By David Hill - 23rd February 2006
European farmers need the freedom to choose if they want to grow GM crops or not insists third generation farmer, David Hill.
The business of farming today is challenging.
Farmers across Europe are increasingly finding it difficult to make a decent living faced with a fall in global commodity prices, reductions in support measures, higher environmental and production standards and at the same time a rise in competition from outside Europe.
As farmers we can rise to a challenge, we always have. However to be able to do this, we cannot be denied access to the very tools and techniques that are helping our counterparts from outside Europe to become more competitive.
We need access to new technologies like GM crops to take us forward and it frustrates me as a farmer that I am currently excluded from using this tool.
I took part in the UK farm scale evaluations – the biggest study of the environmental impact of GM crops conducted anywhere in the world - from 1998 to 2003.
During this time I had the opportunity to grow Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide tolerant sugar beet, one of the four herbicide-tolerant crops on trial.
I saw striking results. The sugar beet required much less in terms of agrochemicals; three litres per hectare of material compared to 19 litres per hectare on the conventional area, the technology helped to reduce our unit cost of production significantly enabling us to produce much more per hectare.
Regarding coexistence, this was not a problem, on my farm we use organic and conventional techniques and I don’t see any difficulty in combining the three operations.
It means that we just had to discuss with our neighbors how we were going to place the crops and it certainly didn’t bother them and many of them grow organic.
A few months ago I went to Zaragossa in Spain where I met other European farmers to look at the GM maize being grown there.
Farmers from France, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic and Portugal grew GM maize last year and they spoke about their experiences.
They told me the GM maize was bringing in more euros per hectare and proved that there were absolutely no problems with their downstream buyers or with non-GM growers in the vicinity.
The 20 or so farmers there from 12 European countries all went home with quite a determination to bring this case forward and make people aware of the benefits and the realities of biotechnology, it is quite simply a new tool for farmers and we don’t really see what all the fuss is about.
I am glad the WTO has said that some European countries banned GM products illegally.
Maybe now the politicians in these countries will be forced to think more about their own farmers instead of their own re-election.
Take for example Austria. How is it possible that the minister dealing with agriculture, Josef Proell, has banned GM from his country?
Does he not want his own national farmers to have access to or at least the choice to use competitive new technologies?
What’s worse, politicians like this are now trying to limit farmers in other Europe countries from growing GM crops.
Thankfully, the European commission has taken a more sensible approach to the coexistence issue than people like the Austrian minister. The commission has written guidelines and they promote exchange of
information on the best way to run coexistence.
They are very clear about the right for farmers to choose to grow GM or not. My neighbour may not want to grow GM and I may want to, and we should both have that right, and respect each other for that choice.
Currently I do not have that choice.I think there is a big future with GM crops, but if we don’t get a move on Europe risks denying European farmers access to the biggest environmental advance that we have seen in the last 20-30 years and at a time when we really need it.
And if Europe does want to become an agricultural backwater, then it is certainly going about it in the right way.
This article originally appeared in the February 20 edition of Parliament Magazine.
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