In a commentary in The Age in June, Sir Gustav Nossal reported on genetically modified canola hearings in Victoria. This was one of a number of media outings, including an address to the National Press Club, in which Nossal reiterated the same biotech message that the pro-GM lobby has peddled for more than a decade.
The article claims that pro-GM farmers should be able to choose whether to grow GM crops or not. However, this ignores the fact that conventional farmers will be denied their choice because all crops face the threat of becoming contaminated by GM cross pollination and the mixing of seeds.
Nossal claims that GM and non-GM seeds can easily be segregated, ignoring the experienced opinion of farmers, carriers and seed merchants, as well as the extra costs involved in separating the seeds. Allowing pro-GM farmers a choice between GM and conventional crops takes choice away from opposing farmers and the consumers.
His article also claims that great financial benefits are promised from growing GM crops, paralleling a report on the potential benefits of GM crops presented by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics earlier this year. However, this ignores the real financial losses experienced by farmers who cannot get the premium prices given to certified non-GM canola.
Nossal suggests that farmers, consumers and anyone who expresses reservations about GM technology are against science. He suggests that critics believe GM 'is somehow against nature or God's plan'. This is far from the truth. Anti-GM farmers encourage scientific research, but they do not want to equate good science with GM.
In fact, farmers want more science, and praise research done by the CSIRO in the past. What they do not want is a reduction of funding to conventional agricultural research as is occurring under the Federal Labor Government.
Nossal also suggests that people who question the introduction of GM canola do not respect the democratic process. However, at the hearing, it was the pro-GM lobby which was the loudest and best funded. The opinion of the majority of farmers, expressed in surveys reported in The Land, is to continue the moratorium on commercial growing of GM-canola was ignored. This is hardly democratic.
The GM lobby argues that it is not really new but merely a 'high-tech extension of biotechnology processes used over millennia'. However, direct gene-swap between organisms through GM is totally new. Its proper name is revealing — 'recombinant DNA' and 'transgenic