Graham Harvey - The New Day Age
May 23, 2012 One of Britain's leading agricultural scientists fears we may be entering a new dark age. Professor Maurice Moloney – director of Rothamsted Research – is worried by green activist threats to trash a trial plot of GM wheat at the Hertfordshire research site. "We face the destruction of a technology that could not just help wheat production in Britain," he says, "but could boost crop yields elsewhere in the world."
Down here in Candleford we take a rather different view. We think that if there’s a new dark age being ushered in, it's because of the decisions made by Prof Moloney and the BBSRC – the funding body that appointed him. Rothamsted's chief responsibility is to conduct research aimed at improving our food security. Britain already has a secure food production system – it’s called the mixed farm. It's capable of producing large amounts of healthy food through biological processes. And it has an inbuilt resilience to climate change by virtue of its biological diversity.
A World Bank-funded study by more than 400 scientists around the world concluded that diverse farming systems like UK mixed farming were the most secure and effective way to feed the world, now and in the future (IAASTD, 2008). You might think –as we do – that a leading research station concerned with food security would concentrate its energies on understanding and refining this established model. But under Professor Moloney, the scientists seem content to gamble our food security on an unproven and potentially unstable technology.
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