Buy into the bunk or let biotech forge on

Early this year a professor from the University of Queensland predicted 60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef would bleach this summer because of global warming.

Then a few months later, at the end of summer, Professor Ove Hoegh-Gieldberg revised his estimate down to just one per cent.

In some ways global warming is a bit like genetically modified food, there is an awful lot of hype.  A couple of years ago Jeffrey Smith published Seeds of Deception claiming that genetically modified (GM) food is unsafe.

I heard Mr Smith on radio when he was over here promoting his book.  When asked for an example of an unsafe food on the supermarket shelves, he made some reference to how GM foods had not been properly tested.

A second book by Mr Smith about how GM foods are going to kill us will be published in August.  Called Genetic Roulette, it will apparently document the health risks from GM foods, which is interesting because I thought that was what the first book was all about.

In fact, I feel Mr Smith should tell us right-a-way what the health risks are.  Why should we wait until August, unless it's all hype?  I am starting to wonder whether people buy books about global warming and GM foods because they want to be titillated?

These two issues are particularly popular with people who like to have something frightening to chatter about.

The trouble is that politicians are often looking for something to legislate and I suspect that Mr Smith's last book, which was promoted by Greenpeace and subsequently frightened people, helped create enough angst for the NSW government to put in place the current bans on GM food crops.

In the meantime, Australian scientists recently made a major breakthrough finding an anti-freeze gene in a grass from Antarctica.  They claim that through genetic modification, this gene could be used to frost-proof grain crops.  The finding was announced this month at a Biotechnology Conference in Chicago, but what the audience wasn't told was that GM food crops are banned in all Australian States except Queensland.

Interest in the anti-freeze gene has drawn attention to the extent of agricultural losses from frost -- an ironic topic in this age of concern over global warming.  In the US there are more crop loses to frost than any other weather phenomenon.

But the problem is we also have people like anti-GM campaigner, Jeffrey Smith, and the professor who wrongly predicted the reef would bleach this year, who are expert scaremongers.  Some may be titillated by their dire predictions, but it is important to understand whether their claims have any basis in reality and what we can do about them.

Australian farmers have never had much influence over the weather, but Australian farmers do have some control over issues of genetic modification.

Farm organisations can chose to buy Jeffrey Smith's doomsayer predictions about the safety of this already proven technology, or they can start insisting that the current bans on GM food crops are lifted and research like that into the anti-freeze gene is fast tracked here in Australia.

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