Prince Charles, that noted organic food producer whose food is a bit expensive for the normal tastes of a "credit crunched" UK population has spoken out today against GM foods.
If Prince Charles was not making millions from organic foods and therefore had a vested interest in being anti GM, then I might take him seriously, but his outburst has actually made me angry.
He talks of food security being the number one concern making out he has his finger on the issue, but ignores the fact that organic farmers, like him, cannot provide enough food to feed everyone in this country and even if they could supply it it would be too expensive for the masses to be able to purchase. Just today it has been on the news that an organic farming co-operative that provides organic foods packages to be delivered to people homes in Cambridge has seen a decline of 25% in the number of subscribers because of the credit crunch.
Of course, Prince Charles does not have to worry about getting enough food in for his family (or cooking it for that matter). He grows it on his many thousands of acres of land and comes form one of the richest families in the UK, so his privileged allows him to talk about the issue whilst others worry how they will feed their families, and not just UK citizens, but all those millions around the world who are starving do this each and every day of their lives.
I am not going to argue the merits of GM vs organic. All I know is that science should be allowed the chance to solve our food problems.
A rich privileged man in this case fails to address the point that food is a right not a privilege.
2 comments:
He's speaking the truth about food security.
Science can't solve what is purely an economic problem - food prices were artificially low because of industrialised nations over producing (and even receiving subsidies to do so), so farmers in poorer nations switched from growing food to cash crops.
When the price of food increased again there were no local crops, the cash crops were increasingly expensive to raise and less profitable and food has to be imported.
GM won't help - and the only commercial GM crops are specifically designed for industrialised western farming and specifically linked to pesticides and other agrochemical products.
Just as the big pharma companies aren't interested in curing poor peoples diseases like malaria, they aren't interested in subsisdence farmers with no cash to spend on the seeds, pesticides, etc.
"Food is a right, not a privilege"
Interesting, in which way? In a country suffering a famine food indeed is a privilege, because the access to it is limited. If you mean that everybody ought to have food, that "right" is purely theoretical. In that way we, living in rich countries, are priviledged, because we have access (so far) to all food we need to survive.
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