The Irish Times

An Irishman's Diary On Ecoterrorism

There was something not quite right about these tales of petrol being sprayed on genetically modified sugar-beet in Wexford. It seemed an un-Irish way of protesting, strangely ignorant of the Irish cultural attachment to the land. Who would do such things? Not country people for sure; and now we learn, not Irish people at all. Most people campaigning against GM crops here are foreign, which no doubt explains their tactics.

Of course, they have every right to come to Ireland and speak their minds. We allow freedom of freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and in the case of the anti-GM lobby - well not so much a lobby as a broom cupboard - freedom to be hysterically stupid. Equally, I am free to point out that most of them - not all by any means - are foreigners, who probably come from countries where Monsanto has completed its GM sugar-beet trials.

Absurdity

This is the absurdity of the present campaign of neo-colonial arable vandalism which has destroyed 50 per cent of the Irish trial crop so far. Ireland is just about the last country in Europe to have such trials. Belgium's trials took place in 1991, though I don't recall any Irish protesters going over with a jerry-can of Texaco. So the vandals really are achieving nothing: most of what needs to be known about growing GM sugar-beet is already known. The trials in Ireland are to see how the crop grows in Irish conditions, something foreigners are now telling us we are not allowed to know.

Of course, some Irish people have been involved in this campaign too. One of these is Adrienne Murphy, who told this newspaper that she was pleased about the latest attack on a Monsanto crop because she believed that the new crops were very dangerous. She said that genetically modified crops could wreck the opportunity for organic farming to be developed properly.

What? Lift that one again, the bit about GM foods wrecking the opportunity to develop organic farming. Look at it closely. Turn it over. Hold it up to the light. Can you see anything? No? Okay. Then rattle it. Hear anything, other than the odd loose screw? No. Nothing there at all, right? Excellent. For how could there be? How could new crops "wreck" small-holders' ability to grow vegetables organically? That is on a logical par with saying the long cricket season in Pakistan is having an adverse effect on lama-milk in Peru, or the Willy Clancy Summer School is having a terrible impact on irregular verbs in New Guinea.

There'll always be a market for organic vegetables, but not organic sugar-beet. Sugar beet is not native to Ireland. Without vigorous chemical protection using half-a-dozen herbicides, it cannot survive competition with weeds. It grows here by men's efforts alone. What GM has done (courtesy, incidentally, of an Irish scientist, Gerald Barry) is to insert a gene which makes it resistant to Round-Up. Instead of having to spray the field with half-a-dozen chemicals, leaving long-lasting residues in the soil, the farmer can spray a single dose of Round-Up which breaks up completely on contact with the soil and which kills all weeds, leaving the beet intact.

Martian plot

It's not complicated - unless, that is, you believe in crop circles and UFOs and abduction by aliens and you think the X-Files is the best thing on television; in which case you probably consider that Monsanto is part of a Martian plot to destroy the human race. It probably would not influence these people's thinking - I use the word in the loosest possible sense - to add that even if the beet were to come to flower (which occurs in the second year, but it is of course harvested in its first year) the only plant it can pollinate is the seabeet, an uncommon little vegetable to be found in remote briny places, far from the fields where sugar-beet is reared. So even if GM pollen, most improbably, had a seaside holiday romance, gazing hand in hand at the sunset, before indulging in a beet of rooting - did the earth move you too, darling? - the only patter of little RoundUp-resistant roots would come from baby sea-beet.

But resistance to Round-Up cannot cross species; just as I could mate vigorously and frequently with a tigress, and the tigress might well leave with a big smile on her face and the promise that she'd call, but she still wouldn't be producing a little litter of Diary-writing cubs. Nettles have not produced a brood of Cox's pippin-bearing young because of the proximity of apple pollen. Wheat-seeds do not yield crops which grow a hundred feet because pine pollen is in the air. Genes don't leap species.

Ignorance and magic

Does this matter to the noknothings? Of course it doesn't. Ignorance and magic are their shield and their armour, which is fair enough: the right to be invincibly stupid is inalienable. But invincible stupidity does not confer the right to damage other people's property, to wreck scientific inquiry by midnight vandalism, to oppose the rule of democratically created law by organised criminality. And the courts exist to protect us from the arrogation of such "rights" to themselves by witless fanatics. Before the rest of our GM crop is wiped out entirely, maybe our District Justices will remember that, and be a little less generous with the Probation Act.

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