. Me, too, many times. Last month they telephoned me and warned me there would be consequences if I carried on showing a film about the Guarani to politicians.”

An ongoing struggle

Far from being sympathetic to the tribe’s plight, the local government of Mato Grosso do Sul state is, in many ways, actively hostile to the Guarani.

Many local politicians and journalists are on the side of ranchers and soya barons who despise the Guarani and would love to see them wiped off the face of the earth. Tonico and other activists have found they must look beyond their home region for support, to the world’s media, and to international NGOs like Survival International.

“We are always fighting for our land. Our culture does not allow violence but the ranchers will kill us rather than give it back. Most of the land was taken in the 1960s and 70s. The ranchers arrived and pushed us out. The land was of good quality, with rivers and forest. Now it is very valuable. The Guarani were living there for hundreds of years and we never suffered.”

Despite the threats to his own life, Tonico hopes to at least reduce the level of violence being meted out almost daily against his people by making their struggle as visible as he can to the world. His real objective though is to exert pressure, on the Brazilian government and on agri-business to push towards a humane solution and a viable future for his people.

The situation may be bleak, but as long as the Guarani have brave leaders like Tonico to raise their voice, there is always hope that they can defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own future.

Lewis Evans is an author, and campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

In his recent piece for The Times newspaper in the UK, Viscount Matt Ridley argues that a new report from the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

Ridley – publicly disgraced for his role as chairman of the failed Northern Rock bank and his support for climate change denialism – adheres to the belief that GM technology reduces insecticide use and speculates that future GM crops will be even safer, better for the environment and better for human health.

He says that it is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that backers claim could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year – but which is emerging as a costly failure that delivers low yields and no proven nutritional benefits.

According to Ridley, opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, which he argues restricts the spread of GM technology. In discussing the labelling of GM food in the US, Ridley argues this leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong.

He argues that the NAS report makes the point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop, and it makes no sense to single it out for special labelling because regulation should be based on traits, not techniques.

Ridley implies, therefore, that GM is no different from food that is boiled or roasted as its actual content remains unaffected. He finishes by saying the NAS report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend.”

With a good dose of industry-inspired PR flurry, he concludes that because gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that critics highlight, if Europe does not embrace biotech plants now, its agriculture will wilt.

Ridley basing his piece on a flawed NAS report

Unfortunately, for readers of The Times, Ridley’s piece is the usual concoction of misrepresentations, falsehoods and blunders we have come to expect of pro-GMO puff pieces that rely on flawed sources and reports. His major blunder is to have accepted at face value the NAS report.

The NAS is compromised by the serious conflicts of interest within the NAS and its research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). Even studies relied upon by the NAS to show GMO safety are authored by people with conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the new report by Food & Water Watch ‘Under the Influence: The National Research Council and GMOs‘ highlights the millions of dollars in donations received by the NAS and NRC from biotech companies.

On its website, GMWatch discusses the Food & Water Watch report, which documents the one-sided panels of scientists the NRC enlists to carry out its GMO studies and describes the revolving door of its staff directors who shuffle in and out of industry groups. The report also shows how it routinely arrives at watered-down scientific conclusions based on industry science.

Some 11 out of the 19 members of the NRC committee listed in the NAS report have ties to the GMO industry or to pro-GMO advocacy. The two reviews of animal data relied on by the NAS to claim GMO safety are authored by people who also have conflicts of interest (an analysis of these reviews and why they are misleading is here).

Readers are advised to read the Food & Water Watch Report to see for themselves the massive conflicts of interests that Ridley either remains ignorant of or wishes to gloss over in order to push a pro-GMO agenda.

‘False and misleading statements’

GMWatch notes that the NAS committee member chosen to speak about the food safety aspect of the report to the online magazine The Conversation was Michael A. Gallo, emeritus professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Rutgers University. Gallo is a regular pro-corporate commentator who in 2004 defended farmed salmon in the wake of research showing it contained high levels of toxic PCB chemicals.

In his piece for The Conversation, Gallo makes false and misleading statements, which are apparently designed to reassure the public about the safety of GM foods. For example, he says that any changes seen in GMO feeding experiments were “within normal ranges”.

GMWatch states that this is an unscientific statement of a type often used to dismiss significant differences found in GM-fed animals compared with the non-GM-fed controls and goes on to highlight how pro-GM scientists make “a nonsense of the scientific method” and to come up with conclusions designed to mislead.

GMWatch concludes: “It is well established that conflicts of interest affect scientific outcomes and conclusions in every field that has been investigated, from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to GM crops and foods. The public deserves better than the NAS’s biased attempt to convince the public that GMOs are safe.”

It is not the first time advocates for GM like Matt Ridley have used flawed reports to push for this technology and to attempt to pass off tainted sources as ‘independent’ and thus beyond reproach (see this and this). Readers may also wish to read these commentaries on the NAS report.

Rosemary Mason’s 44-page open letter response to Ridley

Matt Ridley’s piece in The Times may be regarded as part of the government’s on-going push to get GMOs into Britain and a timely intervention as the debate about glyphosate in the EU reaches a head. The final vote on renewing the licence for glyphosate use in the EU will take place on 6th June 2016. The British Government is supporting the European Food and Safety Authority’s assertion that it doesn’t cause cancer, despite the WHO saying it is “probably carcinogenic.”

In her 44-page open letter (1/6/2016) to Ridley and the editor-in-chief of The Times, Rosemary Mason responds to Ridley’s piece by saying, “I think I smell an industry rat.”

While Ridley takes about the safety of GM crops and reduced chemical use, Mason rubbishes such claims by referring to Charles Benbrook’s paper on the massive increases in glyphosate use in trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally (2016) which states that:

“Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called ‘Roundup® Ready’.”

If recent evidence demonstrates anything, it is that GM crops and glyphosate use are joined at the hip where industry profits are concerned. GMOs drive the sales of glyphosate.

As if to underline this, referring to Monsanto, Jack Kasky on Bloomberg reports: “Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16 percent, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24 percent.”

In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co states that “Glyphosate really crushed it”, implying it was a major boost to Monsanto’s profits.

The bottom line is sales and profit maximisation – and the unflinching and defence of glyphosate despite the cover up of its harm and the effects on communities in Latin America, where cancers, birth defects, infertility and DNA changes since being exposed to GM Roundup Ready Crops are reported.

An unstoppable global momentum against GMOs and glyphosate

Mason draws Ridley’s attention to a recent piece in the New Eastern Outlook in which William Engdahl discusses the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU:

“What is amazing about the entire ongoing battle over glyphosate re-approval is that opposition and awareness that the EU Commission is willing by any means possible to bow to the chemical industry glyphosate weed-killer cartel and approve a probable carcinogen, is growing by leaps and bounds, and internationally.

“That awareness is in turn bringing light to the very dark corners of the world of GMO itself, something that Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Monsanto, Syngenta and friends are none too able to withstand. To date the EU Commission has received a staggering 1.5 million citizen petitions demanding they not re-approve glyphosate.

“The opposition to EU Commission approval of glyphosate has taken on a self-expanding character and that has the agribusiness weed-killer cartel alarmed. The process is exposing to the general public, for the first time in such a clear manner, the degree of corruption in not only Brussels but also in the so-called scientific bodies that advise it on what is safe and what not.”

Signed by individuals and groups representing 60 million US citizens, Mason also brings the Letter from America to the attention of Ridley, which warned David Cameron (and the rest of the EU) not to authorise GM crops. It confirmed the devastating effects on human health and the environment.

Feeding the world? Who cares? This is about corporate profit

GM is not about public good or feeding the hungry as lobbyists claimed, but about corporate control of the food system. It stated: “Studies of animals fed GM foods and/or glyphosate, however, show worrying trends including damage to vital organs like the liver and kidneys, damage to gut tissues and gut flora, immune system disruption, reproductive abnormalities, and even tumors …

“These scientific studies point to potentially serious human health problems that could not have been anticipated when our country first embraced GMOs, and yet they continue to be ignored by those who should be protecting us. Instead our regulators rely on outdated studies and other information funded and supplied by biotech companies that, not surprisingly, dismiss all health concerns.

“Through our experience we have come to understand that the genetic engineering of food has never really been about public good, or feeding the hungry, or supporting our farmers. Nor is it about consumer choice. Instead it is about private, corporate control of the food system Americans are reaping the detrimental impacts of this risky and unproven agricultural technology.

“EU countries should take note: there are no benefits from GM crops great enough to offset these impacts. Officials who continue to ignore this fact are guilty of a gross dereliction of duty.”

Most of the countries in the EU apart from Britain took that advice and opted out of GM (including Scotland, Wales and Ireland).

Mason argues that glyphosate is a biocide: it kills life. She knows this from her direct experience on her nature reserve in the UK and cites various sources of evidence to highlight a correlation of the huge loss of biodiversity with GMOs and glyphosate use in the US, the massive adverse impacts on human health and links between herbicide use (including glyphosate) and antibiotic resistance.

In citing a wide array of sources throughout her letter, Mason also highlights the ongoing collusion between academia and biotech companies, not least Monsanto, resulting in fraudulent practices intended to deceive the public and fool it into accepting harmful but highly profitable products.

Readers are urged to read Mason’s open letter to Ridley in full. In it, she outlines how GMOs, glyphosate and the increasingly globalised system of chemical-intensive food and agriculture have led not only to academic fraud but also to an increase in congenital anomalies in the UK, decreased mental acuity and adverse impacts on fetal and child development and a wide range of diseases and illnesses.

And she also takes apart Ridley’s claim about GM crops and new techniques being no different from conventionally bred crops and safer (as have others), highlights various conflicts of interest within prominent bodies which shape policy and public opinion and addresses the issue of Golden Rice that Ridley also misrepresents in his piece (see this as well).

Ideology and self-interest driving the pro-GMO lobby

Whereas Ridley offers a short but prominent newspaper article based on a flawed report, industry-inspired clichés and falsehoods, Mason is compelled to respond with a 44-page, comprehensive and fully-referenced text that pulls together relevant scientific research on GMOs and glyphosate. At the same time, she highlights the corruption and deceptions that have made it possible for powerful commercial interests to destroy the environment and human health for profit.

A privileged viscount like Ridley, affluent biotech company CEOs, politicians and well-paid career scientists spout public relations rhetoric and deride critics for denying GM to the hungry poor. However, the pro-GMO lobby relies on fraud, regulatory delinquency, opaque practices, smear campaigns, dirty tricks, the debasement of science and PR messages such as a trillion meals containing GMOs have been eaten and no one has died or become ill as a result and that ‘the debate is over‘.

Aside from well-funded slick PR, it also relies on secretive studies and makes baseless claims wrapped up as scientific facts. And yet it is their critics who are dismissed for supposedly being emotive, unscientific, ideologues driven by self-interest.

In making such accusations, pro-GMO figures attempt to deflect attention from their own self-interested motives, their hypocrisy concerning their policies towards the poor or their massive political influence.

These people tend to be part of an enclosed world that promotes allegiance to a corporate-dominated paradigm that is intolerant of alternative views. And the result is a certain self-righteousness that leads them to impose their will and neoliberal ideology on the rest of humanity in collusion with the machinery and active backing of national states, while they set out to denigrate models of agriculture that could sustainably feed much of the world and ignore those factors (largely fuelled by the neoliberal system they support) that currently create poverty, hunger and food insecurity.

When saying that Europe’s agriculture will wilt if it rejects GM, Ridley mirrors the claim made by Owen Paterson that Europe will become a museum of world farming if it does not embrace GM crops (and, by implication, its chemical inputs). The evidence indicates that this is nothing more than fear-mongering. Ridley’s tone reflects Paterson’s baseless attacks on critics of GM.

Finally, for those who may not be aware, Owen Paterson is a British MP and former the former environment minister. Due to his ongoing promotion of GM, fellow Conservative Party MP Zac Goldsmith described him as a puppet of the biotech industry. He is also Matt Ridley’s brother-in-law.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

Support Colin’s work here.

EDF and China General Nuclear Corporation (CGN), the two companies set to build the UK’s Hinkley C nuclear power station, have just ‘sealed’ their twin reactors at Taishan, China – disregarding widespread fears that they are unsafe and may crack in operation.

The discovery has emerged in drone footage obtained by the Hong Kong-based China Free Press (see video, below), which found that the concrete shells surrounding the reactors have now been closed ruling out any future replacement of the vessels and heads. The news is causing alarm in Hong Kong which lies just 130km east of the Taishan plant.

The Taishan nuclear site near Chanxi is isolated and entry is strictly forbiden to all non-accredited persons. Little information on construction progress or safety is released by CGN and EDF, the two companies building the power station, or by Chinese authorities.

The two 1.75 GW reactors at Taishan are of the same ‘EPR’ design to be used at Hinkley C, and already installed at Flamanville in France, where both reactor vessel and head were found to suffer from severe metallurgical defects that could cause the reactor’s failure.

Areas of very high carbon in the Flamanville reactor vessel and lid, both forged at Areva’s Le Creuset works, have caused that reactor’s construction to be placed on what appears to be indefinite hold. France’s nuclear safety inspectorate, ASN, is demanding ever more tests to be carried out on these two key components.

The danger posed by the high-carbon anomalies is that the reactor vessel and head will become brittle, crack under pressure, and release large amounts of radiation into the environment.

The Flamanville project is already running at €10.5 billion, over three times its original €3.3 billion cost. Originally scheduled to be generating power in 2012, it is now scheduled to be operational only in 2020. The faulty components having already been installed, it is very possible that they would have to be removed and replaced adding further huge costs. So large, in fact, that the project would probably be abandoned altogether.

Do Taishan reactor vessels share the same problem?

It is widely believed that the twin EPR reactor vessels and heads at Taishan suffer from precisely the same defects as those in France. Following the discovery of the problems at Flamanville in April construction at Taishan was halted for an extended period – from mid-2015 until at least October.

The two reactors were expected to be operational in December 2013 and October 2014, according to a report in Power Technology, which stated: “The Chinese nuclear project is benefiting from the experience gained from the Finnish and French NPPs, with significant savings in cost and construction time.” Reports from the site indicate that the current completion target is 2018 “at the earliest”.

In April 2015 the South China Morning Post ran a report stating that the Taishan reactors had not been subject to tests before installation, and could therefore suffer from the same defect.

CGN Power spokesperson Wang Xiaofei stated on 18th May that Areva had performed a comprehensive review of the manufacturing process of the parts in the two units at the Taishan plant according to the requirements of the “relevant regulations”, and that nothing was found to be sub-standard.

However Wang said nothing of the non-destructive tests that the Chinese National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) had ordered on the units last year – leaving open the possibility that some problems may have been detected.

Fears not yet dispelled

The Taishan EPR vessels and heads were not forged by Areva, but were instead made in China and Japan under Areva’s direction and using the identical manufacturing process, as reported by China Free Press.

The vessel for Taishan 1 was made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan), which delivered the unit to site in 2011. Dongfang Electric Corporation (China) began to make the vessel in December 2009, and delivered it from its factory in Nansha, Guangzhou to Taishan on 22nd October 2014. 

Professor Woo Chung-ho, a Hong Kong nuclear energy expert and former senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada, told CFP of his surprise that a Chinese factory had forged the reactor: “I didn’t know China was able to produce a pressure vessel. This component is quite special, it’s large. Every step in the manufacturing process requires strict control. The welding of the pressure vessel is highly complex because it is very thick and must be able to withstand high pressure, raising serious safety concerns.”

Lai Kwong-tak, policy convenor of the Professional Commons think tank, added his own serious safety concerns: “Areva has repeatedly had problems with product quality, even falsifying quality control tests, which China completely overlooked when they received the components. It shows that China lacks real regulatory power and has always relied on safety measures carried out by the French.”

And as an anonymous nuclear energy expert told CFP: “No one takes money out of their own pocket in this kind of company. All funds are borrowed, whether from banks or bonds, so there’s interest on everything. No profit means money lost on interest. You can work out the massive sum they’re losing daily if you go back to the average amount of electricity the plant is projected to generate each day.”

So while the sealing of the Taishan reactors in their concrete shell might demonstrate that the vessels and heads were found to be completely sound, it could also reflect an economic decision to press ahead regardless of known problems.

A French nuclear engineer with over 20 years’ experience and who specialises in nuclear reactors confirmed to CFP that the Chinese operators had been anxiously pushing for construction to speed up, so that the plant could come into service next year. “They want the plant to be the first in the world to use third-generation nuclear technology”, he said.

Hinkley C fears

The Taishan project is being carried out by Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Co (TNPJVC), in which CGN has a 70% stake, while EDF has 30%.

The same two companies are also at the heart of the UK’s nuclear ambitions. The Hinkley C nuclear plant with its twin 1.6GW EPRs is to be shared between EDF and CGN with 66.5% of the joint venture company and 33.5% respectively.

CGN is to take the lead at nuclear sites at Bradwell in Essex and Sizewell in Suffolk, taking 66.5% of the two projects leaving 33.5% for EDF. Instead of the EPR, CGN is looking to use its own (never built) ‘Hualong’ reactor design at these two locations.

The big question raised for the UK is whether EDF and CGN are ‘fit and proper’ to be conducting major nuclear power projects here based on huge taxpayer guarantees and electricity market subsidies when their joint operation in China remains so questionable and opaque.

Areva, the company due to forge the reactors for Hinkley, also looks like failing the ‘fit and proper test’. Last month it was found to have ‘falsified’ the safety certificates on 400 key nuclear components. Now the French government is forcing EDF buying the near-bankrupt company.

Oliver Tickell is Contributing Editor at The Ecologist.

Survival International recently hosted a visit from Tonico Benites Guarani, one of the leaders of the Guarani Kaiowá people in southern Brazil. Few of us who work here have ever met a more measured, determined, or quietly courageous man.

Despite the sheer horror of the situation facing his tribe who, following the theft of their land, suffer constant violence, terrible poverty, and a growing sense of despair, Tonico remained calm when discussing his people’s plight.

“Our young people’s only choice is to work for pitiful wages in atrocious conditions in the sugar cane plantations that now occupy our ancestral lands”, he says.

“If we cannot plant, what is our future? Begging is no future. If people do leave the communities the only work they can get is on building sites or in sugarcane plantations. Our young people have no choice but to do degrading work.

“We suffer from racism and discrimination. Until 1988 indigenous peoples in Brazil were not considered human beings in the constitution. This created racism and prejudice. It suggested Indians could be killed, were a free target … If nothing changes many more young people will kill themselves, and others will die of malnutrition.”

A dark and bloody history

The Guarani have had to endure a lot over the past five centuries. They were one of the first tribes in what would eventually become Brazil to be contacted by Europeans, suffering all the violence, enslavement, plunder of their land and infectious disease that that entailed.

But being far from the coast, on land that was difficult to exploit on a large scale in the early stages of colonization, the Guarani Kaiowá were saved from the wholesale genocide inflicted on other peoples. Until the 20th century, they had a relatively tranquil relationship with mainstream Brazilian society.

In the 20th century all that changed. Eager to seize the rich red soil of the Guarani’s land, ranchers moved in, cleared the tribe’s forests and opened it up for cattle ranching and agri-business. Now rather than nourishing the tens of thousands of Guarani people, as it did for generations, the land is turned over to profit. Vast quantities of soya, sugar cane, and other cash crops are forced out of it every year.

Despite the wholesale destruction of their environment, the Guarani remain, though their lives are more difficult than ever before. They are forced to live in overcrowded reserves, in makeshift encampments on roadsides, or on tiny patches of surviving forest, drinking water that is polluted by pesticides, and scratching out a living any way they can.

If they try to return to their ancestral land, which they are cruelly partitioned off from by wire fences, they are attacked by mercenary gunmen. That any of them remain on the land at all is testament to their courage and resilience, and to their profound sense of connection to the land.

A profound connection

Land is more than just life to the Guarani, it is central to their entire conception of themselves. Their history revolves around it, and it is a central tenet of their religion. They call it “the land without evil“ and their ancestors wandered for centuries searching for it.

Generations of their people are buried there, and they cannot countenance the idea of leaving. As far as they are concerned, there is no future without their land, no matter what condition it has been left in by outsiders.

From what was once millions of hectares of dense forest in the central core of South America, the Guarani are now reduced to tiny patches of land, islands they have claimed in a sea of chemically-enhanced plantation agriculture.

A strong sense of connection to the environment is a common feature among many tribal societies around the world, and this is particularly true of the Guarani. Land is not just a food source, a home, or a commodity to them, it is a totality, a universe to which they belong and towards which they have a deep responsibility.

Sadly the loss and destruction of their land has translated accordingly. Depression is rife among the Guarani, and Tonico’s people, the Guarani Kaiowá, suffer the highest suicide rate in the world. Faced with the prospect of a life of poverty and perpetual struggle on the margins of a society they did not create and which offers them less than nothing, hundreds have tragically taken their own lives.

Terrible threats, simple solutions

The solution is clear. Map out the Guarani’s land and return it to the tribe, as Brazilian and international law demand. But waiting for Brazil’s government – wracked by political chaos – or the country’s courts, in which Guarani land cases are paralysed, to rule in their favor, has taken its toll on their morale. A deep sense of misery has set in.

Tonico spoke candidly about this terrible problem: “So many young Guarani people commit suicide. It’s around one a week. The time comes when you have had enough of waiting [for change]. You work yourself up with hope, then the courts dash your hopes. Your family suffers with hunger and malnutrition, the despair increases, there is no security, no hope, you are not sure of life improving. It is very sad.”

For speaking out and campaigning for their people’s basic right to dignity and self-determination, Tonico and other Guarani leaders are harassed, intimidated, and attacked. He continued:

“A slow genocide is taking place. There is a war being waged against us. We are scared … They kill our leaders, hide their bodies, intimidate and threaten us. Me, too, many times. Last month they telephoned me and warned me there would be consequences if I carried on showing a film about the Guarani to politicians.”

An ongoing struggle

Far from being sympathetic to the tribe’s plight, the local government of Mato Grosso do Sul state is, in many ways, actively hostile to the Guarani.

Many local politicians and journalists are on the side of ranchers and soya barons who despise the Guarani and would love to see them wiped off the face of the earth. Tonico and other activists have found they must look beyond their home region for support, to the world’s media, and to international NGOs like Survival International.

“We are always fighting for our land. Our culture does not allow violence but the ranchers will kill us rather than give it back. Most of the land was taken in the 1960s and 70s. The ranchers arrived and pushed us out. The land was of good quality, with rivers and forest. Now it is very valuable. The Guarani were living there for hundreds of years and we never suffered.”

Despite the threats to his own life, Tonico hopes to at least reduce the level of violence being meted out almost daily against his people by making their struggle as visible as he can to the world. His real objective though is to exert pressure, on the Brazilian government and on agri-business to push towards a humane solution and a viable future for his people.

The situation may be bleak, but as long as the Guarani have brave leaders like Tonico to raise their voice, there is always hope that they can defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own future.

Lewis Evans is an author, and campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

In his recent piece for The Times newspaper in the UK, Viscount Matt Ridley argues that a new report from the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

Ridley – publicly disgraced for his role as chairman of the failed Northern Rock bank and his support for climate change denialism – adheres to the belief that GM technology reduces insecticide use and speculates that future GM crops will be even safer, better for the environment and better for human health.

He says that it is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that backers claim could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year – but which is emerging as a costly failure that delivers low yields and no proven nutritional benefits.

According to Ridley, opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, which he argues restricts the spread of GM technology. In discussing the labelling of GM food in the US, Ridley argues this leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong.

He argues that the NAS report makes the point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop, and it makes no sense to single it out for special labelling because regulation should be based on traits, not techniques.

Ridley implies, therefore, that GM is no different from food that is boiled or roasted as its actual content remains unaffected. He finishes by saying the NAS report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend.”

With a good dose of industry-inspired PR flurry, he concludes that because gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that critics highlight, if Europe does not embrace biotech plants now, its agriculture will wilt.

Ridley basing his piece on a flawed NAS report

Unfortunately, for readers of The Times, Ridley’s piece is the usual concoction of misrepresentations, falsehoods and blunders we have come to expect of pro-GMO puff pieces that rely on flawed sources and reports. His major blunder is to have accepted at face value the NAS report.

The NAS is compromised by the serious conflicts of interest within the NAS and its research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). Even studies relied upon by the NAS to show GMO safety are authored by people with conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the new report by Food & Water Watch ‘Under the Influence: The National Research Council and GMOs‘ highlights the millions of dollars in donations received by the NAS and NRC from biotech companies.

On its website, GMWatch discusses the Food & Water Watch report, which documents the one-sided panels of scientists the NRC enlists to carry out its GMO studies and describes the revolving door of its staff directors who shuffle in and out of industry groups. The report also shows how it routinely arrives at watered-down scientific conclusions based on industry science.

Some 11 out of the 19 members of the NRC committee listed in the NAS report have ties to the GMO industry or to pro-GMO advocacy. The two reviews of animal data relied on by the NAS to claim GMO safety are authored by people who also have conflicts of interest (an analysis of these reviews and why they are misleading is here).

Readers are advised to read the Food & Water Watch Report to see for themselves the massive conflicts of interests that Ridley either remains ignorant of or wishes to gloss over in order to push a pro-GMO agenda.

‘False and misleading statements’

GMWatch notes that the NAS committee member chosen to speak about the food safety aspect of the report to the online magazine The Conversation was Michael A. Gallo, emeritus professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Rutgers University. Gallo is a regular pro-corporate commentator who in 2004 defended farmed salmon in the wake of research showing it contained high levels of toxic PCB chemicals.

In his piece for The Conversation, Gallo makes false and misleading statements, which are apparently designed to reassure the public about the safety of GM foods. For example, he says that any changes seen in GMO feeding experiments were “within normal ranges”.

GMWatch states that this is an unscientific statement of a type often used to dismiss significant differences found in GM-fed animals compared with the non-GM-fed controls and goes on to highlight how pro-GM scientists make “a nonsense of the scientific method” and to come up with conclusions designed to mislead.

GMWatch concludes: “It is well established that conflicts of interest affect scientific outcomes and conclusions in every field that has been investigated, from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to GM crops and foods. The public deserves better than the NAS’s biased attempt to convince the public that GMOs are safe.”

It is not the first time advocates for GM like Matt Ridley have used flawed reports to push for this technology and to attempt to pass off tainted sources as ‘independent’ and thus beyond reproach (see this and this). Readers may also wish to read these commentaries on the NAS report.

Rosemary Mason’s 44-page open letter response to Ridley

Matt Ridley’s piece in The Times may be regarded as part of the government’s on-going push to get GMOs into Britain and a timely intervention as the debate about glyphosate in the EU reaches a head. The final vote on renewing the licence for glyphosate use in the EU will take place on 6th June 2016. The British Government is supporting the European Food and Safety Authority’s assertion that it doesn’t cause cancer, despite the WHO saying it is “probably carcinogenic.”

In her 44-page open letter (1/6/2016) to Ridley and the editor-in-chief of The Times, Rosemary Mason responds to Ridley’s piece by saying, “I think I smell an industry rat.”

While Ridley takes about the safety of GM crops and reduced chemical use, Mason rubbishes such claims by referring to Charles Benbrook’s paper on the massive increases in glyphosate use in trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally (2016) which states that:

“Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called ‘Roundup® Ready’.”

If recent evidence demonstrates anything, it is that GM crops and glyphosate use are joined at the hip where industry profits are concerned. GMOs drive the sales of glyphosate.

As if to underline this, referring to Monsanto, Jack Kasky on Bloomberg reports: “Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16 percent, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24 percent.”

In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co states that “Glyphosate really crushed it”, implying it was a major boost to Monsanto’s profits.

The bottom line is sales and profit maximisation – and the unflinching and defence of glyphosate despite the cover up of its harm and the effects on communities in Latin America, where cancers, birth defects, infertility and DNA changes since being exposed to GM Roundup Ready Crops are reported.

An unstoppable global momentum against GMOs and glyphosate

Mason draws Ridley’s attention to a recent piece in the New Eastern Outlook in which William Engdahl discusses the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU:

“What is amazing about the entire ongoing battle over glyphosate re-approval is that opposition and awareness that the EU Commission is willing by any means possible to bow to the chemical industry glyphosate weed-killer cartel and approve a probable carcinogen, is growing by leaps and bounds, and internationally.

“That awareness is in turn bringing light to the very dark corners of the world of GMO itself, something that Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Monsanto, Syngenta and friends are none too able to withstand. To date the EU Commission has received a staggering 1.5 million citizen petitions demanding they not re-approve glyphosate.

“The opposition to EU Commission approval of glyphosate has taken on a self-expanding character and that has the agribusiness weed-killer cartel alarmed. The process is exposing to the general public, for the first time in such a clear manner, the degree of corruption in not only Brussels but also in the so-called scientific bodies that advise it on what is safe and what not.”

Signed by individuals and groups representing 60 million US citizens, Mason also brings the Letter from America to the attention of Ridley, which warned David Cameron (and the rest of the EU) not to authorise GM crops. It confirmed the devastating effects on human health and the environment.

Feeding the world? Who cares? This is about corporate profit

GM is not about public good or feeding the hungry as lobbyists claimed, but about corporate control of the food system. It stated: “Studies of animals fed GM foods and/or glyphosate, however, show worrying trends including damage to vital organs like the liver and kidneys, damage to gut tissues and gut flora, immune system disruption, reproductive abnormalities, and even tumors …

“These scientific studies point to potentially serious human health problems that could not have been anticipated when our country first embraced GMOs, and yet they continue to be ignored by those who should be protecting us. Instead our regulators rely on outdated studies and other information funded and supplied by biotech companies that, not surprisingly, dismiss all health concerns.

“Through our experience we have come to understand that the genetic engineering of food has never really been about public good, or feeding the hungry, or supporting our farmers. Nor is it about consumer choice. Instead it is about private, corporate control of the food system Americans are reaping the detrimental impacts of this risky and unproven agricultural technology.

“EU countries should take note: there are no benefits from GM crops great enough to offset these impacts. Officials who continue to ignore this fact are guilty of a gross dereliction of duty.”

Most of the countries in the EU apart from Britain took that advice and opted out of GM (including Scotland, Wales and Ireland).

Mason argues that glyphosate is a biocide: it kills life. She knows this from her direct experience on her nature reserve in the UK and cites various sources of evidence to highlight a correlation of the huge loss of biodiversity with GMOs and glyphosate use in the US, the massive adverse impacts on human health and links between herbicide use (including glyphosate) and antibiotic resistance.

In citing a wide array of sources throughout her letter, Mason also highlights the ongoing collusion between academia and biotech companies, not least Monsanto, resulting in fraudulent practices intended to deceive the public and fool it into accepting harmful but highly profitable products.

Readers are urged to read Mason’s open letter to Ridley in full. In it, she outlines how GMOs, glyphosate and the increasingly globalised system of chemical-intensive food and agriculture have led not only to academic fraud but also to an increase in congenital anomalies in the UK, decreased mental acuity and adverse impacts on fetal and child development and a wide range of diseases and illnesses.

And she also takes apart Ridley’s claim about GM crops and new techniques being no different from conventionally bred crops and safer (as have others), highlights various conflicts of interest within prominent bodies which shape policy and public opinion and addresses the issue of Golden Rice that Ridley also misrepresents in his piece (see this as well).

Ideology and self-interest driving the pro-GMO lobby

Whereas Ridley offers a short but prominent newspaper article based on a flawed report, industry-inspired clichés and falsehoods, Mason is compelled to respond with a 44-page, comprehensive and fully-referenced text that pulls together relevant scientific research on GMOs and glyphosate. At the same time, she highlights the corruption and deceptions that have made it possible for powerful commercial interests to destroy the environment and human health for profit.

A privileged viscount like Ridley, affluent biotech company CEOs, politicians and well-paid career scientists spout public relations rhetoric and deride critics for denying GM to the hungry poor. However, the pro-GMO lobby relies on fraud, regulatory delinquency, opaque practices, smear campaigns, dirty tricks, the debasement of science and PR messages such as a trillion meals containing GMOs have been eaten and no one has died or become ill as a result and that ‘the debate is over‘.

Aside from well-funded slick PR, it also relies on secretive studies and makes baseless claims wrapped up as scientific facts. And yet it is their critics who are dismissed for supposedly being emotive, unscientific, ideologues driven by self-interest.

In making such accusations, pro-GMO figures attempt to deflect attention from their own self-interested motives, their hypocrisy concerning their policies towards the poor or their massive political influence.

These people tend to be part of an enclosed world that promotes allegiance to a corporate-dominated paradigm that is intolerant of alternative views. And the result is a certain self-righteousness that leads them to impose their will and neoliberal ideology on the rest of humanity in collusion with the machinery and active backing of national states, while they set out to denigrate models of agriculture that could sustainably feed much of the world and ignore those factors (largely fuelled by the neoliberal system they support) that currently create poverty, hunger and food insecurity.

When saying that Europe’s agriculture will wilt if it rejects GM, Ridley mirrors the claim made by Owen Paterson that Europe will become a museum of world farming if it does not embrace GM crops (and, by implication, its chemical inputs). The evidence indicates that this is nothing more than fear-mongering. Ridley’s tone reflects Paterson’s baseless attacks on critics of GM.

Finally, for those who may not be aware, Owen Paterson is a British MP and former the former environment minister. Due to his ongoing promotion of GM, fellow Conservative Party MP Zac Goldsmith described him as a puppet of the biotech industry. He is also Matt Ridley’s brother-in-law.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

Support Colin’s work here.

Survival International recently hosted a visit from Tonico Benites Guarani, one of the leaders of the Guarani Kaiowá people in southern Brazil. Few of us who work here have ever met a more measured, determined, or quietly courageous man.

Despite the sheer horror of the situation facing his tribe who, following the theft of their land, suffer constant violence, terrible poverty, and a growing sense of despair, Tonico remained calm when discussing his people’s plight.

“Our young people’s only choice is to work for pitiful wages in atrocious conditions in the sugar cane plantations that now occupy our ancestral lands”, he says.

“If we cannot plant, what is our future? Begging is no future. If people do leave the communities the only work they can get is on building sites or in sugarcane plantations. Our young people have no choice but to do degrading work.

“We suffer from racism and discrimination. Until 1988 indigenous peoples in Brazil were not considered human beings in the constitution. This created racism and prejudice. It suggested Indians could be killed, were a free target … If nothing changes many more young people will kill themselves, and others will die of malnutrition.”

A dark and bloody history

The Guarani have had to endure a lot over the past five centuries. They were one of the first tribes in what would eventually become Brazil to be contacted by Europeans, suffering all the violence, enslavement, plunder of their land and infectious disease that that entailed.

But being far from the coast, on land that was difficult to exploit on a large scale in the early stages of colonization, the Guarani Kaiowá were saved from the wholesale genocide inflicted on other peoples. Until the 20th century, they had a relatively tranquil relationship with mainstream Brazilian society.

In the 20th century all that changed. Eager to seize the rich red soil of the Guarani’s land, ranchers moved in, cleared the tribe’s forests and opened it up for cattle ranching and agri-business. Now rather than nourishing the tens of thousands of Guarani people, as it did for generations, the land is turned over to profit. Vast quantities of soya, sugar cane, and other cash crops are forced out of it every year.

Despite the wholesale destruction of their environment, the Guarani remain, though their lives are more difficult than ever before. They are forced to live in overcrowded reserves, in makeshift encampments on roadsides, or on tiny patches of surviving forest, drinking water that is polluted by pesticides, and scratching out a living any way they can.

If they try to return to their ancestral land, which they are cruelly partitioned off from by wire fences, they are attacked by mercenary gunmen. That any of them remain on the land at all is testament to their courage and resilience, and to their profound sense of connection to the land.

A profound connection

Land is more than just life to the Guarani, it is central to their entire conception of themselves. Their history revolves around it, and it is a central tenet of their religion. They call it “the land without evil“ and their ancestors wandered for centuries searching for it.

Generations of their people are buried there, and they cannot countenance the idea of leaving. As far as they are concerned, there is no future without their land, no matter what condition it has been left in by outsiders.

From what was once millions of hectares of dense forest in the central core of South America, the Guarani are now reduced to tiny patches of land, islands they have claimed in a sea of chemically-enhanced plantation agriculture.

A strong sense of connection to the environment is a common feature among many tribal societies around the world, and this is particularly true of the Guarani. Land is not just a food source, a home, or a commodity to them, it is a totality, a universe to which they belong and towards which they have a deep responsibility.

Sadly the loss and destruction of their land has translated accordingly. Depression is rife among the Guarani, and Tonico’s people, the Guarani Kaiowá, suffer the highest suicide rate in the world. Faced with the prospect of a life of poverty and perpetual struggle on the margins of a society they did not create and which offers them less than nothing, hundreds have tragically taken their own lives.

Terrible threats, simple solutions

The solution is clear. Map out the Guarani’s land and return it to the tribe, as Brazilian and international law demand. But waiting for Brazil’s government – wracked by political chaos – or the country’s courts, in which Guarani land cases are paralysed, to rule in their favor, has taken its toll on their morale. A deep sense of misery has set in.

Tonico spoke candidly about this terrible problem: “So many young Guarani people commit suicide. It’s around one a week. The time comes when you have had enough of waiting [for change]. You work yourself up with hope, then the courts dash your hopes. Your family suffers with hunger and malnutrition, the despair increases, there is no security, no hope, you are not sure of life improving. It is very sad.”

For speaking out and campaigning for their people’s basic right to dignity and self-determination, Tonico and other Guarani leaders are harassed, intimidated, and attacked. He continued:

“A slow genocide is taking place. There is a war being waged against us. We are scared … They kill our leaders, hide their bodies, intimidate and threaten us. Me, too, many times. Last month they telephoned me and warned me there would be consequences if I carried on showing a film about the Guarani to politicians.”

An ongoing struggle

Far from being sympathetic to the tribe’s plight, the local government of Mato Grosso do Sul state is, in many ways, actively hostile to the Guarani.

Many local politicians and journalists are on the side of ranchers and soya barons who despise the Guarani and would love to see them wiped off the face of the earth. Tonico and other activists have found they must look beyond their home region for support, to the world’s media, and to international NGOs like Survival International.

“We are always fighting for our land. Our culture does not allow violence but the ranchers will kill us rather than give it back. Most of the land was taken in the 1960s and 70s. The ranchers arrived and pushed us out. The land was of good quality, with rivers and forest. Now it is very valuable. The Guarani were living there for hundreds of years and we never suffered.”

Despite the threats to his own life, Tonico hopes to at least reduce the level of violence being meted out almost daily against his people by making their struggle as visible as he can to the world. His real objective though is to exert pressure, on the Brazilian government and on agri-business to push towards a humane solution and a viable future for his people.

The situation may be bleak, but as long as the Guarani have brave leaders like Tonico to raise their voice, there is always hope that they can defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own future.

Lewis Evans is an author, and campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

In his recent piece for The Times newspaper in the UK, Viscount Matt Ridley argues that a new report from the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

Ridley – publicly disgraced for his role as chairman of the failed Northern Rock bank and his support for climate change denialism – adheres to the belief that GM technology reduces insecticide use and speculates that future GM crops will be even safer, better for the environment and better for human health.

He says that it is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that backers claim could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year – but which is emerging as a costly failure that delivers low yields and no proven nutritional benefits.

According to Ridley, opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, which he argues restricts the spread of GM technology. In discussing the labelling of GM food in the US, Ridley argues this leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong.

He argues that the NAS report makes the point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop, and it makes no sense to single it out for special labelling because regulation should be based on traits, not techniques.

Ridley implies, therefore, that GM is no different from food that is boiled or roasted as its actual content remains unaffected. He finishes by saying the NAS report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend.”

With a good dose of industry-inspired PR flurry, he concludes that because gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that critics highlight, if Europe does not embrace biotech plants now, its agriculture will wilt.

Ridley basing his piece on a flawed NAS report

Unfortunately, for readers of The Times, Ridley’s piece is the usual concoction of misrepresentations, falsehoods and blunders we have come to expect of pro-GMO puff pieces that rely on flawed sources and reports. His major blunder is to have accepted at face value the NAS report.

The NAS is compromised by the serious conflicts of interest within the NAS and its research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). Even studies relied upon by the NAS to show GMO safety are authored by people with conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the new report by Food & Water Watch ‘Under the Influence: The National Research Council and GMOs‘ highlights the millions of dollars in donations received by the NAS and NRC from biotech companies.

On its website, GMWatch discusses the Food & Water Watch report, which documents the one-sided panels of scientists the NRC enlists to carry out its GMO studies and describes the revolving door of its staff directors who shuffle in and out of industry groups. The report also shows how it routinely arrives at watered-down scientific conclusions based on industry science.

Some 11 out of the 19 members of the NRC committee listed in the NAS report have ties to the GMO industry or to pro-GMO advocacy. The two reviews of animal data relied on by the NAS to claim GMO safety are authored by people who also have conflicts of interest (an analysis of these reviews and why they are misleading is here).

Readers are advised to read the Food & Water Watch Report to see for themselves the massive conflicts of interests that Ridley either remains ignorant of or wishes to gloss over in order to push a pro-GMO agenda.

‘False and misleading statements’

GMWatch notes that the NAS committee member chosen to speak about the food safety aspect of the report to the online magazine The Conversation was Michael A. Gallo, emeritus professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Rutgers University. Gallo is a regular pro-corporate commentator who in 2004 defended farmed salmon in the wake of research showing it contained high levels of toxic PCB chemicals.

In his piece for The Conversation, Gallo makes false and misleading statements, which are apparently designed to reassure the public about the safety of GM foods. For example, he says that any changes seen in GMO feeding experiments were “within normal ranges”.

GMWatch states that this is an unscientific statement of a type often used to dismiss significant differences found in GM-fed animals compared with the non-GM-fed controls and goes on to highlight how pro-GM scientists make “a nonsense of the scientific method” and to come up with conclusions designed to mislead.

GMWatch concludes: “It is well established that conflicts of interest affect scientific outcomes and conclusions in every field that has been investigated, from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to GM crops and foods. The public deserves better than the NAS’s biased attempt to convince the public that GMOs are safe.”

It is not the first time advocates for GM like Matt Ridley have used flawed reports to push for this technology and to attempt to pass off tainted sources as ‘independent’ and thus beyond reproach (see this and this). Readers may also wish to read these commentaries on the NAS report.

Rosemary Mason’s 44-page open letter response to Ridley

Matt Ridley’s piece in The Times may be regarded as part of the government’s on-going push to get GMOs into Britain and a timely intervention as the debate about glyphosate in the EU reaches a head. The final vote on renewing the licence for glyphosate use in the EU will take place on 6th June 2016. The British Government is supporting the European Food and Safety Authority’s assertion that it doesn’t cause cancer, despite the WHO saying it is “probably carcinogenic.”

In her 44-page open letter (1/6/2016) to Ridley and the editor-in-chief of The Times, Rosemary Mason responds to Ridley’s piece by saying, “I think I smell an industry rat.”

While Ridley takes about the safety of GM crops and reduced chemical use, Mason rubbishes such claims by referring to Charles Benbrook’s paper on the massive increases in glyphosate use in trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally (2016) which states that:

“Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called ‘Roundup® Ready’.”

If recent evidence demonstrates anything, it is that GM crops and glyphosate use are joined at the hip where industry profits are concerned. GMOs drive the sales of glyphosate.

As if to underline this, referring to Monsanto, Jack Kasky on Bloomberg reports: “Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16 percent, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24 percent.”

In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co states that “Glyphosate really crushed it”, implying it was a major boost to Monsanto’s profits.

The bottom line is sales and profit maximisation – and the unflinching and defence of glyphosate despite the cover up of its harm and the effects on communities in Latin America, where cancers, birth defects, infertility and DNA changes since being exposed to GM Roundup Ready Crops are reported.

An unstoppable global momentum against GMOs and glyphosate

Mason draws Ridley’s attention to a recent piece in the New Eastern Outlook in which William Engdahl discusses the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU:

“What is amazing about the entire ongoing battle over glyphosate re-approval is that opposition and awareness that the EU Commission is willing by any means possible to bow to the chemical industry glyphosate weed-killer cartel and approve a probable carcinogen, is growing by leaps and bounds, and internationally.

“That awareness is in turn bringing light to the very dark corners of the world of GMO itself, something that Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Monsanto, Syngenta and friends are none too able to withstand. To date the EU Commission has received a staggering 1.5 million citizen petitions demanding they not re-approve glyphosate.

“The opposition to EU Commission approval of glyphosate has taken on a self-expanding character and that has the agribusiness weed-killer cartel alarmed. The process is exposing to the general public, for the first time in such a clear manner, the degree of corruption in not only Brussels but also in the so-called scientific bodies that advise it on what is safe and what not.”

Signed by individuals and groups representing 60 million US citizens, Mason also brings the Letter from America to the attention of Ridley, which warned David Cameron (and the rest of the EU) not to authorise GM crops. It confirmed the devastating effects on human health and the environment.

Feeding the world? Who cares? This is about corporate profit

GM is not about public good or feeding the hungry as lobbyists claimed, but about corporate control of the food system. It stated: “Studies of animals fed GM foods and/or glyphosate, however, show worrying trends including damage to vital organs like the liver and kidneys, damage to gut tissues and gut flora, immune system disruption, reproductive abnormalities, and even tumors …

“These scientific studies point to potentially serious human health problems that could not have been anticipated when our country first embraced GMOs, and yet they continue to be ignored by those who should be protecting us. Instead our regulators rely on outdated studies and other information funded and supplied by biotech companies that, not surprisingly, dismiss all health concerns.

“Through our experience we have come to understand that the genetic engineering of food has never really been about public good, or feeding the hungry, or supporting our farmers. Nor is it about consumer choice. Instead it is about private, corporate control of the food system Americans are reaping the detrimental impacts of this risky and unproven agricultural technology.

“EU countries should take note: there are no benefits from GM crops great enough to offset these impacts. Officials who continue to ignore this fact are guilty of a gross dereliction of duty.”

Most of the countries in the EU apart from Britain took that advice and opted out of GM (including Scotland, Wales and Ireland).

Mason argues that glyphosate is a biocide: it kills life. She knows this from her direct experience on her nature reserve in the UK and cites various sources of evidence to highlight a correlation of the huge loss of biodiversity with GMOs and glyphosate use in the US, the massive adverse impacts on human health and links between herbicide use (including glyphosate) and antibiotic resistance.

In citing a wide array of sources throughout her letter, Mason also highlights the ongoing collusion between academia and biotech companies, not least Monsanto, resulting in fraudulent practices intended to deceive the public and fool it into accepting harmful but highly profitable products.

Readers are urged to read Mason’s open letter to Ridley in full. In it, she outlines how GMOs, glyphosate and the increasingly globalised system of chemical-intensive food and agriculture have led not only to academic fraud but also to an increase in congenital anomalies in the UK, decreased mental acuity and adverse impacts on fetal and child development and a wide range of diseases and illnesses.

And she also takes apart Ridley’s claim about GM crops and new techniques being no different from conventionally bred crops and safer (as have others), highlights various conflicts of interest within prominent bodies which shape policy and public opinion and addresses the issue of Golden Rice that Ridley also misrepresents in his piece (see this as well).

Ideology and self-interest driving the pro-GMO lobby

Whereas Ridley offers a short but prominent newspaper article based on a flawed report, industry-inspired clichés and falsehoods, Mason is compelled to respond with a 44-page, comprehensive and fully-referenced text that pulls together relevant scientific research on GMOs and glyphosate. At the same time, she highlights the corruption and deceptions that have made it possible for powerful commercial interests to destroy the environment and human health for profit.

A privileged viscount like Ridley, affluent biotech company CEOs, politicians and well-paid career scientists spout public relations rhetoric and deride critics for denying GM to the hungry poor. However, the pro-GMO lobby relies on fraud, regulatory delinquency, opaque practices, smear campaigns, dirty tricks, the debasement of science and PR messages such as a trillion meals containing GMOs have been eaten and no one has died or become ill as a result and that ‘the debate is over‘.

Aside from well-funded slick PR, it also relies on secretive studies and makes baseless claims wrapped up as scientific facts. And yet it is their critics who are dismissed for supposedly being emotive, unscientific, ideologues driven by self-interest.

In making such accusations, pro-GMO figures attempt to deflect attention from their own self-interested motives, their hypocrisy concerning their policies towards the poor or their massive political influence.

These people tend to be part of an enclosed world that promotes allegiance to a corporate-dominated paradigm that is intolerant of alternative views. And the result is a certain self-righteousness that leads them to impose their will and neoliberal ideology on the rest of humanity in collusion with the machinery and active backing of national states, while they set out to denigrate models of agriculture that could sustainably feed much of the world and ignore those factors (largely fuelled by the neoliberal system they support) that currently create poverty, hunger and food insecurity.

When saying that Europe’s agriculture will wilt if it rejects GM, Ridley mirrors the claim made by Owen Paterson that Europe will become a museum of world farming if it does not embrace GM crops (and, by implication, its chemical inputs). The evidence indicates that this is nothing more than fear-mongering. Ridley’s tone reflects Paterson’s baseless attacks on critics of GM.

Finally, for those who may not be aware, Owen Paterson is a British MP and former the former environment minister. Due to his ongoing promotion of GM, fellow Conservative Party MP Zac Goldsmith described him as a puppet of the biotech industry. He is also Matt Ridley’s brother-in-law.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

Support Colin’s work here.

When the Environment Audit Committee of the House of Commons published its report into soil health yesterday it pulled no punches. For example, it pointed out,

“The Government says it wants our soil to be managed sustainably by 2030, but there is no evidence that it is putting in place the policies to make this happen.”

That lack of action comes even though “society relies on healthy soil for the food we eat, for flood prevention, and for storing carbon … Soil is crucial to society. Neglecting soil health could have dire consequences for food security, climate change, and public health.”

This confirmed what many of us who work with soil have known for sometime: that soil is an often overlooked component of the environment – but one that is critical to our very survival.

The report calls on the government to account over four main issues: the need to protect soils from degradation; the need to clean-up contaminated land; the potential to enhance carbon sequestration in soils; and the need to monitor the condition of soils across the UK on a rolling basis.

Stop degrading soils!

The EAC’s report identifies the government’s record in tackling soil degradation as a cause for concern. Even in a benign climate such as in the UK we can still find soils that are severely degraded.

Farmers on the South Downs are growing crops in rock rubble, relying on external nutrient inputs to sustain their crops, many rivers run turbid during heavy rains and some of our upland soils have become so severely degraded that you can stand on bed rock where once there were soils almost two meters deep.

There are places within view of Lancaster University where Trig points put up in the 1920s with a foundation dug six foot into the ground are now completely exposed. Currently the government relies on ‘cross compliance’ (subsidy payments farmers receive for protecting the environment) as a mechanism to promote maintaining soil cover. But as the Committee points out,

“There is reason to doubt that the current cross compliance regime is achieving its goal of preventing soil damage. In 2015 only two breaches of the soil rules were detected. Moreover, the Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition standards are not ambitious enough to support Defra’s goal that all soils are managed sustainably by 2030, since they focus only on preventing damaging practices and not on restoration or improvement of soil quality. The requirements also fail to address important aspects of soil health such as soil biota and soil structure.”

The government should, they continue, “produce and consult on proposals to increase the ambition, scope and effectiveness of cross compliance in order to mitigate the impact of agriculture on soil health and incentivise provision of wider ecosystems services such as water quality and flood protection.”

Widening this out to include soils in the uplands will also be essential as these soils contain much of our soil carbon and are source of flood water. Tackling wind erosion and tillage erosion are also important. In many agricultural landscapes tillage is a much more significant process than water erosion.

The scandal of maize of anaerobic digestion

The Committee takes well-deserved aim at the problem of large scale maize cultivation for anaerobic digestion to generate ‘renewable’ electricity, attracting both farming and energy subsidies – and often leading to massive soil erosion:

“Maize production can damage soil health when managed incorrectly, and incentives for anaerobic digestion should be structured to reflect this. The double subsidy for maize produced for anaerobic digestion is counterproductive and has contributed to the increase in land used for maize production.

“Renewable energy subsidies for anaerobic digestion should be restructured to avoid harmful unintended consequences. Revisions should either exclude maize from the subsidy altogether or impose strict conditions on subsidised maize production to avoid practices in high-risk locations which lead to soil damage. The broader cross-compliance regime has not proved sufficient to prevent such damage.

“Defra and DECC should work together to evaluate the impact of energy policy on soil health across the board. The upcoming 25-year environment plan should include specific plans for inter-departmental working and structures of accountability with the goal that soil protection is not simply the responsibility of Defra, but rather is a factor against which any policy can be measured.”

Boost soil carbon

Soil carbon is vital to the functioning of soil. It provides the food and habitat for soil organisms, supporting a population of billions bacteria and fundi in just a handful of soil.

These organisms are critical for cycling nutrients between the organic and inorganic fractions of the soil, making them more available to plants. The soil organic matter also helps the soil to hold onto nutrients and release them into the soil solution and the glue that binds soils together helping it to resist erosive forces.

However, it’s the soil’s ability to store carbon that has caught the Committee’s eyes. Soils store more carbon than that in all the vegetation (including forests) and atmosphere combined – about a third of all carbon on the terrestrial surface. Storing more carbon in soils could help to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

And the Committee is keen that the government delivers on its commitments under the Paris climate change agreement and supports the French proposal of a 0.4% increase in soil carbon each year: “At COP21 the Government signed up to an initiative to increase soil carbon levels by 0.4% per year: as part of the 25-year environment plan, it should set out specific, measurable and time-limited actions that will be taken to achieve this goal.”

Achieving a year-on-year increase will be a challenge, but given the benefits to the soil and the atmosphere it is one would should rise to.

Repair our contaminated and degraded soils

The UK has for sometime adopted a pragmatic, risk-based approach to managing contaminated land – given our long industrial history we have quite a lot of it – with around 300,000 potentially contaminated land sites in the UK, which may represent a source of harm to the environment and human health. This has allowed low value contaminated land to be ‘recycled’ and used more profitably.

However Defra’s decision to withdraw the ‘Part 2A’ Capital Grant funding for contaminated land remediation has “undermined councils’ ability to meet their statutory duty under the Environmental Protection Act. Despite this, Defra appears complacent about the issue … we have heard evidence that local authorities are having difficulty meeting this duty, making Part 2A ‘virtually unworkable’ … The rationale Defra gave in 2014 for not producing an impact assessment for withdrawing the funding was entirely spurious.”

The Committee rightly calls on the government to to set new funding for contaminated land remediation at the level of the old scheme. It has also recognised that action to combat degradation, raise soil carbon contents and address soil contamination are laudable and necessary, but we need know if things are getting worse or better.

The last (and only!) National Soil Inventory (NSI) was carried out in 1983 with a partial resurvey in 1995. The NSI visited the soils at over 6,500 locations and analysed them for a wide range of characteristics. More recently we have relied on the decadal Countryside Survey where topsoil samples were analysed for a more limited number of characteristics, with samples from around 600 kilometer squares across the country.

No further Countryside Survey has yet been planned. However, the situation is not the same in Scotland and Wales: here the devolved governments have recognised the importance of soils and commissioned soil monitoring programmes of their own – it’s time for England to catch up.

A time for action!

On our present trajectory dire consequences lie ahead, warns the report: “Some of the most productive agricultural land in England is at risk of becoming unprofitable within a generation through soil erosion and loss of carbon, and the natural environment will be seriously harmed.”

As the committee recognises, soil protection has to be at the heart of environmental policy. But will the government pay attention? Defra is developing two separate 25 year plans for the Environment and for Agriculture. There is great potential here for Defra to address years of neglecting soils, but also for conflict between the plans:

“Defra’s upcoming 25-year environment plan should seek to rectify this long-standing deficit and place soil protection at the heart of environmental policy. Defra must also ensure that its accompanying 25-year plan for food and farming does not sit in tension with its environment plan.

“We must move away from viewing soil merely as a growth medium and treat it as an ecosystem in its own right. We call for more joined up soil policy between Government departments to ensure no clashes in priorities. As well as taking national action, the Government should remain open to action on a European level to ensure soil protection.”

We certainly need a fresh approach to protecting our soils against erosion, degradation and contamination, placing soil on a level with air and water as essential to the nation’s prosperity and survival.

We must hope that the EAC’s strongly-worded report provides the alarm call the government so clearly needs to take swift and effective action.

The report: ‘Soil Health‘ is published by the House of Commons Environment Audit Committee. It is available in HTML and PDF versions.

John Quinton is Professor of Soil Science at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. He has a degree in Soil Science and a PhD in soil erosion and has spent the last 25 years researching soil processes and their links to environmental quality and food production. He is Executive Editor of the European Sciences Union’s journal SOIL. He tweets @JohnQuinton