Fact: GM crops don’t increase yields, do have negative health impacts

Against all the evidence and in direct opposition to the recommendations of his Chief Scientist, Gordon Brown, like his predecessor, is being bamboozled by PR from the Agro biotech lobby that GM crops ‘can feed the world’.

Contrary to the claims of some government ministers that are ‘there are no scientific arguments’ against GM crops, there is a strong body of published evidence that shows GM crops do not increase yields and also indicating negative health impacts for livestock eating GM feed and potentially for humans consuming produce from those animals. This research is set out below.
But the main argument against GM crops is that they reinforce an outdated model of agriculture that is wholly unsuited for adapting to and contending with the conditions that climate change and more costly, scarcer oil bring for global food security.

Patrick Holden, Soil Association director said,
"The GM industry is desperate to prove it offers any benefits beyond the self-interested, commercial one of locking farmers into dependency on its own patented seeds and linked inputs of pesticides and fertilisers. The evidence after decades of claims is that GM crops are no better and often poorer in terms of yields, and more worryingly that there are real animal and human health concerns.

"GM’s greatest flaw is that it reinforces agriculture’s inherently unsustainable reliance on vast inputs of fossil-fuel derived inputs in the form of fertilisers and pesticides – which are becoming economically, as well environmentally unaffordable. Poor farmers in developing countries cannot afford expensive chemicals and even big arable producers in the UK question their viability as fertiliser costs double in price to over £350 a tonne.  GM crops will add to climate change, by requiring the added inputs of the same old chemical fertilisers that consume half of all the energy used in agriculture, so giving off vast amounts of damaging greenhouse gases.

"The Prime Minister would do better to listen to his Chief Scientist at Defra, Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the recent international agricultural assessment that concluded ‘business as usual is no longer an option’ and called for a shift to ‘agroecological’ food production. The assessment questioned GM’s claims to be the solution to global poverty, hunger or climate change and in contrast inclined towards organic, causing the GM representatives to storm out of the process."
soil association