Penicillin wouldn't exist if we had the same attitude to pharmaceuticals as we do to genetically modified food. One of the arguments against GM food is that genetic engineering is somehow "unnatural". Yet creating antibiotics to take as medicine is just as "unnatural" as manipulating the genes of plants to produce food.
Penicillin has dramatically improved the quality of life of the people who are lucky enough to have access to it. GM food could have the same beneficial impact. GM crops need less pesticide, use less water and require less fertiliser than conventional crops. GM food can make up for the vitamin deficiency of the world's malnourished. While the use of penicillin is taken for granted, growing GM crops is prohibited in Victoria.
What is "unnatural" is in the eye of the beholder. There's nothing unnatural about using science and human ingenuity to make our lives better. What would be unnatural is if we denied ourselves the advantages of science because of an unfounded concern about the unknown.
The State Government's ban on GM food will expire at the beginning of next year. Quite appropriately, the Government has announced that before a decision on whether the ban will continue or be lifted, there will be public consultation. That consultation will reveal two things about the GM debate.
The first is the widespread misunderstanding about the subject.
The second is that much of the resistance to GM food is not based on science. Instead, it is the product of opposition to multinational companies and their role in the supply and marketing of GM technology.
Despite the ban on GM crops, we already consume genetically modified food. Thirty-five per cent of the vegetable oil consumed in this country is from GM cottonseed, most of which is grown in Queensland.
GM technology doesn't threaten Victoria's clean and green image. One of the motivations behind the original GM ban was the concern that if GM crops were grown in the state, Victorian food exports to non-GM countries would be threatened. The reality is that both Canada and the United States have GM crops and none of their markets has been affected.
In other countries, both organic and GM crops are cultivated and marketed successfully. All the evidence is that the consumers actually like having the choice between organic food, GM food and food grown as it is now.
The claim that GM organisms might escape and infect non-GM animals and plants is scare-mongering. Sensible precautions are necessary when growing GM food.
Opponents of GM crops protest that GM technology is a profit-driven enterprise. There's one simple answer to that accusation. Of course it is. All food production is profit-driven. Dairy farmers don't produce the milk that we pour on our morning cereal out of the goodness of their hearts. GM is a big business and developing GM technology is expensive. Naturally anyone who invests in GM wants to make a profit. The search for profit encourages innovation. The profit incentive encouraged the great figures of Australian agriculture such as H.V. McKay who invented the Sunshine Harvester and William Farrer who developed Federation wheat. Thanks to Farrer's wheat-breeding discoveries, the yield from the national wheat crop at the beginning of the 20th century was more than doubled.
Another complaint is that many patents for GM technology are owned and controlled by "multinational agribusiness companies". This is true -- but it's irrelevant to the question of whether GM crops should be grown in Victoria. Farmers themselves are in the best position to know what is in their own best interests.
The patents to the computer software packages used by farmers to manage their business are also owned by multinational companies. No one is suggesting that farmers should not be allowed to use these computer programs.
Our farmers would not be among the world's best if the only technology they had access to was that owned by other Australians.
Victorian Labor MP Tammy Lobato has warned that the introduction of GM crops "would mean the end of agriculture as we know it". And she's right. Agriculture is continuously changing and every year the process of farming is different from the year before. GM technology is an improvement that should be welcomed -- not feared.
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