Author: earthfirst

There was a protest today against the last remain­ing GM pota­to tri­al in the UK just out­side of Cam­bridge.

Despite being heav­i­ly out­num­bered by the police & Chubb secu­ri­ty guards, pro­test­ers were able to make their way right up to the twen­ty metre perime­ter fence sur­round­ing the tri­al site (with elec­tric fence inside). Two demon­stra­tors were arrest­ed, one for attempt­ing to breach the fence and anoth­er some dis­tance from the site.

Pro­test­ers played fris­bee and ate a pic­nic at the site but, due to being out­num­bered, were not in a posi­tion to get through the fence to decon­t­a­m­i­nate the site.

Full write up of protest and some back­ground

One knew right from arriv­ing at the start point of this protest in Gir­ton that the police were going to be total­ly in con­trol. Pro­test­ers were great­ly out­num­bered. Also there were no main­stream jour­nal­ists present at all. There were lines of police pho­tog­ra­phers with big cam­eras and long lens­es posi­tioned all around the cen­tre of the vil­lage. This was clear­ly a way of warn­ing any locals who might wish to become involved that they would be treat­ed as poten­tial crim­i­nals even though it was a very fluffy protest. Pro­test­ers set off along the road, turned off onto a pub­lic foot­path towards the site, escort­ed and watched all the way by dozens of police on foot and in vehi­cles. Police made a token attempt to stop every­one from leav­ing the foot­path but the deter­mined pro­test­ers quick­ly nipped through a gap in the hedge and straight onto the cor­po­rate land that was alleged­ly pro­tect­ed by a hur­ried­ly obtained injunc­tion. From there, one could see the test plot in the dis­tance across corn fields with many expen­sive police 4X4s sur­round­ing it. Pro­test­ers then walked care­ful­ly along the head­lands so as not to be accused of dam­ag­ing the adjoin­ing (hope­ful­ly non GM) wheat and bar­ley crops and then set­tled down to pic­nic right next to the block and mesh fence that had only just been erect­ed around the pota­to test site. Many of the pic­nicers lunch box­es seemed to con­tain pota­to sal­ad! One very brave pro­test­er man­aged to leap over this fence when most of the yel­low jack­ets were dis­tract­ed but was imme­di­ate­ly arrest­ed. A lit­tle while lat­er a very polite man from Chubb secu­ri­ty came to announce that an injunc­tion had been obtained and that every­one was with­in the injunct­ed area and that he would be very great­ful if every­one were to leave soon. After con­fer­ring amongst them­selves, pro­test­ers realised that because they were so out­num­bered by both police and pri­vate secu­ri­ty guards and because a six foot fence stood between them and the much despised crop, the protest could only be a sym­bol­ic one and so they upped and left.

The pupose of this genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied crop tri­al is alleged­ly to eval­u­ate the resis­tance of a new GM pota­to vari­ety to late blight in the field. I real­ly can­not see why this exper­i­ment has to be done in the open coun­try­side rather than inside a closed lab­o­ra­to­ry. Blight needs par­tic­u­lar con­di­tions of tem­per­a­ture, humid­i­ty and air cir­cu­la­tion in order to strike. These con­di­tions would be easy to sim­u­late in a large cli­mat­i­cal­ly con­trolled green­house but out in a field, the cor­rect con­di­tions may not be achieved from one year to the next despite the fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tion’s best/worst attempts to change our cli­mate. Not only that but the grow­ing pota­toes were vis­i­bly in flower, there­fore pro­duc­ing GM pollen and I did indeed see at least two bee hives pre­sum­ably installed and main­tained by BASF about 300 metres away near the hedge. Since it would be eas­i­ly pos­si­ble to pinch out the GM pollen pro­duc­ing flow­ers on such a small plot (doing this actu­al­ly INCREASES pota­to yield by about 15%) and since the flow­ers had­n’t been removed, one has to con­clude that BASF delib­er­ate­ly want to spread GM pollen around Cam­bridgeshire as part of their open-air exper­i­ment. Pity any local hon­ey pro­duc­ers as they could lose their organ­ic sta­tus over this. I’m won­der­ing if BASF have any mon­i­tor­ing hives 3km away rather than just 300m as bees can eas­i­ly trav­el this dis­tance in search of flow­ers or maybe BASF don’t want to know such a fact?

Being a keen pota­to fanci­er and grow­er, I have a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in this blight issue. Pota­to late blight is a par­tic­u­lar­ly dev­as­tat­ing fun­gus that spreads faster than any oth­er plant dis­ease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_blight
This is the same dis­ease that caused the famous 1845 Irish pota­to famine that claimed a mil­lion lives. (In fact it would be more accu­rate to say that the British gov­erne­ment caused the deaths by com­plete­ly ignor­ing the famine and suf­fer­ing that they knew was occur­ring.) Blight, being a fun­gus, thrives in warm damp still weath­er. Last year’s very wet ear­ly autumn weath­er caused my own pota­to crop to dra­mat­i­cal­ly suc­cumb to blight in just two days. In that short peri­od, the foliage changed from healthy green to a black putre­fy­ing slime and the only rem­e­dy at that stage is to attempt to remove every scrap of infect­ed mate­r­i­al from the soil, lift all the tubers from the ground and dry the intact ones as quick­ly as pos­si­ble before stor­ing them. It’s not over then — one has to fre­quent­ly check the stored pota­toes for months and pull out the con­sid­er­able num­ber that con­tin­ue to go putrid before the tuber blight spreads to the entire sack. As a rule, fun­gal dis­eases can only be con­trolled by spray­ing with quite strong chem­i­cals. The only per­mit­ted (just) organ­ic con­trol is Bor­deaux mix­ture — cop­per sul­phate and lime. This is only mod­er­ate­ly effec­tive — rather use­less under severe con­di­tions like last year as, since cop­per suphate is sol­u­ble, it has to be reap­plied after each heavy rain by which time, the dis­ease may have become unstop­pable. So you can see that inor­gan­ic pota­to grow­ing can require strong chem­i­cals and organ­ic grow­ing is real­ly quite prob­lem­at­ic. In these days of unsta­ble weath­er, my over­rid­ing cri­teri­um for choos­ing pota­to vari­eties to grow now is no longer flavour or out­ra­geous colour but blight resis­tance. I would tru­ly love a 100% blight resis­tant pota­to to grow myself. How­ev­er I can­not see myself trust­ing an injunc­tion wield­ing GM cor­po­ra­tion’s cre­ation any fur­ther than I could throw that entire cor­po­ra­tion uphill. As I see it their over­rid­ing inter­est is not to help strug­gling farm­ers or alle­vi­ate world famine. It is prof­it and the wish to mono­plise and dom­i­nate the pota­to seed mar­ket with just a very few expen­sive patent­ed-up-to-the-hilt vari­eties.

If you go to the super­mar­kets, you’ll see on dis­play just six or so vari­eties of pota­toes. In fact world­wide there are an amaz­ing 5000 dif­fer­ent vari­eties, 800 or so vari­eties in this coun­try and about 150 of these are eas­i­ly avail­able com­mer­cial seed vari­eties. The con­se­quences of any mar­ket dom­i­nat­ing GM vari­ety could cause the grad­ual extinc­tion of many irre­placa­ble her­itage vari­eties. Being bru­tal­ly hon­est, the few her­itage vari­eties that I’ve tried grow­ing myself have been too sus­cep­ti­ble to blight for me to con­tin­ue to grow them organ­i­cal­ly. How­ev­er tucked in amongst all those thou­sands of vari­eties there could be some almost for­got­ten about ones that have nat­u­ral­ly high resis­tance. Not only that but this huge repos­i­to­ry of vari­eties can be used in tra­di­tion­al selec­tive breed­ing pro­grams to pro­duce new non GM vari­eties that have much high­er resis­tance. This year I am try­ing Sár­po Mira, Sár­po Axona and Ver­i­ty which are all new vari­eties recent­ly cre­at­ed in just this way and that are claimed to have excep­tion­al resis­tance. So the point I am mak­ing is that there are clear and hope­ful­ly viable alter­na­tives to genet­ic manip­u­la­tion with­out the risks.

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GM pro­test­er court news

Two pro­test­ers were in court this morn­ing hav­ing been arrest­ed on Sun­day dur­ing protests at the site of the UK’s only GM tri­al — pota­toes.

Both were charged with Crim­i­nal Dam­age. One pled not guilty, and that tri­al will resume in 4 weeks. The oth­er pled guilty and was fined.

Ted­dy Bears Pic­nic — video/quicktime 31M