Sur l'immoralité des aliments non-génétiquement modifiés :
(...) in a country like ours that produces excess food, organic farming robs land that might otherwise be used to promote bio-diversity. That's because organic fields need to be left fallow, growing leguminous crops or livestock whose faeces can be used to return nitrogen to the soil. Yes, you read that correctly. The inefficiencies of organic land use make it less environmentally friendly than conventional farming whose efficiencies mean we can return land to nature. But there's a more sinister perspective. In our lifetime we'll see global population top 10 billion. We're lucky it won't be more.
That alone means finding 35% more calories to feed the world. On decreasingly fertile land. But if we are self-indulgently to insist that we are so important that we should be fed organically, with its yields some 20% to 50% lower, that can only put an additional, unnecessary strain on feeding the planet. Every organic mouthful makes it more difficult to feed the most vulnerable.
(...) as the Food Standards Agency put it in 2004: "Organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from ood produced conventionally."
Sir John Krebs of the FSA has noted: "A single cup of coffee contains natural carcinogens equal to at least a year's worth of carcinogenic residues in the diet." Yet we're tacitly encouraging the nation's poor to spend cash on this indulgence. Consider Sir John again: "Dietary contributions to cardiovascular disease and to cancer... probably account for more than 100,000 deaths per year in Britain. Food poisoning probably accounts for between 50 and 300... pesticides in food, as well as GM food, are not responsible for any deaths."
(...) In 2006 I shall tuck into food made more productively and at a lower cost than organic and regular conventional agriculture. A food whose production increases biodiversity in fields and lowers pesticide use. A food enjoyed every day by 280 million Americans and indeed much of the livestock that we eat. A food that has brought nothing but health benefits to those who enjoy it. That's right. Call it what you will. Genetically Modified, GM, transgenic. I just like to think of it as safer, more productive, kinder to its local environment, and kinder to the globe. That's what I call good food.
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