Right, that’s it. No more paying through the nose for sun-dried tomatoes. I am boycotting Waitrose and I urge others to do the same. I am not buying my groceries from a company which has caved into the unscientific balderdash coming from the anti-GM lobby. Waitrose has just announced that it will no longer use GM feed on its farms.
I am not usually one for boycotts, but the only way anyone is going to defeat the anti-GM brigade is to play it at its own game. Britain should have been a world leader in GM technology. In the late 1990s we had the minds to develop and grow it. Instead, it was squashed by scare stories spread by environmentalists, who claimed that GM food was going to give us cancer and lead to the countryside being gobbled up by cross-pollinated superweeds.
The claims were laughable – not least because many GM crops on farms are engineered to be sterile, and are incapable of cross-pollinating with anything. When the subject is climate change, the green lobby never stops telling us that we must all accept the weight of scientific opinion, and that failure to do so is equivalent to being a flat-Earther. Yet change the subject to GM foods and the green lobby doesn’t want to know about the science at all. They still expect us to believe that GM crops will make us ill and ruin the environment – in spite of the vast weight of scientific work establishing that they are safe. The 1998 study which claimed GM potatoes suppressed the immune systems of rats was discredited years ago. Yet some greens still trawl it up (in spite of many of them professing to be against the use of animals in scientific experiments, which ought to put them on the side of the mice rather than Dr Pusztai, whom they treat as a folk hero).
The result of green lobbying, combined with a feeble response from the government, is that the technology has gone to the US, and we have ceded any kind of leadership. But if you think that means British stomachs have been ‘protected’ from GM, think again. Much processed food contains GM soya grown in the US and Canada. We eat it – without growing two heads – but we can’t profit from the technology.
The big supermarkets feebly gave into the anti-GM brigade nearly two decades ago, and tried to eliminate what GM foods they could from their shelves. But in recent years they have eased their bans, seeing how illogical they are. Waitrose, however, has decided to give in and feed animals on its farms only with conventionally-grown feed. It won’t bring back Britain’s GM industry but it is time to make a stand. Boycott Waitrose.
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