And Another Thing

Walter Ellis

What an ill-informed,and ill-natured, buffoon!

ian skidmore

well said. Global changes of weather are cyclical. In the 17ty cenury there was a wiunte so cold birds were freexing to the trees on wh9ch hey perched. In the Middle Ages we had grape harvests

William

Perfect reading, as usual. May I say sir that your column is why I read the Spectator, along with Taki's with his very direct style of common sense. Will we ever know what it was like to live in St Lawrence's day or in the Middle Ages? The overwhelming impression is that it would be much the same, though our lords and masters then also bowed down to God, together with priests, in the same direction (bowing to the altar not the priest), and our perception of the passage of time would perhaps be different. Unfortunately the godless, Soviet ideal whose theories of permanent revolution, "change" i.e. destruction, mass migrations, complete disregard for human life, etc. are still with us.

I believe there is a danger from chemically-altered, GM foods in the way there is from nuclear power. Things can go wrong. I feel Prince Charles is sensible to be cautious, as was the Church faced with Galileo. If less money, effort and intelligence had been spent on the atomic bomb and more on conventional, more efficient, warfare perhaps we might have been able to save Poland and other Christian states from the Soviets -- as it is Poland was ravaged by Hitler and by Stalin (twice) We failed them miserably, possibly for the sake of the arms race per se. And there would certainly have been more to spend on improving the speed and efficiency of the American navy and air-force in the Pacific.

Could the same be said of GM? Could the vast amounts spent on research for a potential “global food weapon” be better spent on local development (charity not loans)? If the world economy allowed poor farmers land and subsistence, markets and training, instead of destroying their cultures by forcing them to migrate and survive in a single monolithic “global” economy, then they could feed themselves, without recourse to Monsanto and other multinational concerns born (I believe) from the US defence complex, who are probably not exactly developing GM crops for the benefit of foreign peasants. Our Industrial Revolution was also on a national or local scale. We didn’t have to beg from faceless men thousands of miles away. We were not threatened by atomic bombs, Chernobyl or Union Carbide slaughter as at Bhopal. I am not a Luddite. I think the USA and Britain should quickly develop clean energy from coal and work to increase the efficiency of solar power. I don’t necessarily believe man is responsible for global warming, but he is obviously responsible for awful pollution and his own quality of life.

You will say that there will always be saints and always those to persecute them, and there will always be those who suffer. I agree. You make St Lawrence’s choices and fate very clear. However, again, what would he say today? Would he side with the Christians or Valerian today -- the poor or the powerful? Tolstoy and Tagore both sided with the poor. I cannot imagine Tagore encouraging his peasant friends to become indentured labourers or factory workers abroad. St Lawrence took the food to the poor. He didn’t lead an army of starving citizens or peasants into a foreign unknown and expect them to pay him back.

drg

Your comments on the green movement are quite correct. Much of Africa and India starved through the 1950s and 1960s and there was a food emergency. Thus came the green revolution. Through the introduction of semidwarf genes into wheat, more fertiliser was applied to wheat crops, without lodging and yields went up and up.

Now is the time for the next revolution and that is genetically modified crops. Most wheat grown in the world today has some rye DNA in it or wheatgrass DNA and this foreign DNA caries disease resistant genes. We have blindly accepted these harmless modifications and of course the foreign DNA does not necessarily provide disease resistance alone, it is possible that other genes are introduced which affect flour colour and may cause allegic responses in humans who eat the flour. At least with the new technologies which have seen the development of glyphosate tolerant crops, the foreign DNA that is transferred is thoroughly understood.

I thought you should have called the environmentalists a bunch of Luddites, although I can think of several more appropriate terms.

Biofuels have a small place and very minor role to play, but in a short time they will go away. The Reverend Malthus scared the shit out of a lot of people for a short time and then everybody got on with getting rich and fat. It is curious that his theory is still given time in university lecture halls and in the press.

Similarly the Club of Rome scared quite a few people but we all got on with living quite well; and the reality is that we actually need a large population to maintain our happy quality of life. I understand that Italy has a population shortage. It is likely that the members of thewestern world will compete for immigrants in the very near future.

Inland Australia has problems finding both dentists and medical practioners, and there is a problem finding teachers and nurses to staff schools and hospitals beyond the major urban centres of Australia.