Un film sur le thème «Livre voitures Anciennes françaises» sur YouTube

Le thème « Livre voitures Anciennes françaises » en vidéo par Noober

Disponible sur YouTube (), cette vidéo créée par Noober examine le thème « Livre voitures Anciennes françaises » et mérite que l’on en parle quelques minutes.

La plateforme YouTube regroupe toute sorte d’informations et de vidéos, avec des critiques détaillées, des présentation de thématiques et des analyses approfondies de la société.

La vidéo avait déjà enregistré quelques interactions lorsque nous l’avons regardée () . Le nombre de Likes indiquait: 6.

Nous retranscrivons ici la durée (00:51:52s), le titre (Conférence Oxford 2013 de Mark Lynas sur les OGM – Sous-titres français), et les commentaires fournis par l’auteur :
« Ayant participé à créer le mouvement anti-OGM dans les années 90, Mark Lynas revient dans cette conférence sur les raisons qui l’ont poussé à son revirement sur la question des biotechnologies, et les avantages environnementaux qu’elles peuvent apporter dans l’agriculture. ».

Vous trouverez la vidéo juste sous cette section

Choisir un ouvrage de qualité

Faire le choix d’un ouvrage de qualité sur les voitures anciennes implique de prendre en compte quelques critères fondamentaux :

1. L’Expertise des Auteurs: Il est important de choisir des ouvrages écrits par des experts reconnus, des historiens de l’automobile ou des journalistes spécialisés. Cela assure des recherches rigoureuses et des informations fiables.
2. Les Illustrations et la Qualité d’Édition: Un ouvrage sur les voitures anciennes prend de la valeur avec de belles illustrations. Optez pour des ouvrages bien illustrés, avec des photos qui saisissent l’essence des véhicules, leurs lignes et leur caractère. Une édition de qualité, avec une reliure solide et un papier de haute qualité, garantit un livre durable et agréable à lire.
3. Les Avis et les Critiques: Avant de faire un acquisition, il peut s’avérer utile de consulter les avis de lecteurs et les critiques. Les passionnés d’automobile partagent souvent leurs impressions en ligne, ce qui aide à déterminer si le livre est à la hauteur de vos attentes.

Une FAQ approfondie sur le choix d’un livre de voiture ancienne est désormais disponiblesur cette page. Chaque section vous orientera sur les critères essentiels à considérer.

Qu’est-ce qui rend certains ouvrages si onéreux ?

Pour réduire les coûts, tournez-vous vers les livres d’occasion. Les sites tels que Rakuten, eBay ou les librairies de seconde main sont de très bonnes sources pour dénicher des livres en bon état à des prix compétitifs. Les forums de passionnés et les groupes de collectionneurs peuvent aussi fournir des opportunités intéressantes.

Les meilleurs endroits pour acheter des livres de collection

Pour dénicher le bon livre, il est également important de considérer le point de vente. Voici quelques suggestions pour découvrir des ouvrages de qualité :

• Librairies Spécialisées et Salons de l’Automobile: Des librairies spécialisées dans l’automobile offrent des livres anciens et rares. De plus, les salons d’automobiles anciennes et les événements dédiés aux collectionneurs mettent souvent à disposition des ouvrages spécifiques.
• Sites de Collection et Plateformes en Ligne: AbeBooks, eBay, Amazon et Le Bon Coin regorgent de ouvrages, y compris des éditions d’occasion. Pour dénicher des éditions rares, tournez-vous vers les sites spécialisés ou les catalogues de bibliophilie.
• Bourses aux Livres et Bibliothèques: Certaines bibliothèques permettent d’emprunter des ouvrages rares, et les bourses aux livres offrent parfois des trouvailles à des prix attractifs.

Le Choix Optimal pour Chaque Amoureux des Voitures

Sélectionner un ouvrage sur les voitures anciennes est une joie qui contribue à enrichir votre collection ou à offrir un cadeau significatif. Que vous soyez tenté par une rétrospective ou un ouvrage axé sur un sujet particulier, il est crucial de prendre le temps de découvrir les diverses catégories de livres pour dénicher celui qui satisfera le mieux votre passion ou celle du destinataire. Les ouvrages de qualité, chargés d’histoire et d’illustrations, sont des trésors pour les passionnés de voitures anciennes et des souvenirs à chérir.

Les voitures anciennes, véritables œuvres d’art de l’histoire voiture, émerveillent par leur design, leur technologie, et leur impact culturel. De nombreux fans souhaitent approfondir leurs connaissances via des livres de collection, mais le marché est riche en options. Comment sélectionner le ouvrage idéal, que ce soit pour soi-même ou en tant que cadeau ? Ce guide vous guidera à travers les types d’livres, les endroits où les acheter et les prix.

Quel budget envisager pour un livre d’automobile ?

Un livre consacré aux voitures anciennes peut avoir des prix très différents, selon sa qualité et son édition :

• Livres Généralistes: Un bon ouvrage d’introduction peut se trouver entre 30 et 60 €.
• Ouvrages Spécialisés et Beaux Livres: Pour les éditions illustrées, comptez entre 80 et 200 euros.
• Livres de Collection et Éditions Limitées: Les livres de collection peuvent facilement dépasser les 200 euros, surtout s’ils sont rares.

Pourquoi certains ouvrages sont-ils si chers à l’acquisition ?

Les prix des livres de collection automobile peuvent apparaître élevés à cause de leur qualité d’édition et de leur valeur ajoutée. Les éditions limitées, les livres anciens ou signés sont prisés pour leur rareté. De plus, les ouvrages de luxe incluent fréquemment des photos et des documents exclusifs, des reliures en cuir ou des boîtiers, ce qui les rend très précieux pour les collectionneurs.

Pourquoi acheter un livre sur les voitures d’époque?

Leslivres dédiés aux voitures anciennesne sont pas simplement des sources d’information, mais aussi de véritablesobjets de collection. Certains livres contiennent des photographies exclusives, des dessins techniques, et des essais qui ne sont pas disponibles ailleurs. Avoir unlivre sur son modèle favoriou sur une époque particulière devient alors unplaisirqui transcende la simple lecture.

À l’époque numérique, chercher des informations sur lesvoitures anciennesen ligne peut sembler plus pratique. Cependant, pour les fans, leslivresrestent indispensables. Un livrebien documentéet illustré permet d’explorer l’histoire voitureen profondeur, offrant une qualité d’édition et un savoir-faire qui garantissent uneexpérience de lectureexceptionnelle. Contrairement aux ressources en ligne, souventincomplètesoudispersées, les ouvrages de collection fournissent desanalyses détaillées, souvent rédigées par desspécialistesou des journalistes du secteur.

Rétrospectives et livres spécialisés : Quels types sont disponibles ?

Les livres visuellement attrayants

Les splendides ouvrages sur les voitures anciennes sont souvent publiés en grand format et sont particulièrement appréciés pour leur qualité visuelle. Dotés de photographies en haute définition et d’images d’archives uniques, ces livres sont idéaux pour être affichés et consultés. Ce type de publication est très recherché tant pour son attrait esthétique que pour son contenu informatif.

Les rétrospectives voitures généralistes

Ces ouvrages offrent un aperçu de plusieurs décennies d’histoire voiture, englobant divers modèles issus de multiples marques, styles et époques. Ils regorgent d’informations précieuses et représentent une excellente introduction pour les novices ou ceux intéressés par l’évolution générale de l’automobile. Les rétrospectives bien illustrées proposent un panorama captivant et soulignent les avancées en matière de design, de technologie et de tendances. Ce genre de livre est parfait en tant quecadeau, car il attire un large public sans être trop ciblé.

Les livres consacrés à une marque ou un modèle particulier

Pour ceux qui aiment les voitures anciennes et qui sont particulièrement attachés à une marque ou à un modèle, un livre dédié peut être un excellent choix. Il existe de nombreux livres qui examinent de manière approfondie des marques prestigieuses comme Ferrari, Bugatti, Harley-Davidson ou la Citroën 2CV. Toutefois, ces ouvrages peuvent poser un problème pour un collectionneur averti : il se peut qu’il ait déjà ce livre en sa possession, ou qu’il ne couvre pas les aspects qui l’intéressent réellement. Si le destinataire a un goût pour une période ou un type de véhicule plus large, une rétrospective pourrait s’avérer plus adaptée.

Avant de procéder à unachat, il est important de bien connaître les différentes catégories d’livresexistants. Que ce soit pour vos propres besoins ou pour offrir uncadeau, certains livres seront plus appropriés.

Pour regarder la vidéo directement sur YouTube, cliquez sur ce lien :
la source: Cliquer ici

#Conférence #Oxford #Mark #Lynas #sur #les #OGM #Soustitres #français

Retranscription des paroles de la vidéo: now my Lords ladies and gentlemen I want to start with some apologies which I believe are most appropriate to this audience for the record here in upfront I want to apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops I’m also sorry that I helped start the anti GM movements back in the 90s and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can and should be used to benefit the environment as an environmentalist and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing I could not have chosen a more counterproductive path and I now regret it completely so I guess you’ll be wondering following on from what Mike said what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but actually come here and stand before you today and admit it well the answer is fairly simple I discovered science and in the process I hope I’m becoming a better environmentalist now to take you back to 1995 when I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly and immediately what I thought here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record putting something new and experimental into our food supply without telling us mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get here was humankind acquiring too much technological power something was bound to go horribly wrong these genes would spread like some kind of living pollution it was the stuff of nightmares now these fears spread like wildfire and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa India and the rest of Asia where GM is still banned today this was the most successful campaign that I’ve ever been involved with a lot more successful in the campaign against global warming this was also an explicitly anti science movement we employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life hence the Frankenstein foods tag which was a eagerly taken up by the Daily Mail of course this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used for unnatural and demonic ends what we didn’t realize at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not the gem technology that our reaction against it for me this anti science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro science environmentalism with regards to climate change I published my first book on global warming in 2004 and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes it was basically a travelogue going around the world looking at the impacts of climate change so for example I had to back up my story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glasses in the Peruvian Andes with long-term records of the mass bounce mass balances of mountain glaciers around the world and that meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers understand basic science statistics and become a bit more literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleo climate none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with an enormous amount I found myself arguing constantly with people who I consider to be incorrigibly anti science because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologist and they denied the scientific reality of climate change and sorry lectured them about the value of peer review about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals now my second book six degrees was so sciences that even won the Royal Society science books prize and climate scientists have become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than they did and yet incredibly at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in The Guardian attacking the science of GM even though I’d done no academic research on the topic and had a very limited personal understanding I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or any aspect of plant science even at this late stage and I’m ashamed to admit it now obviously this contradiction was untenable in the long term what really threw me actually were some of the comments underneath my final antigen piece in The Guardian one particular critic said to me in the comments so you’re opposed to GM on the basis it’s marketed by big corporation are you also opposed to the wheel because it’s marketed by the big auto companies and thought well that’s an interesting analogy so I so I did some reading and I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals it turned out that pest resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide I’d assume the GM benefited only the big companies it turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers around the world especially in developing countries who needed fewer inputs I’ve assumed that Terminator technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed turned out the hybrids did that long ago and the Terminator never actually happened I’d assume that no one wanted GM actually what happened was the bt cotton was pirated into India and Roundup Ready soy was pirated into Brazil because farmers are so eager to use them I’ll assume that GM was dangerous it turned out it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example GM just moves a couple of genes whereas conventional breeding marks about with the entire genome in a trial-and-error way but what about mixing genes between unrelated species there the fish in the tomato for instance it turns out viruses do that all the time must do plants and insects and even us it’s called gene flow but this was still only the beginning so in my third book the god species i junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale and this is the challenge that faces us today as I saw it we’re going to have to feed nine point five billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land areas we use today using limited fertilizer water pesticides and in the context of a rapidly changing climate so let’s unpack this a bit I know in a previous year’s lecture at this conference there was the topic of population growth and this area too is beset by a number of myths people think that high rates of fertility in the developing world are the big issue in other words that poorer people are essentially having too many children and therefore we either need family planning or something even more drastic like mass one-child policies the reality is that global average fertility is down to 2.5 and if you consider that natural replacement is 2.2 this figure is not very much above that so where is the massive population growth coming from it’s coming because of declining infant mortality more of today’s youngsters are growing up to have their own children rather than dying of preventable diseases in early childhood the rapid decline in infant mortality is one of the best news stories of our decade in the heartland heartland of this great success story is in sub-saharan Africa it’s not that there are legions more children being born in fact in the words of hands rustling we are already at peak child that is there’s about 2 billion children alive today and there will never be more in absolute terms because of this declining average fertility rate but so many more of these 2 billion children will survive into adulthood today to have their own children these are the parents of the young adults of 2015 that’s the source of this 9.5 billion un population projection for 2015 and you don’t have to have lost a child god forbid or even be a parent to know that declining infant mortality is absolutely a good thing so how much food well all these people need according to the latest projections published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences we’re looking at a global demand increase of well over a hundred percent by mid-century by 2050 this is almost entirely down to GDP growth especially in developing countries in other words we need to produce more food not just to keep up with population but because poverty is gradually being eradicated along with the widespread malnutrition that still means that close to 800 million people go to bed hungry each night and I would challenge anyone in a rich country to say that this GDP growth in poor countries is a bad thing but as a result of this growth we have very serious environmental challenges to tackle land conversion is the large source of greenhouse gases perhaps the greatest source of biodiversity loss this is another reason why intensification and sustainable intensification thing today’s buzz word buzz phrase is essential we have to grow more on limited land in order to save the rainforest and the remaining natural habitats from going under plow we also have to deal with limited water not just depleting aquifers which are a serious problem in some parts of the world but also the droughts which are expected to strike with increasing intensity and frequency in the agricultural heartlands of the great continents thanks to climate change if we take more water from the rivers of course where we accelerate biodiversity loss in these fragile habitats we also need to better manage nitrogen use artificial fertilizer is essential to feed humanity and let no one deny it but it’s inefficient use means that we see dead zones spreading around the world 20,000 acres of the Gulf of Mexico 20,000 square kilometres rather of the Gulf of Mexico every year is now a dead zone and the same process is happening in many coastal areas around the world and habitats and freshwater habitats which is subject to eutrophication now it’s not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve all of our problems we have to be much more activist and much more strategic than that we have to ensure that technical technological innovation moves much more rapidly and in the right direction for those who most need it in a sense we’ve been here before when Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in 1968 he wrote and I quote the battle to feed all of humanity is over in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs that barked upon now that’s a very famous quote you probably all many of you heard it before and his advice and the advice of many other Malthusian at the time was explicit in basket-case countries like India people might as well starve sooner rather than later and therefore food aid to them should be eliminated to reduce future population growth now by the way it was not preordained that Ehrlich would be wrong in fact if everyone had heeded his advice then perhaps hundreds of millions of people might well have died needlessly but in the event malnutrition was cut dramatically and India became food self-sufficient thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution now it’s important to recall that ballout was equally as worried about population growth as Paul early at Paul Ehrlich he just thought it was worth trying to do something about it he was a pragmatist because he believed in doing what was possible but he was also an idealist because it believes that people everywhere deserved and had the right to have enough to eat so what did Norman ballout do he turned to science and technology humans are at all making species from clothes to plows technology is primarily what distinguishes us from other Apes and much of this work that ballout did and with it with his companions was focused on the genome of major domesticated crops if wheat for example could be shorter and put more effort into seed making rather than stalks than yields would improve and grain loss due to lodging would be minimized before ballout died in 2009 he spent many years campaigning against those like myself who for political and ideological reasons oppose modern innovation in agriculture to quote again he said if the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of biodiversity they’ve been predicting for nearly 40 years and you can guess who that was aimed at and thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns now spread from Africa affluent countries we’re perilously close to this position biotechnology has not been stopped but it has been made prohibitively prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations it now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries in fact the latest figures I picked up just two days ago from croplife suggest it costs 139 million dollars to move from discovering a new crop traits to full commercialization so obviously the open source and the public sector biotech approaches really don’t stand a chance and there’s a depressing irony here that the anti biotech campaigners complained about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they’ve done more than anyone else to help bring about in the EU the system is at a virtual standstill and many GM crops have been waiting a decade or more for approval but are permanently held up by the twisted domestic politics of anti biotech countries like Austria Germany in Frantz around the whole world the regulatory delay is increased to more than five and a half years now from three point seven years back in 2002 the bureaucratic burden is clearly getting worse all the time France remember long refused to accept the potato because it was an American import as one commentator put it recently Europe is on the verge of becoming a food museum and you will all be or many of you will be curators of this museum we well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming methods of the past because we have enough to eat we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions but at the same time the growth of yields worldwide has stagnated for many of the major food crops as research published only last month by John Foley and others in the journal Nature communications showed if we don’t get yield growth back on track we’re indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and the resulting increases in demand and prices will rise as well as more land will being converted from nature to agriculture to quote Norman Borlaug again he said I now say that the world has the technology either available or well advanced in the research pipeline to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people the more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology while the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra-low risk positions and pay for more pay for food produced by the so called organic methods the 1 billion chronically undernourished people of the low income food deficit nations cannot end of quote as Borlaug was saying perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better either for people or the environment the idea that it’s healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature we also know from many studies that organic is significantly less productive with up to 40 to 50 percent lower yields in terms of land area the Soil Association went to great lengths in a recent report on feeding the world with organic not too this productivity gap anywhere nor did it mention that overall if you take into account land displacement effects because of this productivity gap organic is also likely worse for biodiversity instead they talk about an ideal world where people in the West eat less meat and fewer calories overall so the people in developing countries can have more this is simplistic nonsense if you think about it the organic movement is at its heart a rejection this one it doesn’t accept many modern technologies on principle like the Amish in Pennsylvania who froze their technology in 1850 with the horse and cart the organic movement basically freezes ik technology somewhere around 1950 and for no better reason and it doesn’t even apply this idea consistently I was reading in a recent Soil Association magazine that it’s ok to blast weeds with flamethrowers or flop fried them with electric currents but benign herbicides like glyphosate are still a no-no because they are artificial chemicals now in reality there’s no reason at all why avoiding artificial chemicals should be better for the environment quite the opposite in fact recent research by Jesse Roosevelt and colleagues at Rockefeller University in the United States looked at how much extra farmland Indian farmers would have had to cultivate today using the technologies of 1961 to get today’s overall yield the answer is 65 million hectares which is an area the size of France in China maize farmers spared 120 billion 8 hectares an area twice the size of France thanks to modern technologies getting high yields on a global scale between 1961 and 9 2010 the area farmed grew by only 12 percent whereas kilocalories per person rose from 2200 to 2800 so even with 3 billion more people in that time period everyone still had more to eat thanks to a production increase of 300% over that same period and remember the area farmed grew by only 12% so how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements for which chemical inputs and modern farming played a crucial role the answer is three billion hectares or the equivalent of the land area of two South America’s there would be no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields nor would there be any Tigers in India or orangutangs left in Indonesia this is why I don’t understand why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists so what does this opposition come from there seems to be a widespread assumption that modern technology equals more risk in a kind of a priori sense actually there are many very natural and organic ways to face illness and early death as the debacle with Germany’s organic beansprouts showed perhaps into 2011 this by the way was a public health catastrophe with the same number of deaths and injuries as were caused by Chernobyl because e.coli probably from animal manure infected organic bean sprout seeds were imported from Egypt actually inside the seed in total fifty three people died in 3500 suffered serious kidney failure and why were these consumers choosing organic because they thought it was safer and healthier and they were scared of entirely trivial risks from highly regulated chemical pesticides and fertilizers and if you if you look at the situation without prejudice much of the debate both in terms of anti biotech and anti jeje Ehrman organic is simply based on the naturalistic fallacy the belief that natural is good and that artificial if you can define it is bad this is a fallacy because as I said there’s plenty of entirely natural poisons and ways to die as the relatives of those who died from the e coli poisoning an outbreak would tell you for organic the naturalistic fallacy is elevated into the central guiding principle for an entire movement this is irrational and we owe it to the earth and to our children to do better now before you come back at me and the questions it is not to say that organic farming has absolutely nothing to offer my parents are organic farmers in fact they approve this speech and there are but I do want to put on the record that I believe there are many good techniques which organic farmers have developed and deployed such as intercropping canned complained companion planting the principles of agro ecology such as recycling nutrients and promoting on-farm by diver dear ones which should be taken more seriously and will be taken more seriously everywhere but organic is in the way of progress when it refuses to allow innovation and again using GM is the most obvious example many third-generation GM crops allow us not to use these environmentally damaging chemicals because the genome of the crop in question has been altered so that the plant can protect itself against pests so question is why is that not organic organic is also in the way when it’s used as an excuse to take away choice from others one of the communist arguments against GM now is that organic farmers will be somehow contaminated note the use of that word with GM Pollan and therefore nobody anywhere should be allowed to use it so apparently the rights of a well-heeled minority which ultimately come down to a consumer preference based on aesthetics trump the rights of everyone else to use improve crop which would probably benefit the environment overall now again just to make very clear I’m all for a world of diversity but if that means one farming system claiming a monopoly of virtue and aiming it excluding all others that I’m not in favor of then why can’t we have peaceful coexistence this is particularly the case when it shackles us to old technologies which have probably higher inherent risks than the new now the biggest risk of all is that we do not take advantage of all thoughts of opportunities for innovation because of what is in reality little more than blind prejudice and let me give you two regrettable examples both involved in Greenpeace last year Greenpeace destroyed a GM crop wheat crop in fact in Australia for all the traditional reasons which I’m very familiar with having engaged in these activities myself and this was a crop which was being carried out a research which has been carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific Research Institute and so it’s public sector but no matter they were against it because it was GM and unnatural now what few people have since heard is that the other trials being undertaken in that same plot which Greenpeace activists would they’re strimmers luckily did not manage the destroy accidentally found a wheat yield increase of an extraordinary 30 percent just think this knowledge might never have been produced at all if Greenpeace have succeeded in destroying this innovation before we anyone heard about it as the president of the end of you Peter Kendall believes her today recently suggested this is analogous to burning books in a library before anyone had a chance to read them the second example comes from China where Greenpeace managed to trigger a national media panic by claiming that two dozen children had been used as human guinea pigs in a trial of GM Golden Rice as the secretary State mentioned this morning Golden Rice is in fact healthier and could save thousands of children from vitamin A deficiency related blindness and death each year what happened in reality now is that three of these three Chinese scientists named in the greenpeace press release were publicly hounded and have since lost their jobs and in an autocratic country like China they’re at serious personal risk internationally because of over-regulation sparked by NGO scare campaigns Golden Rice has been on the Shelf now for a decade and thanks to the activities of groups like Greenpeace it may never become available to Bitterman deficient poorer people this is to my mind immoral and inhumane depriving the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away who are in no danger of bitumen a shortage Greenpeace is a hundred million dollar a year multinational and as such it has moral responsibilities just like any other large company the fact that Golden Rice was developed in the public sector and for public benefit cuts no ice with the auntie’s take Rothamsted research whose director Morris Maloney is speaking to you tomorrow last year Rothamsted began a trial of aphid resistant GM wheat which would need no pesticides to combat this serious pest because its GM the auntie’s were determined to destroy it and they failed they failed because of the courage that Professor John Pickett and his team who took to YouTube and took to the media to tell the important story of why their research mattered and why it should not be destroyed they gathered thousands of signatures on the petition which the auntie’s when the auntie’s could only managed to garner a couple of hundred and they attempted destruction was a damp squib one intruder did manage to scale offense at a different point however who turned out to be the perfect stereotypical anti-gm protester and old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful path makes our own local democracy Blandford looked like the model of responsible citizenry this highborn activist scattered organic wheat seeds around the trial site and what was presumably a symbolic statement of naturalness professor Pickett’s team told me they had a very low-tech solution to getting rid of it they went around with a cordless portable Hoover to declare it up off the field and this year as well as repeating the wheat trial Rothamsted is working on a Amiga 3 and I hope I’m not stealing more is this thunder both saying this but they’re working on a omega-3 oil seed which could replace wild fish in in food farm salmon so this could help reduce overfishing of course by allowing land-based feed stocks to be used in aquaculture so yes its GM and expect the auntie’s to oppose this too despite the obvious potential benefits in terms of marine biodiversity so I don’t know about you but I’ve had enough and so my conclusion today is very clear the GM debate is over it is finished we no longer need to discuss whether or not it’s safe over a decade and a half with three million three trillion rather GM meals eaten has never been a single substantiated case of harm you’re more likely to get hit by an asteroid than you are to get hurt by eating GM food more to the point people have died from choosing organic as I mentioned earlier but no one has died from eating GM just as I did ten years ago Greenpeace in the sole Association and all the other NGOs like Friends of the Earth who were quoted in The Guardian this morning taking the same line they’ve taken for 15 years claimed to be guided by consensus science as they are as they claim on climate change yet on GM there’s a rock-solid scientific consensus backed by the American Association for the Advancement of science the the Royal Society health Institute’s medical institutes national science academies around the world and yet this Inconvenient Truth to coin a phrase is ignored because it conflicts with the ideology and the vested interests of these NGOs one final example which you’ve also heard about already this morning is the sad story of the GM blight resistant potato this is being developed by the Sainsbury laboratory and Chaya which is a publicly-funded institute in ireland but the irish green party whose leader often attends this very conference was so opposed that they even took out a court case to stop it this is despite the fact that the blight resistant potato would save farmers from doing 15 fungicide sprays per season that pollen transfer is not really an issue with potatoes because they’re totally propagated and that the offending gene which so against came from the wild relative of a potato who didn’t even come from a fish or anything now they would I think to my mind have been a nice historical resonance to having a blight resistance potato developed in Ireland given the million or more who died in the potato family in the mid 19th century it would in fact have been a wonderful thing for Ireland to be the country that defeated the blight but thanks to the Green Party this seems not to be the case and unfortunately the antes now have the bureaucrats on their side Wales and Scotland are officially GM free taking medieval superstition as a strategic imperative for the devolved government supposedly guided by science and they lose no opportunity to remind you of this it’s unfortunately much the same in in in most of Africa and Asia India recently rejected BT brinjal eggplants even though it would reduce insecticide applications in the field and residues therefore on the fruit the government in India is increasingly enthralled to backward-looking ideologues like Vandana Shiva who idealized pre industrial village agriculture despite the fact it was an age of repeated famines and structural and security for everyone in Africa no GM is still the motto for many governments Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed health risks they pose despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition which is still rampant in the country and malnutrition by the way is the proven health risk with no further evidence needed in Kenya I couldn’t believe this when I first heard it but in Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has higher nutrition or higher yield or something used to benefit poorer people you will go to jail for 10 years thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating burden of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk indeed the risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food but that millions will be harmed by not having enough to eat because of the vocal minority of people in rich countries who want to be who want their meals to be what they consider to be natural now I hope that things are beginning to change the wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave a grants of ten million dollars or pounds it may have been to the John Innes Center to begin efforts to integrate nitrogen-fixing capabilities into the world’s major food crops starting with maize yes Greenpeace this will be GM time for you to get over it if we’re going to reduce the global scale problem of nitrogen pollution then having major crop plants fixing their own nitrogen is surely a worthy goal and GM is probably the only way to achieve this now I know it’s politically incorrect to say this but I think we need a major dose of both International myth-busting and international deregulation the plant scientists I know hold their heads in their hands when I talk about this with them because governments and so many people have got their sense of risk so utterly back-to-front and awful closing a vitally necessary technology Norman Borlaug is dead now as I mentioned he died in 2009 he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize but I think we honor his memory in his vision when we refused to give in to politically correct orthodoxies when we know they’re wrong in points of fact the stakes are high if we continue to get this wrong the life prospects of billions of people will be harmed so I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination always ask for evidence as the campaigning group cents about science advises and make sure you go beyond the self referential reports of campaigning NGOs the most important of all farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt do you think the old ways are the best if you want to cut your fields with a scythe that’s fine you have that right I’m not going to oppose it what you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently and hopefully doing in better farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and the trials of a warming world who understand that yields per hectare are the probably the most important environmental metric and to understand that technology never stopped developing and that even the fridge and the humbo humble potato were new and scary ones so my message to the anti GM Lobby from the ranks of the British aristocracy and celebrity chefs to the u.s. foodies to the peasant groups of India is this you are entitled to your views but you must know by now that they are not supported by science we are coming to a crunch point and for the sake of both people and the planet now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably thank you very much mark thank you very much indeed for your presentation as I said at the beginning the Frank Parkinson lecture is supported to challenge our thinking and I think you’ll all agree with me mark has fully met that brief now I am sure there are a few questions the form here is really quite simple you try and attract the attention of one of the people who have the markers and I will come to you can we stick to questions and not political statements that’s going to be an interesting one and we’ll try and fit in as much as we can in the next 25 minutes or so so I go to microphone five first place John Neal from IgD first he can apologize for delivering some anti-gm leaflets in the year I think of 2000 or 99 in East Yorkshire thirteen years ago now learnt a lot since then but the more questions about development and population growth two things that are challenges to sustainability into feeding the world in the future I’ve heard before somebody puts forward the premise that development is actually one of the answers to population growth because families then don’t have to breathe lots of children to support them in old age so my question is from a sustainability point of view which is better thank you and from a sustainability point of view development is essential and it’s development which has led us to the stage now where we are seeing the democratic the demographic transition happen in so many countries even in countries like Bangladesh where GDP is still relatively low and fertility is down to 2.6 2.7 it’s it’s very close to natural replacement around the whole of the world which is why I think it’s important to to bust this myth that poor people are having too many children it will always be the case that people choose to have larger families in poorer countries in fact as as you see the processes both of GDP growth and of urbanization and of all of the life choices that people have when they’re in cities when they are in a higher income country where they’ve got more opportunities for jobs and for getting out of I mean they don’t necessarily all want to be subsistence farmers forever and people want different different job opportunities different life opportunities particularly if they’re female and and those all of those processes add up to the declining global fertility rate but as I said earlier on the fact that so many younger children are surviving because we’ve got in vastly improved health systems now in poorer countries that means that the population growth is absolutely there’s nothing you can do about it we’re going to see a population of nine point five billion perhaps ten billion by 2050 and all those people need to be fed and they need to be fed on improved eyes because they’re hopefully going to be wealthier and less potent in the process microphones three at the back there please thank you David hills from do fields animal feeds I think it’s a brave brave man these days to put their head above the parapet and start talking about GM and I’m very pleased today I hear those those charges we talked about today the challenge of feeding potentially 9 billion people how do we balance off the development of biofuels from feed that we are producing around the world with actually feed for human consumption very good question thank you for that and to my mind biofuels are generally an environmental and human rights disaster and where they’re taking feedstocks which could be good could be going either to feed animals I’m into the human food supply directly and convert them into and fuel for cars and make that observation particularly with regards to biodiesel made from palm oil and an easy assay or to ethanol which is checking up something like a third of the u.s. food and corn crop now there’s no doubt that would raise prices overall because it’s it’s reducing supply and that means that people in poorer countries are having to pay more for their food and there is increasing malnutrition perhaps directly related to to this increase in biofuels and it also doesn’t do anything to help climate change because of the land conversion the displacement effects that you see which will release more greenhouse gases in tropical forests as they’re cleared and so on and so forth and so I think it’s a very misguided policy there may be there may be room for some biofuels particularly there using waste products and so on so I’m not ruling this out a priori but I think biofuels using food crops are really really not sustainable and not sensible either it might find – over here what if we think about the message we’ve had 20 years trying to get approval to commercial release of GM plants in particular through the European Union advised by the best scientists available their advice is not always taken and we have very little to show for it should how can we change that process or should we be taking the opportunity which was offered some years ago to do more of the approvals at a national or member state level well I’ve heard talk that there is a derogation is that the right word from the from the EU bureaucracy where these decisions could be taken more at a national level I’m no expert on this but my understanding is that seeds new seeds have to be approved by the entire EU and I guess that’s because if you’ve got an if you’ve got an open market then all of the products need to be able to be sold within and all of the member countries without there being any sort of national barriers because some things GM or something something else so to that extent this does have to be rolled back it’s au level but I can’t see any reason why France and sorry why Wales and Scotland have to have a GM free status I mean that’s patently ridiculous I think if more ministers and secretaries of state go to the go to Brussels and and make this case and have a courage as you heard from the secretary this morning to make this case more openly without being worried about there being some kind of public backlash or backlash from the green NGOs then we can begin to roll back the regulations because it simply isn’t fair that crops which have been bred by some method which is probably safer have to be held up for 10 to 15 years by these unnecessary bureaucratic regulations which don’t apply to an equivalent crop with an identical genome which has been developed from different methods so it doesn’t it totally is fundamentally irrational even at the most basic level and I think for that reason and the rules will be changed and it’s the process now we have to all all help in in getting that right Oshin roll back at the front and then we’ll go over to number six and number four who was thank you good morning Stuart Eric you know I remember the European Parliament I sit on the Agriculture Committee with Mairead and we have conversations that we get on pretty well I think first of all thank you very much for your Damascus conversion I was one of the farmers who grew GM crops 12 11 years ago and was subjected to some of the sort of tyranny and intimidation that have forced many out of it so it really is very heartening to hear you say what you have I went to Rothamsted in May to help defend the crop there and I think everyone here would be interested to know that of the hundred and fifty people who are going to destroy that crop I would have said that half were foreigners bussed in and when they started singing they sang in French so that’s see that’s the good news on the other side of the coin Al Gore produced a film about ten years ago called An Inconvenient Truth in which he said that carbon dioxide levels were running and he had a thing called hockey stick graph and everything was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter because the carbon dioxide levels 1/3 of mo’ne sugar beet was killed frozen solid into the ground by global warming two years ago I also experienced the coldest wettest summer I’ve ever had I think since 1987 carbon dioxide levels and methane levels were high I don’t think they can be the drivers of this because of what actually happened so what is driving it thank you perhaps we avoid the French markings I think we can both be anti French we can agree on that even if we don’t agree on climate change I I think if you if you if you look at the fundamentals of this there’s no dispute and I’m sure you wouldn’t dispute that that carbon dioxide and methane a greenhouse gases and in an atmosphere without greenhouse gases and water vapors well of course and this planet would be on average I think minus 18 degrees centigrade and frozen solid so if other things remaining equal if you increase the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you’ll get a warmer planet and I think it’s fairly clear from satellite measurements and everything else that the planet is in energy imbalance and is therefore gaining heat overall on average now it doesn’t mean to say that you’re not going to see the usual fluctuations of weather include including very cold winters on occasion and in fact there’s some evidence that the Jetstream is responding to the disappearing Arctic sea ice by being frozen in particular loop configurations and so on and so forth which may in fact be responsible for some of the rather atrocious weather we’ve seen over the last summer and the last few winters as well and I don’t think that that you can accept science in one area not in another and that was the whole point of of what I was saying to you today so for me it was the fact that I accepted the the consensus on climate science and that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be dissent I think dissent is essential in science and I subscribe to a lot of the lists and I listen to a lot of the dissenting opinions on climate change so in no way does this exclude dissenting voices but if you want to take the the scientific consensus as your guide then you should do so equally for climate science as you do for for the science of biotechnology that was more or less my message number six over here David please David Beamer reading University I’m as a scientist as a scientist who worked on GM as a scientist who worked with Monsanto not for Monsanto I’m delighted but science is actually coming through in the GM debate I’ve also delighted to hear that we’re going to see more funding of science I look forward to that because there has been a considerable loss of the science base in the UK the agricultural science loss but Greenpeace and NGOs such them and and Friends of the Earth may no longer be your friends but they’re still there there’s still an amazing force what can you do to go can convince them that your conversion was right and they should follow your path good question again I I’d say this probably this is no longer the case but up until this morning Greenpeace was my friend and Friends of the earth – and I work with them and I have a lot of respect for a lot of the work they do so this isn’t to to rule out all all environmental NGOs again without any kind of question but their work the good work they do has to be balanced against the the bad work that they’ve done over the last decade or two which they need to I’m trying to get into a treat I think they’ve got themselves into a corner an unscientific corner on GM on on some very other specific areas as well but I think they’re dead on more or less with climate change one of the other controversial things I’ve done over the last few years is to have take a pro-nuclear role in the energy debate and actually one of one of the things that really gave me a lot of hope recently was that the nuclear industry in the wind industry so the low-carbon industries together were beginning to join up and Friends of the Earth and both Greenpeace were relatively supportive of that so I think they can be changes perhaps subtle changes at least at the outset in the positions that these NGOs take and one shouldn’t say that they are bad or out of order forever but I think we have to encourage them by a process of constructive engagement to say look the world has moved on you’ve got a bit left behind here but you can play catch-up and you can actually change in some areas you’re not the Vatican you’re not the Pope you know you don’t have to say the same thing for 2,000 years it’s been 15 now it’s time for a change the next religious question I suggest a tom number four please hi Tom he BBC food retailers supermarkets and manufacturers are extremely keen to sell their food through the natural image and then natural things on packaging and when could we see food retailers and supermarkets making science a positive ingredient in their food and having the bravery to do that and do they have a role in changing public opinion on the relative values of science versus nature in our food well another excellent question I think this I mean we could take as a as an example from the past to learn from the the issue of food irradiation which would have saved hundreds probably thousands of lives by killing bacteria which then people eat in their food because and this wasn’t again entirely down to the naturalistic fallacy people thought that their food would be radioactive in the supermarket aisles other things which should be very easy to to myth bust but weren’t and they they catch on because people have obviously people have a very intense personal and emotional connection with their food and a good thing too but that makes means that people are very susceptible to to these kinds of myths being propagated from people with with with very strong ideological agendas and I don’t think science science and and food are very uneasy bedfellows for that for that very reason and so I I think Menaul so of course the first generation of GM crops had no benefit for the consumer and they didn’t have much benefit for the environment either you know I don’t see Roundup Ready as being an enormous ly important environmental innovation but that’s not the case for some of the things which are coming through the pipeline now if you could have GM Amiga 3 all seeds grown on on in British farms which are then used to make the food which are then and sustainably farming salmon then you don’t have to go and Hoover up all of the small fish in the sea that’s something which delivers the benefit benefits to an environmentally conscious consumer and I hope and I believe that that the GM and science if they are deployed with those ends in mines would have a much more receptive audience than they do if they are deployed simply to to help the profits admittedly of some very large corporations that’s when that’s essentially the problem with the behold GM debate as it’s got into this ideological thing of your if you’re against big corporations than the big anti GM is a kind of proxy war for that and I think we have to take it apart which is why I’m so interested in supporting public sector initiatives on plant science mic microphone five please Emily Scott from University of Cambridge mark I was just wondering what your views are on the intellectual property issues and the sort of ownership issues that accompany the development of GM crops and what you think the role is of C companies in ensuring that the GM seeds that they create can remain affordable and accessible in the countries where they would be most useful another excellent question I think at a fundamental level there’s nothing wrong with intellectual property and we should agree that especially as I’m a writer and I don’t want you parroting my books because I want to get the royalties for them and so does anyone else who has intellectual property for something which they’ve creatively done whether it’s a technical invention or something different and and there is an incentive to develop new things if you have the IPR down the line where you’re going to get some kind of financial reward from that then perhaps you can consider that an investment so if you take away intellectual property completely from the picture then you are going to have a disincentive for innovation and for technological progress and on the other hand there’s a lot being done in the public sector and which is supported by the public sector which doesn’t need to have very restrictive IPR attached to it and Rothamsted made very clear with the GM wheat trial that that would be royalty-free and would be offered to farmers for their own benefit on that basis and I think that’s the same the same would be the case for a lot of the nutritionally enhanced or dried drought tolerant crops which being developed in in Africa for example most of that’s done in the public sector because these people don’t have any money and so there’s no great commercial advantage to anyone to do that and the states would have to be offered again not free of charge because nothing as well display of charge but at a reduced rate and I think there shouldn’t be any restrictions on farmers saving seed if that’s to their benefit although of course that hasn’t been the case with hybrids I mean everyone grows hybrid maize and you don’t save the seed because it won’t be true and so I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings about that too but I think we should all support and the the taxpayer-funded sectors here but the problem is that these things can’t be deployed as I said in Kenya you’ll do ten years in jail if you take it out of the laboratory into the field and the same is the case I find it difficult to imagine Rothamsted GM wheat being used in the fields in Britain and over the next five years I hope we can change that but there’s not much point in developing these things if you can never use them microphone one down here please Martin talk with the RSPB and the NGOs have taken a bit of a kicking this morning for many speakers I thought someone ought to speak up anyway and one of the roles I think avenges is to put its spotlights on Inconvenient Truth so I think you have done that this morning also for the record you say the RSPB did support the GM farm scale evaluation trials so I’ve got a little bit of a halo this morning but much of the debate has thus far focused on the desire HAP’s understandably to increase yields but there are other inconvenient truths out there about the fact there are a billion people who are currently obese and that every night of billion children go to bed hungry despite the fact that there is enough food currently being produced to feed the world so I wonder if you want to comment on issues of overconsumption and indeed access to food for people in developing world yes in particular the food security issue in the developing world and if you look at the the yield gap that you see between the major food crops as they’re grown in sub-saharan Africa and places like China India or the u.s. it’s enormous I mean the yields that they’re getting our 1/10 of what of what what they should be getting even with fairly depleted soils that they have and if you could increase the productivity of those small-scale farmers there would be a additional benefit in terms of food security and poverty reduction there’s no doubt about that and you know if you only doubled the the yields of or the productivity of crops and sub-saharan Africa the continent would be food exporting and in given that people are subsidies are people who are living subsistence lifestyles they are eating their own food productivity actually does matter for their food security probably more than anything else and it’s simplistic to say well these people in this continents are eating more and eating too much and these people in this contents are eating too little I mean it’s not that you can truck all of these extra calories across the Atlantic and somehow make a real difference this food is traded through the market and there’s a whole lot of other economic factors which are at play there too so that the the only way really in the longer term where food security will be protected is through increasing GDP growth and accelerating the the economic prospects of these countries luckily that’s the prospect which is already well underway and in fact rates of malnutrition have plummeted over the last 10 or 20 years largely in Asia but also increasingly now in sub-saharan Africa thanks to these innovations and again I should make absolutely clear GM is just one of a whole panoply of different options and but it should be an option it shouldn’t be discounted on some kind of a rational basis but it’s not I’m not saying either this is a silver bullet mark talking about nutrition we have to move into lunch would you just all join me again please in thank you thank you mark [Applause] .

Déroulement de la vidéo:

0.03 now my Lords ladies and gentlemen I want
0.03 to start with some apologies which I
0.03 believe are most appropriate to this
0.03 audience for the record here in upfront
0.03 I want to apologize for having spent
0.03 several years ripping up GM crops I&;m
0.03 also sorry that I helped start the anti
0.03 GM movements back in the 90s and that I
0.03 thereby assisted in demonizing an
0.03 important technological option which can
0.03 and should be used to benefit the
0.03 environment as an environmentalist and
0.03 someone who believes that everyone in
0.03 this world has a right to a healthy and
0.03 nutritious diet of their choosing I
0.03 could not have chosen a more
0.03 counterproductive path and I now regret
0.03 it completely so I guess you&;ll be
0.03 wondering following on from what Mike
0.03 said what happened between 1995 and now
0.03 that made me not only change my mind but
0.03 actually come here and stand before you
0.03 today and admit it well the answer is
0.03 fairly simple
0.03 I discovered science and in the process
0.03 I hope I&;m becoming a better
0.03 environmentalist now to take you back to
0.03 1995 when I first heard about Monsanto&;s
0.03 GM soya I knew exactly and immediately
0.03 what I thought here was a big American
0.03 corporation with a nasty track record
0.03 putting something new and experimental
0.03 into our food supply without telling us
0.03 mixing genes between species seemed to
0.03 be about as unnatural as you can get
0.03 here was humankind acquiring too much
0.03 technological power something was bound
0.03 to go horribly wrong these genes would
0.03 spread like some kind of living
0.03 pollution it was the stuff of nightmares
0.03 now these fears spread like wildfire and
0.03 within a few years GM was essentially
0.03 banned in Europe and our worries were
0.03 exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and
0.03 Friends of the Earth to Africa India and
0.03 the rest of Asia where GM is still
0.03 banned today this was the most
0.03 successful campaign that I&;ve ever been
0.03 involved with a lot more successful in
0.03 the campaign against global warming this
0.03 was also an explicitly anti science
0.03 movement we employed a lot of imagery
0.03 about scientists in their labs cackling
0.03 demonically as they tinkered with the
0.03 very building blocks of life
0.03 hence the Frankenstein foods tag which
0.03 was a eagerly taken up by the Daily Mail
0.03 of course this absolutely was about
0.03 deep-seated fears
0.03 of scientific powers being used for
0.03 unnatural and demonic ends what we
0.03 didn&;t realize at the time was that the
0.03 real Frankenstein&;s monster was not the
0.03 gem technology that our reaction against
0.03 it for me this anti science
0.03 environmentalism became increasingly
0.03 inconsistent with my pro science
0.03 environmentalism with regards to climate
0.03 change I published my first book on
0.03 global warming in 2004 and I was
0.03 determined to make it scientifically
0.03 credible rather than just a collection
0.03 of anecdotes it was basically a
0.03 travelogue going around the world
0.03 looking at the impacts of climate change
0.03 so for example I had to back up my story
0.03 of my trip to Alaska with satellite data
0.03 on sea ice and I had to justify my
0.03 pictures of disappearing glasses in the
0.03 Peruvian Andes with long-term records of
0.03 the mass bounce mass balances of
0.03 mountain glaciers around the world and
0.03 that meant I had to learn how to read
0.03 scientific papers understand basic
0.03 science statistics and become a bit more
0.03 literate in very different fields from
0.03 oceanography to paleo climate none of
0.03 which my degree in politics and modern
0.03 history helped me with an enormous
0.03 amount
0.03 I found myself arguing constantly with
0.03 people who I consider to be incorrigibly
0.03 anti science because they wouldn&;t
0.03 listen to the climatologist and they
0.03 denied the scientific reality of climate
0.03 change and sorry lectured them about the
0.03 value of peer review about the
0.03 importance of scientific consensus and
0.03 how the only facts that mattered were
0.03 the ones published in the most
0.03 distinguished scholarly journals now my
0.03 second book six degrees was so sciences
0.03 that even won the Royal Society science
0.03 books prize and climate scientists have
0.03 become friendly with would joke that I
0.03 knew more about the subject than they
0.03 did and yet incredibly at this time in
0.03 2008 I was still penning screeds in The
0.03 Guardian attacking the science of GM
0.03 even though I&;d done no academic
0.03 research on the topic and had a very
0.03 limited personal understanding I don&;t
0.03 think I&;d ever read a peer-reviewed
0.03 paper on biotechnology or any aspect of
0.03 plant science even at this late stage
0.03 and I&;m ashamed to admit it now
0.03 obviously this contradiction was
0.03 untenable in the long term what really
0.03 threw me actually were some of the
0.03 comments underneath my final antigen
0.03 piece in The Guardian one particular
0.03 critic said to me in the comments so
0.03 you&;re opposed to GM on the basis it&;s
0.03 marketed by big corporation
0.03 are you also opposed to the wheel
0.03 because it&;s marketed by the big auto
0.03 companies and thought well that&;s an
0.03 interesting analogy so I so I did some
0.03 reading and I discovered that one by one
0.03 my cherished beliefs about GM turned out
0.03 to be little more than green urban myths
0.03 I&;d assumed that it would increase the
0.03 use of chemicals it turned out that pest
0.03 resistant cotton and maize needed less
0.03 insecticide I&;d assume the GM benefited
0.03 only the big companies it turned out
0.03 that billions of dollars of benefits
0.03 were accruing to farmers around the
0.03 world especially in developing countries
0.03 who needed fewer inputs I&;ve assumed
0.03 that Terminator technology was robbing
0.03 farmers of the right to save seed turned
0.03 out the hybrids did that long ago and
0.03 the Terminator never actually happened
0.03 I&;d assume that no one wanted GM
0.03 actually what happened was the bt cotton
0.03 was pirated into India and Roundup Ready
0.03 soy was pirated into Brazil because
0.03 farmers are so eager to use them I&;ll
0.03 assume that GM was dangerous it turned
0.03 out it was safer and more precise than
0.03 conventional breeding using mutagenesis
0.03 for example GM just moves a couple of
0.03 genes whereas conventional breeding
0.03 marks about with the entire genome in a
0.03 trial-and-error way but what about
0.03 mixing genes between unrelated species
0.03 there the fish in the tomato for
0.03 instance it turns out viruses do that
0.03 all the time must do plants and insects
0.03 and even us it&;s called gene flow but
0.03 this was still only the beginning so in
0.03 my third book the god species i junked
0.03 all the environmentalist orthodoxy at
0.03 the outset and tried to look at the
0.03 bigger picture on a planetary scale and
0.03 this is the challenge that faces us
0.03 today as I saw it we&;re going to have to
0.03 feed nine point five billion hopefully
0.03 much less poor people by 2050 on about
0.03 the same land areas we use today using
0.03 limited fertilizer water pesticides and
0.03 in the context of a rapidly changing
0.03 climate so let&;s unpack this a bit I
0.03 know in a previous year&;s lecture at
0.03 this conference there was the topic of
0.03 population growth and this area too is
0.03 beset by a number of myths people think
0.03 that high rates of fertility in the
0.03 developing world are the big issue in
0.03 other words that poorer people are
0.03 essentially having too many children and
0.03 therefore we either need family planning
0.03 or something even more drastic like mass
0.03 one-child policies
0.03 the reality is that global average
0.03 fertility is down to 2.5 and if you
0.03 consider that natural replacement is 2.2
0.03 this figure is not very much above that
0.03 so where is the massive population
0.03 growth coming from it&;s coming because
0.03 of declining infant mortality more of
0.03 today&;s youngsters are growing up to
0.03 have their own children rather than
0.03 dying of preventable diseases in early
0.03 childhood the rapid decline in infant
0.03 mortality is one of the best news
0.03 stories of our decade in the heartland
0.03 heartland of this great success story is
0.03 in sub-saharan Africa it&;s not that
0.03 there are legions more children being
0.03 born in fact in the words of hands
0.03 rustling we are already at peak child
0.03 that is there&;s about 2 billion children
0.03 alive today and there will never be more
0.03 in absolute terms because of this
0.03 declining average fertility rate but so
0.03 many more of these 2 billion children
0.03 will survive into adulthood today to
0.03 have their own children these are the
0.03 parents of the young adults of 2015
0.03 that&;s the source of this 9.5 billion un
0.03 population projection for 2015 and you
0.03 don&;t have to have lost a child god
0.03 forbid or even be a parent to know that
0.03 declining infant mortality is absolutely
0.03 a good thing so how much food well all
0.03 these people need according to the
0.03 latest projections published last year
0.03 in the Proceedings of the National
0.03 Academy of Sciences we&;re looking at a
0.03 global demand increase of well over a
0.03 hundred percent by mid-century by 2050
0.03 this is almost entirely down to GDP
0.03 growth especially in developing
0.03 countries in other words we need to
0.03 produce more food not just to keep up
0.03 with population but because poverty is
0.03 gradually being eradicated along with
0.03 the widespread malnutrition that still
0.03 means that close to 800 million people
0.03 go to bed hungry each night and I would
0.03 challenge anyone in a rich country to
0.03 say that this GDP growth in poor
0.03 countries is a bad thing but as a result
0.03 of this growth we have very serious
0.03 environmental challenges to tackle land
0.03 conversion is the large source of
0.03 greenhouse gases perhaps the greatest
0.03 source of biodiversity loss this is
0.03 another reason why intensification and
0.03 sustainable intensification thing
0.03 today&;s buzz word buzz phrase is
0.03 essential we have to grow more on
0.03 limited land in order to save the
0.03 rainforest and the remaining natural
0.03 habitats from going under
0.03 plow we also have to deal with limited
0.03 water not just depleting aquifers which
0.03 are a serious problem in some parts of
0.03 the world but also the droughts which
0.03 are expected to strike with increasing
0.03 intensity and frequency in the
0.03 agricultural heartlands of the great
0.03 continents thanks to climate change if
0.03 we take more water from the rivers of
0.03 course where we accelerate biodiversity
0.03 loss in these fragile habitats we also
0.03 need to better manage nitrogen use
0.03 artificial fertilizer is essential to
0.03 feed humanity and let no one deny it but
0.03 it&;s inefficient use means that we see
0.03 dead zones spreading around the world
0.03 20,000 acres of the Gulf of Mexico
0.03 20,000 square kilometres rather of the
0.03 Gulf of Mexico every year is now a dead
0.03 zone and the same process is happening
0.03 in many coastal areas around the world
0.03 and habitats and freshwater habitats
0.03 which is subject to eutrophication now
0.03 it&;s not enough to sit back and hope
0.03 that technological innovation will solve
0.03 all of our problems we have to be much
0.03 more activist and much more strategic
0.03 than that we have to ensure that
0.03 technical technological innovation moves
0.03 much more rapidly and in the right
0.03 direction for those who most need it in
0.03 a sense we&;ve been here before
0.03 when Paul Ehrlich published the
0.03 Population Bomb in 1968 he wrote and I
0.03 quote the battle to feed all of humanity
0.03 is over in the 1970s hundreds of
0.03 millions of people will starve to death
0.03 in spite of any crash programs that
0.03 barked upon now that&;s a very famous
0.03 quote you probably all many of you heard
0.03 it before and his advice and the advice
0.03 of many other Malthusian at the time was
0.03 explicit in basket-case countries like
0.03 India people might as well starve sooner
0.03 rather than later and therefore food aid
0.03 to them should be eliminated to reduce
0.03 future population growth now by the way
0.03 it was not preordained that Ehrlich
0.03 would be wrong in fact if everyone had
0.03 heeded his advice then perhaps hundreds
0.03 of millions of people might well have
0.03 died needlessly but in the event
0.03 malnutrition was cut dramatically and
0.03 India became food self-sufficient thanks
0.03 to Norman Borlaug and his Green
0.03 Revolution now it&;s important to recall
0.03 that ballout was equally as worried
0.03 about population growth as Paul early at
0.03 Paul Ehrlich he just thought it was
0.03 worth trying to do something about it
0.03 he was a pragmatist because he believed
0.03 in doing what was possible but he was
0.03 also an idealist because it believes
0.03 that people everywhere deserved and had
0.03 the right to have enough to eat so what
0.03 did Norman ballout do he turned to
0.03 science and technology humans are at all
0.03 making species from clothes to plows
0.03 technology is primarily what
0.03 distinguishes us from other Apes and
0.03 much of this work that ballout did and
0.03 with it with his companions was focused
0.03 on the genome of major domesticated
0.03 crops if wheat for example could be
0.03 shorter and put more effort into seed
0.03 making rather than stalks than yields
0.03 would improve and grain loss due to
0.03 lodging would be minimized before
0.03 ballout died in 2009 he spent many years
0.03 campaigning against those like myself
0.03 who for political and ideological
0.03 reasons oppose modern innovation in
0.03 agriculture to quote again he said if
0.03 the naysayers do manage to stop
0.03 agricultural biotechnology they might
0.03 actually precipitate the famines and the
0.03 crisis of biodiversity they&;ve been
0.03 predicting for nearly 40 years and you
0.03 can guess who that was aimed at and
0.03 thanks to supposedly environmental
0.03 campaigns now spread from Africa
0.03 affluent countries we&;re perilously
0.03 close to this position biotechnology has
0.03 not been stopped but it has been made
0.03 prohibitively prohibitively expensive to
0.03 all but the very biggest corporations it
0.03 now costs tens of millions to get a crop
0.03 through the regulatory systems in
0.03 different countries in fact the latest
0.03 figures I picked up just two days ago
0.03 from croplife suggest it costs 139
0.03 million dollars to move from discovering
0.03 a new crop traits to full
0.03 commercialization
0.03 so obviously the open source and the
0.03 public sector biotech approaches really
0.03 don&;t stand a chance and there&;s a
0.03 depressing irony here that the anti
0.03 biotech campaigners complained about GM
0.03 crops only being marketed by big
0.03 corporations when this is a situation
0.03 they&;ve done more than anyone else to
0.03 help bring about in the EU the system is
0.03 at a virtual standstill and many GM
0.03 crops have been waiting a decade or more
0.03 for approval but are permanently held up
0.03 by the twisted domestic politics of anti
0.03 biotech countries like Austria Germany
0.03 in
0.03 Frantz around the whole world the
0.03 regulatory delay is increased to more
0.03 than five and a half years now from
0.03 three point seven years back in 2002 the
0.03 bureaucratic burden is clearly getting
0.03 worse all the time
0.03 France remember long refused to accept
0.03 the potato because it was an American
0.03 import as one commentator put it
0.03 recently Europe is on the verge of
0.03 becoming a food museum and you will all
0.03 be or many of you will be curators of
0.03 this museum we well-fed consumers are
0.03 blinded by romantic nostalgia for the
0.03 traditional farming methods of the past
0.03 because we have enough to eat we can
0.03 afford to indulge our aesthetic
0.03 illusions but at the same time the
0.03 growth of yields worldwide has stagnated
0.03 for many of the major food crops as
0.03 research published only last month by
0.03 John Foley and others in the journal
0.03 Nature communications showed if we don&;t
0.03 get yield growth back on track
0.03 we&;re indeed going to have trouble
0.03 keeping up with population growth and
0.03 the resulting increases in demand and
0.03 prices will rise as well as more land
0.03 will being converted from nature to
0.03 agriculture to quote Norman Borlaug
0.03 again he said I now say that the world
0.03 has the technology either available or
0.03 well advanced in the research pipeline
0.03 to feed on a sustainable basis a
0.03 population of 10 billion people the more
0.03 pertinent question today is whether
0.03 farmers and ranchers will be permitted
0.03 to use this new technology while the
0.03 affluent nations can certainly afford to
0.03 adopt ultra-low risk positions and pay
0.03 for more pay for food produced by the so
0.03 called organic methods the 1 billion
0.03 chronically undernourished people of the
0.03 low income food deficit nations cannot
0.03 end of quote
0.03 as Borlaug was saying perhaps the most
0.03 pernicious myth of all is that organic
0.03 production is better either for people
0.03 or the environment the idea that it&;s
0.03 healthier has been repeatedly disproved
0.03 in the scientific literature we also
0.03 know from many studies that organic is
0.03 significantly less productive with up to
0.03 40 to 50 percent lower yields in terms
0.03 of land area the Soil Association went
0.03 to great lengths in a recent report on
0.03 feeding the world with organic not too
0.03 this productivity gap anywhere nor did
0.03 it mention that overall if you take into
0.03 account land displacement effects
0.03 because of this productivity gap organic
0.03 is also likely worse for biodiversity
0.03 instead they talk about an ideal world
0.03 where people in the West eat less meat
0.03 and fewer calories overall so the people
0.03 in developing countries can have more
0.03 this is simplistic nonsense if you think
0.03 about it the organic movement is at its
0.03 heart a rejection this one it doesn&;t
0.03 accept many modern technologies on
0.03 principle like the Amish in Pennsylvania
0.03 who froze their technology in 1850 with
0.03 the horse and cart the organic movement
0.03 basically freezes ik technology
0.03 somewhere around 1950 and for no better
0.03 reason and it doesn&;t even apply this
0.03 idea consistently I was reading in a
0.03 recent Soil Association magazine that
0.03 it&;s ok to blast weeds with
0.03 flamethrowers or flop fried them with
0.03 electric currents but benign herbicides
0.03 like glyphosate are still a no-no
0.03 because they are artificial chemicals
0.03 now in reality there&;s no reason at all
0.03 why avoiding artificial chemicals should
0.03 be better for the environment quite the
0.03 opposite in fact recent research by
0.03 Jesse Roosevelt and colleagues at
0.03 Rockefeller University in the United
0.03 States looked at how much extra farmland
0.03 Indian farmers would have had to
0.03 cultivate today using the technologies
0.03 of 1961 to get today&;s overall yield the
0.03 answer is 65 million hectares which is
0.03 an area the size of France in China
0.03 maize farmers spared 120 billion 8
0.03 hectares an area twice the size of
0.03 France thanks to modern technologies
0.03 getting high yields on a global scale
0.03 between 1961 and 9 2010 the area farmed
0.03 grew by only 12 percent whereas
0.03 kilocalories per person rose from 2200
0.03 to 2800 so even with 3 billion more
0.03 people in that time period everyone
0.03 still had more to eat thanks to a
0.03 production increase of 300% over that
0.03 same period and remember the area farmed
0.03 grew by only 12% so how much land
0.03 worldwide was spared in the process
0.03 thanks to these dramatic yield
0.03 improvements for which chemical inputs
0.03 and modern farming played a crucial role
0.03 the answer is three billion hectares or
0.03 the equivalent of the land area of two
0.03 South America&;s there would be no Amazon
0.03 rainforest left today without this
0.03 improvement in yields nor would there be
0.03 any Tigers in India or orangutangs left
0.03 in Indonesia this is why I don&;t
0.03 understand why so many of those opposing
0.03 the use of technology in agriculture
0.03 call themselves environmentalists so
0.03 what does this opposition come from
0.03 there seems to be a widespread
0.03 assumption that modern technology equals
0.03 more risk in a kind of a priori sense
0.03 actually there are many very natural and
0.03 organic ways to face illness and early
0.03 death as the debacle with Germany&;s
0.03 organic beansprouts showed perhaps into
0.03 2011 this by the way was a public health
0.03 catastrophe with the same number of
0.03 deaths and injuries as were caused by
0.03 Chernobyl because e.coli probably from
0.03 animal manure infected organic bean
0.03 sprout seeds were imported from Egypt
0.03 actually inside the seed in total fifty
0.03 three people died in 3500 suffered
0.03 serious kidney failure and why were
0.03 these consumers choosing organic because
0.03 they thought it was safer and healthier
0.03 and they were scared of entirely trivial
0.03 risks from highly regulated chemical
0.03 pesticides and fertilizers and if you if
0.03 you look at the situation without
0.03 prejudice much of the debate both in
0.03 terms of anti biotech and anti jeje
0.03 Ehrman organic is simply based on the
0.03 naturalistic fallacy the belief that
0.03 natural is good and that artificial if
0.03 you can define it is bad this is a
0.03 fallacy because as I said there&;s plenty
0.03 of entirely natural poisons and ways to
0.03 die as the relatives of those who died
0.03 from the e coli poisoning an outbreak
0.03 would tell you for organic the
0.03 naturalistic fallacy is elevated into
0.03 the central guiding principle for an
0.03 entire movement this is irrational and
0.03 we owe it to the earth and to our
0.03 children to do better now before you
0.03 come back at me and the questions it is
0.03 not to say that organic farming has
0.03 absolutely nothing to offer my parents
0.03 are organic farmers in fact they approve
0.03 this speech and there are but I do want
0.03 to put on the record that I believe
0.03 there are many good techniques which
0.03 organic farmers have developed and
0.03 deployed such as intercropping canned
0.03 complained companion planting the
0.03 principles of agro ecology such as
0.03 recycling nutrients and promoting
0.03 on-farm by diver
0.03 dear ones which should be taken more
0.03 seriously and will be taken more
0.03 seriously everywhere but organic is in
0.03 the way of progress when it refuses to
0.03 allow innovation and again using GM is
0.03 the most obvious example many
0.03 third-generation GM crops allow us not
0.03 to use these environmentally damaging
0.03 chemicals because the genome of the crop
0.03 in question has been altered so that the
0.03 plant can protect itself against pests
0.03 so question is why is that not organic
0.03 organic is also in the way when it&;s
0.03 used as an excuse to take away choice
0.03 from others one of the communist
0.03 arguments against GM now is that organic
0.03 farmers will be somehow contaminated
0.03 note the use of that word with GM Pollan
0.03 and therefore nobody anywhere should be
0.03 allowed to use it so apparently the
0.03 rights of a well-heeled minority which
0.03 ultimately come down to a consumer
0.03 preference based on aesthetics trump the
0.03 rights of everyone else to use improve
0.03 crop which would probably benefit the
0.03 environment overall now again just to
0.03 make very clear I&;m all for a world of
0.03 diversity but if that means one farming
0.03 system claiming a monopoly of virtue and
0.03 aiming it excluding all others that I&;m
0.03 not in favor of then why can&;t we have
0.03 peaceful coexistence this is
0.03 particularly the case when it shackles
0.03 us to old technologies which have
0.03 probably higher inherent risks than the
0.03 new now the biggest risk of all is that
0.03 we do not take advantage of all thoughts
0.03 of opportunities for innovation because
0.03 of what is in reality little more than
0.03 blind prejudice and let me give you two
0.03 regrettable examples both involved in
0.03 Greenpeace last year Greenpeace
0.03 destroyed a GM crop wheat crop in fact
0.03 in Australia for all the traditional
0.03 reasons which I&;m very familiar with
0.03 having engaged in these activities
0.03 myself and this was a crop which was
0.03 being carried out a research which has
0.03 been carried out by the Commonwealth
0.03 Scientific Research Institute and so
0.03 it&;s public sector but no matter they
0.03 were against it because it was GM and
0.03 unnatural now what few people have since
0.03 heard is that the other trials being
0.03 undertaken in that same plot which
0.03 Greenpeace activists would they&;re
0.03 strimmers luckily did not manage the
0.03 destroy accidentally found a wheat yield
0.03 increase of an extraordinary 30 percent
0.03 just think this knowledge might never
0.03 have been produced at all if Greenpeace
0.03 have succeeded in destroying this
0.03 innovation
0.03 before we anyone heard about it as the
0.03 president of the end of you Peter
0.03 Kendall believes her today recently
0.03 suggested this is analogous to burning
0.03 books in a library before anyone had a
0.03 chance to read them the second example
0.03 comes from China where Greenpeace
0.03 managed to trigger a national media
0.03 panic by claiming that two dozen
0.03 children had been used as human guinea
0.03 pigs in a trial of GM Golden Rice as the
0.03 secretary State mentioned this morning
0.03 Golden Rice is in fact healthier and
0.03 could save thousands of children from
0.03 vitamin A deficiency related blindness
0.03 and death each year what happened in
0.03 reality now is that three of these three
0.03 Chinese scientists named in the
0.03 greenpeace press release were publicly
0.03 hounded and have since lost their jobs
0.03 and in an autocratic country like China
0.03 they&;re at serious personal risk
0.03 internationally because of
0.03 over-regulation sparked by NGO scare
0.03 campaigns Golden Rice has been on the
0.03 Shelf now for a decade and thanks to the
0.03 activities of groups like Greenpeace it
0.03 may never become available to Bitterman
0.03 deficient poorer people this is to my
0.03 mind immoral and inhumane depriving the
0.03 needy of something that would help them
0.03 and their children because of the
0.03 aesthetic preferences of rich people far
0.03 away who are in no danger of bitumen a
0.03 shortage Greenpeace is a hundred million
0.03 dollar a year multinational and as such
0.03 it has moral responsibilities just like
0.03 any other large company the fact that
0.03 Golden Rice was developed in the public
0.03 sector and for public benefit cuts no
0.03 ice with the auntie&;s take Rothamsted
0.03 research whose director Morris Maloney
0.03 is speaking to you tomorrow
0.03 last year Rothamsted began a trial of
0.03 aphid resistant GM wheat which would
0.03 need no pesticides to combat this
0.03 serious pest because its GM the auntie&;s
0.03 were determined to destroy it and they
0.03 failed they failed because of the
0.03 courage that Professor John Pickett and
0.03 his team who took to YouTube and took to
0.03 the media to tell the important story of
0.03 why their research mattered and why it
0.03 should not be destroyed they gathered
0.03 thousands of signatures on the petition
0.03 which the auntie&;s when the auntie&;s
0.03 could only managed to garner a couple of
0.03 hundred and they attempted destruction
0.03 was a damp squib one intruder did manage
0.03 to scale offense at a different point
0.03 however who turned out to be the perfect
0.03 stereotypical anti-gm protester and
0.03 old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful
0.03 path makes our own local democracy
0.03 Blandford looked like the model of
0.03 responsible citizenry this highborn
0.03 activist scattered organic wheat seeds
0.03 around the trial site and what was
0.03 presumably a symbolic statement of
0.03 naturalness professor Pickett&;s team
0.03 told me they had a very low-tech
0.03 solution to getting rid of it they went
0.03 around with a cordless portable Hoover
0.03 to declare it up off the field and this
0.03 year as well as repeating the wheat
0.03 trial Rothamsted is working on a Amiga 3
0.03 and I hope I&;m not stealing more is this
0.03 thunder both saying this but they&;re
0.03 working on a omega-3 oil seed which
0.03 could replace wild fish in in food farm
0.03 salmon so this could help reduce
0.03 overfishing of course by allowing
0.03 land-based feed stocks to be used in
0.03 aquaculture so yes its GM and expect the
0.03 auntie&;s to oppose this too despite the
0.03 obvious potential benefits in terms of
0.03 marine biodiversity so I don&;t know
0.03 about you but I&;ve had enough and so my
0.03 conclusion today is very clear the GM
0.03 debate is over it is finished we no
0.03 longer need to discuss whether or not
0.03 it&;s safe over a decade and a half with
0.03 three million three trillion rather GM
0.03 meals eaten has never been a single
0.03 substantiated case of harm you&;re more
0.03 likely to get hit by an asteroid than
0.03 you are to get hurt by eating GM food
0.03 more to the point people have died from
0.03 choosing organic as I mentioned earlier
0.03 but no one has died from eating GM just
0.03 as I did ten years ago Greenpeace in the
0.03 sole Association and all the other NGOs
0.03 like Friends of the Earth who were
0.03 quoted in The Guardian this morning
0.03 taking the same line they&;ve taken for
0.03 15 years claimed to be guided by
0.03 consensus science as they are as they
0.03 claim on climate change yet on GM
0.03 there&;s a rock-solid scientific
0.03 consensus backed by the American
0.03 Association for the Advancement of
0.03 science the the Royal Society health
0.03 Institute&;s medical institutes national
0.03 science academies around the world and
0.03 yet this Inconvenient Truth to coin a
0.03 phrase is ignored because it conflicts
0.03 with the ideology and the vested
0.03 interests of these NGOs one final
0.03 example which you&;ve also heard about
0.03 already this morning is the sad story of
0.03 the GM blight resistant potato this is
0.03 being developed by the Sainsbury
0.03 laboratory and Chaya
0.03 which is a publicly-funded institute in
0.03 ireland but the irish green party whose
0.03 leader often attends this very
0.03 conference was so opposed that they even
0.03 took out a court case to stop it this is
0.03 despite the fact that the blight
0.03 resistant potato would save farmers from
0.03 doing 15 fungicide sprays per season
0.03 that pollen transfer is not really an
0.03 issue with potatoes because they&;re
0.03 totally propagated and that the
0.03 offending gene which so against came
0.03 from the wild relative of a potato who
0.03 didn&;t even come from a fish or anything
0.03 now they would I think to my mind have
0.03 been a nice historical resonance to
0.03 having a blight resistance potato
0.03 developed in Ireland given the million
0.03 or more who died in the potato family in
0.03 the mid 19th century it would in fact
0.03 have been a wonderful thing for Ireland
0.03 to be the country that defeated the
0.03 blight but thanks to the Green Party
0.03 this seems not to be the case and
0.03 unfortunately the antes now have the
0.03 bureaucrats on their side Wales and
0.03 Scotland are officially GM free taking
0.03 medieval superstition as a strategic
0.03 imperative for the devolved government
0.03 supposedly guided by science and they
0.03 lose no opportunity to remind you of
0.03 this it&;s unfortunately much the same in
0.03 in in most of Africa and Asia India
0.03 recently rejected BT brinjal eggplants
0.03 even though it would reduce insecticide
0.03 applications in the field and residues
0.03 therefore on the fruit the government in
0.03 India is increasingly enthralled to
0.03 backward-looking
0.03 ideologues like Vandana Shiva who
0.03 idealized pre industrial village
0.03 agriculture despite the fact it was an
0.03 age of repeated famines and structural
0.03 and security for everyone in Africa no
0.03 GM is still the motto for many
0.03 governments Kenya for example has
0.03 actually banned GM foods because of the
0.03 supposed health risks they pose despite
0.03 the fact that they could help reduce the
0.03 malnutrition which is still rampant in
0.03 the country and malnutrition by the way
0.03 is the proven health risk with no
0.03 further evidence needed in Kenya I
0.03 couldn&;t believe this when I first heard
0.03 it but in Kenya if you develop a GM crop
0.03 which has higher nutrition or higher
0.03 yield or something used to benefit
0.03 poorer people you will go to jail for 10
0.03 years
0.03 thus desperately-needed
0.03 agricultural innovation is being
0.03 strangled by a suffocating burden of
0.03 regulations which are not based on any
0.03 rational scientific
0.03 assessment of risk indeed the risk today
0.03 is not that anyone will be harmed by GM
0.03 food but that millions will be harmed by
0.03 not having enough to eat because of the
0.03 vocal minority of people in rich
0.03 countries who want to be who want their
0.03 meals to be what they consider to be
0.03 natural now I hope that things are
0.03 beginning to change the wonderful Bill
0.03 and Melinda Gates Foundation recently
0.03 gave a grants of ten million dollars or
0.03 pounds it may have been to the John
0.03 Innes Center to begin efforts to
0.03 integrate nitrogen-fixing capabilities
0.03 into the world&;s major food crops
0.03 starting with maize yes Greenpeace this
0.03 will be GM time for you to get over it
0.03 if we&;re going to reduce the global
0.03 scale problem of nitrogen pollution then
0.03 having major crop plants fixing their
0.03 own nitrogen is surely a worthy goal and
0.03 GM is probably the only way to achieve
0.03 this now I know it&;s politically
0.03 incorrect to say this but I think we
0.03 need a major dose of both International
0.03 myth-busting and international
0.03 deregulation the plant scientists I know
0.03 hold their heads in their hands when I
0.03 talk about this with them because
0.03 governments and so many people have got
0.03 their sense of risk so utterly
0.03 back-to-front and awful closing a
0.03 vitally necessary technology Norman
0.03 Borlaug is dead now as I mentioned he
0.03 died in 2009 he was the recipient of the
0.03 Nobel Peace Prize but I think we honor
0.03 his memory in his vision when we refused
0.03 to give in to politically correct
0.03 orthodoxies when we know they&;re wrong
0.03 in points of fact
0.03 the stakes are high if we continue to
0.03 get this wrong the life prospects of
0.03 billions of people will be harmed so I
0.03 challenge all of you today to question
0.03 your beliefs in this area and to see
0.03 whether they stand up to rational
0.03 examination always ask for evidence as
0.03 the campaigning group cents about
0.03 science advises and make sure you go
0.03 beyond the self referential reports of
0.03 campaigning NGOs the most important of
0.03 all farmers should be free to choose
0.03 what kind of technologies they want to
0.03 adopt do you think the old ways are the
0.03 best if you want to cut your fields with
0.03 a scythe that&;s fine you have that right
0.03 I&;m not going to oppose it what you
0.03 don&;t have the right to do is to stand
0.03 in the way of others who hope and strive
0.03 for ways of doing things differently and
0.03 hopefully doing in better
0.03 farmers who understand the pressures of
0.03 a growing population and the trials of a
0.03 warming world who understand that yields
0.03 per hectare are the probably the most
0.03 important environmental metric and to
0.03 understand that technology never stopped
0.03 developing and that even the fridge and
0.03 the humbo humble potato were new and
0.03 scary ones so my message to the anti GM
0.03 Lobby from the ranks of the British
0.03 aristocracy and celebrity chefs to the
0.03 u.s. foodies to the peasant groups of
0.03 India is this you are entitled to your
0.03 views but you must know by now that they
0.03 are not supported by science we are
0.03 coming to a crunch point and for the
0.03 sake of both people and the planet now
0.03 is the time for you to get out of the
0.03 way and let the rest of the rest of us
0.03 get on with feeding the world
0.03 sustainably thank you very much
0.03 mark thank you very much indeed for your
0.03 presentation as I said at the beginning
0.03 the Frank Parkinson lecture is supported
0.03 to challenge our thinking and I think
0.03 you&;ll all agree with me
0.03 mark has fully met that brief now I am
0.03 sure there are a few questions the form
0.03 here is really quite simple
0.03 you try and attract the attention of one
0.03 of the people who have the markers and I
0.03 will come to you can we stick to
0.03 questions and not political statements
0.03 that&;s going to be an interesting one
0.03 and we&;ll try and fit in as much as we
0.03 can in the next 25 minutes or so so I go
0.03 to microphone five first place John Neal
0.03 from IgD first he can apologize for
0.03 delivering some anti-gm leaflets in the
0.03 year I think of 2000 or 99 in East
0.03 Yorkshire thirteen years ago now learnt
0.03 a lot since then but the more questions
0.03 about development and population growth
0.03 two things that are challenges to
0.03 sustainability into feeding the world in
0.03 the future I&;ve heard before somebody
0.03 puts forward the premise that
0.03 development is actually one of the
0.03 answers to population growth because
0.03 families then don&;t have to breathe lots
0.03 of children to support them in old age
0.03 so my question is from a sustainability
0.03 point of view which is better thank you
0.03 and from a sustainability point of view
0.03 development is essential and it&;s
0.03 development which has led us to the
0.03 stage now where we are seeing the
0.03 democratic the demographic transition
0.03 happen in so many countries even in
0.03 countries like Bangladesh where GDP is
0.03 still relatively low and fertility is
0.03 down to 2.6 2.7 it&;s it&;s very close to
0.03 natural replacement around the whole of
0.03 the world which is why I think it&;s
0.03 important to to bust this myth that poor
0.03 people are having too many children it
0.03 will always be the case that people
0.03 choose to have larger families in poorer
0.03 countries in fact as as you see the
0.03 processes both of GDP growth and of
0.03 urbanization and of all of the life
0.03 choices that people have when they&;re in
0.03 cities when they are in a higher income
0.03 country where they&;ve got more
0.03 opportunities for jobs and for getting
0.03 out of I mean they don&;t necessarily all
0.03 want to be subsistence farmers forever
0.03 and people want different different job
0.03 opportunities different life
0.03 opportunities particularly if they&;re
0.03 female
0.03 and and those all of those processes add
0.03 up to the declining global fertility
0.03 rate but as I said earlier on the fact
0.03 that so many younger children are
0.03 surviving because we&;ve got in vastly
0.03 improved health systems now in poorer
0.03 countries that means that the population
0.03 growth is absolutely there&;s nothing you
0.03 can do about it we&;re going to see a
0.03 population of nine point five billion
0.03 perhaps ten billion by 2050 and all
0.03 those people need to be fed and they
0.03 need to be fed on improved eyes because
0.03 they&;re hopefully going to be wealthier
0.03 and less potent in the process
0.03 microphones three at the back there
0.03 please thank you
0.03 David hills from do fields animal feeds
0.03 I think it&;s a brave brave man these
0.03 days to put their head above the parapet
0.03 and start talking about GM and I&;m very
0.03 pleased today I hear those those charges
0.03 we talked about today the challenge of
0.03 feeding potentially 9 billion people how
0.03 do we balance off the development of
0.03 biofuels from feed that we are producing
0.03 around the world with actually feed for
0.03 human consumption
0.03 very good question thank you for that
0.03 and to my mind biofuels are generally an
0.03 environmental and human rights disaster
0.03 and where they&;re taking feedstocks
0.03 which could be good could be going
0.03 either to feed animals I&;m into the
0.03 human food supply directly and convert
0.03 them into and fuel for cars and make
0.03 that observation particularly with
0.03 regards to biodiesel made from palm oil
0.03 and an easy assay or to ethanol which is
0.03 checking up something like a third of
0.03 the u.s. food and corn crop now there&;s
0.03 no doubt that would raise prices overall
0.03 because it&;s it&;s reducing supply and
0.03 that means that people in poorer
0.03 countries are having to pay more for
0.03 their food and there is increasing
0.03 malnutrition perhaps directly related to
0.03 to this increase in biofuels and it also
0.03 doesn&;t do anything to help climate
0.03 change because of the land conversion
0.03 the displacement effects that you see
0.03 which will release more greenhouse gases
0.03 in tropical forests as they&;re cleared
0.03 and so on and so forth and so I think
0.03 it&;s a very misguided policy there may
0.03 be
0.03 there may be room for some biofuels
0.03 particularly there using waste products
0.03 and so on so I&;m not ruling this out a
0.03 priori but I think biofuels using food
0.03 crops are really really not sustainable
0.03 and not sensible either it might find –
0.03 over here what if we think about the
0.03 message we&;ve had 20 years trying to get
0.03 approval to commercial release of GM
0.03 plants in particular through the
0.03 European Union advised by the best
0.03 scientists available their advice is not
0.03 always taken and we have very little to
0.03 show for it should how can we change
0.03 that process or should we be taking the
0.03 opportunity which was offered some years
0.03 ago to do more of the approvals at a
0.03 national or member state level well I&;ve
0.03 heard talk that there is a derogation is
0.03 that the right word from the from the EU
0.03 bureaucracy where these decisions could
0.03 be taken more at a national level I&;m no
0.03 expert on this but my understanding is
0.03 that seeds new seeds have to be approved
0.03 by the entire EU and I guess that&;s
0.03 because if you&;ve got an if you&;ve got
0.03 an open market then all of the products
0.03 need to be able to be sold within and
0.03 all of the member countries without
0.03 there being any sort of national
0.03 barriers because some things GM or
0.03 something something else so to that
0.03 extent this does have to be rolled back
0.03 it&;s au level but I can&;t see any reason
0.03 why France and sorry why Wales and
0.03 Scotland have to have a GM free status I
0.03 mean that&;s patently ridiculous I think
0.03 if more ministers and secretaries of
0.03 state go to the go to Brussels and and
0.03 make this case and have a courage as you
0.03 heard from the secretary this morning to
0.03 make this case more openly without being
0.03 worried about there being some kind of
0.03 public backlash or backlash from the
0.03 green NGOs then we can begin to roll
0.03 back the regulations because it simply
0.03 isn&;t fair that crops which have been
0.03 bred by some method which is probably
0.03 safer have to be held up for 10 to 15
0.03 years by these unnecessary bureaucratic
0.03 regulations which don&;t apply to an
0.03 equivalent crop with an identical genome
0.03 which has been developed from different
0.03 methods so it doesn&;t it totally is
0.03 fundamentally irrational even at the
0.03 most basic level and I think for that
0.03 reason and the rules will be changed and
0.03 it&;s the process now we have to all all
0.03 help in in getting that right
0.03 Oshin roll back at the front and then
0.03 we&;ll go over to number six and number
0.03 four who was thank you good morning
0.03 Stuart Eric you know I remember the
0.03 European Parliament I sit on the
0.03 Agriculture Committee with Mairead and
0.03 we have conversations that we get on
0.03 pretty well I think first of all thank
0.03 you very much for your Damascus
0.03 conversion I was one of the farmers who
0.03 grew GM crops 12 11 years ago and was
0.03 subjected to some of the sort of tyranny
0.03 and intimidation that have forced many
0.03 out of it so it really is very
0.03 heartening to hear you say what you have
0.03 I went to Rothamsted in May to help
0.03 defend the crop there and I think
0.03 everyone here would be interested to
0.03 know that of the hundred and fifty
0.03 people who are going to destroy that
0.03 crop I would have said that half were
0.03 foreigners bussed in and when they
0.03 started singing they sang in French so
0.03 that&;s see that&;s the good news
0.03 on the other side of the coin Al Gore
0.03 produced a film about ten years ago
0.03 called An Inconvenient Truth in which he
0.03 said that carbon dioxide levels were
0.03 running and he had a thing called hockey
0.03 stick graph and everything was going to
0.03 get hotter and hotter and hotter because
0.03 the carbon dioxide levels 1/3 of mo&;ne
0.03 sugar beet was killed frozen solid into
0.03 the ground by global warming two years
0.03 ago I also experienced the coldest
0.03 wettest summer I&;ve ever had I think
0.03 since 1987 carbon dioxide levels and
0.03 methane levels were high I don&;t think
0.03 they can be the drivers of this because
0.03 of what actually happened so what is
0.03 driving it thank you
0.03 perhaps we avoid the French markings I
0.03 think we can both be anti French we can
0.03 agree on that even if we don&;t agree on
0.03 climate change
0.03 I I think if you if you if you look at
0.03 the fundamentals of this there&;s no
0.03 dispute and I&;m sure you wouldn&;t
0.03 dispute that that carbon dioxide and
0.03 methane a greenhouse gases and in an
0.03 atmosphere without greenhouse gases and
0.03 water vapors well of course and this
0.03 planet would be on average I think minus
0.03 18 degrees centigrade and frozen solid
0.03 so if other things remaining equal if
0.03 you increase the proportion of
0.03 greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
0.03 you&;ll get a warmer planet and I think
0.03 it&;s fairly clear from satellite
0.03 measurements and everything else that
0.03 the planet is in energy imbalance and is
0.03 therefore gaining heat overall on
0.03 average now it doesn&;t mean to say that
0.03 you&;re not going to see the usual
0.03 fluctuations of weather include
0.03 including very cold winters on occasion
0.03 and in fact there&;s some evidence that
0.03 the Jetstream is responding to the
0.03 disappearing Arctic sea ice by being
0.03 frozen in particular loop configurations
0.03 and so on and so forth which may in fact
0.03 be responsible for some of the rather
0.03 atrocious weather we&;ve seen over the
0.03 last summer and the last few winters as
0.03 well and I don&;t think that that you can
0.03 accept science in one area not in
0.03 another and that was the whole point of
0.03 of what I was saying to you today so for
0.03 me it was the fact that I accepted the
0.03 the consensus on climate science and
0.03 that doesn&;t mean that there shouldn&;t
0.03 be dissent
0.03 I think dissent is essential in science
0.03 and I subscribe to a lot of the lists
0.03 and I listen to a lot of the dissenting
0.03 opinions on climate change so in no way
0.03 does this exclude dissenting voices but
0.03 if you want to take the the scientific
0.03 consensus as your guide then you should
0.03 do so equally for climate science as you
0.03 do for for the science of biotechnology
0.03 that was more or less my message number
0.03 six over here David please David Beamer
0.03 reading University I&;m as a scientist as
0.03 a scientist who worked on GM as a
0.03 scientist who worked with Monsanto not
0.03 for Monsanto I&;m delighted but science
0.03 is actually coming through in the GM
0.03 debate
0.03 I&;ve also delighted to hear that we&;re
0.03 going to see more funding of science I
0.03 look forward to that because there has
0.03 been a considerable loss of the science
0.03 base in the UK the agricultural science
0.03 loss but Greenpeace and NGOs such them
0.03 and and Friends of the Earth may no
0.03 longer be your friends but they&;re still
0.03 there there&;s still an amazing force
0.03 what can you do to go
0.03 can convince them that your conversion
0.03 was right and they should follow your
0.03 path good question again I I&;d say this
0.03 probably this is no longer the case but
0.03 up until this morning Greenpeace was my
0.03 friend and Friends of the earth – and I
0.03 work with them and I have a lot of
0.03 respect for a lot of the work they do so
0.03 this isn&;t to to rule out all all
0.03 environmental NGOs again without any
0.03 kind of question but their work the good
0.03 work they do has to be balanced against
0.03 the the bad work that they&;ve done over
0.03 the last decade or two which they need
0.03 to I&;m trying to get into a treat I
0.03 think they&;ve got themselves into a
0.03 corner an unscientific corner on GM on
0.03 on some very other specific areas as
0.03 well but I think they&;re dead on more or
0.03 less with climate change one of the
0.03 other controversial things I&;ve done
0.03 over the last few years is to have take
0.03 a pro-nuclear
0.03 role in the energy debate and actually
0.03 one of one of the things that really
0.03 gave me a lot of hope recently was that
0.03 the nuclear industry in the wind
0.03 industry so the low-carbon industries
0.03 together were beginning to join up and
0.03 Friends of the Earth and both Greenpeace
0.03 were relatively supportive of that so I
0.03 think they can be changes perhaps subtle
0.03 changes at least at the outset in the
0.03 positions that these NGOs take and one
0.03 shouldn&;t say that they are bad or out
0.03 of order forever but I think we have to
0.03 encourage them by a process of
0.03 constructive engagement to say look the
0.03 world has moved on you&;ve got a bit left
0.03 behind here but you can play catch-up
0.03 and you can actually change in some
0.03 areas you&;re not the Vatican you&;re not
0.03 the Pope you know you don&;t have to say
0.03 the same thing for 2,000 years it&;s been
0.03 15 now it&;s time for a change
0.03 the next religious question I suggest a
0.03 tom number four please hi Tom he BBC
0.03 food retailers supermarkets and
0.03 manufacturers are extremely keen to sell
0.03 their food through the natural image and
0.03 then natural things on packaging and
0.03 when could we see food retailers and
0.03 supermarkets making science a positive
0.03 ingredient in their food and having the
0.03 bravery to do that and do they have a
0.03 role in changing public opinion on the
0.03 relative values of science versus nature
0.03 in our food well another excellent
0.03 question I think this I mean we could
0.03 take as a as an example from the past to
0.03 learn from the the issue of food
0.03 irradiation which would have saved
0.03 hundreds probably thousands of lives by
0.03 killing bacteria which then people eat
0.03 in their food because and this wasn&;t
0.03 again entirely down to the naturalistic
0.03 fallacy people thought that their food
0.03 would be radioactive in the supermarket
0.03 aisles other things which should be very
0.03 easy to to myth bust but weren&;t and
0.03 they they catch on because people have
0.03 obviously people have a very intense
0.03 personal and emotional connection with
0.03 their food and a good thing too but that
0.03 makes means that people are very
0.03 susceptible to to these kinds of myths
0.03 being propagated from people with with
0.03 with very strong ideological agendas and
0.03 I don&;t think science science and and
0.03 food are very uneasy bedfellows for that
0.03 for that very reason and so I I think
0.03 Menaul so of course the first generation
0.03 of GM crops had no benefit for the
0.03 consumer and they didn&;t have much
0.03 benefit for the environment either you
0.03 know I don&;t see Roundup Ready as being
0.03 an enormous ly important environmental
0.03 innovation but that&;s not the case for
0.03 some of the things which are coming
0.03 through the pipeline now if you could
0.03 have GM Amiga 3 all seeds grown on on in
0.03 British farms which are then used to
0.03 make the food which are then and
0.03 sustainably farming salmon then you
0.03 don&;t have to go and Hoover up all of
0.03 the small fish in the sea that&;s
0.03 something which delivers the benefit
0.03 benefits to an environmentally conscious
0.03 consumer
0.03 and I hope and I believe that that the
0.03 GM and science if they are deployed with
0.03 those ends in mines would have a much
0.03 more receptive audience than they do if
0.03 they are deployed simply to to help the
0.03 profits admittedly of some very large
0.03 corporations that&;s when that&;s
0.03 essentially the problem with the behold
0.03 GM debate as it&;s got into this
0.03 ideological thing of your if you&;re
0.03 against big corporations than the big
0.03 anti GM is a kind of proxy war for that
0.03 and I think we have to take it apart
0.03 which is why I&;m so interested in
0.03 supporting public sector initiatives on
0.03 plant science mic microphone five please
0.03 Emily Scott from University of Cambridge
0.03 mark I was just wondering what your
0.03 views are on the intellectual property
0.03 issues and the sort of ownership issues
0.03 that accompany the development of GM
0.03 crops and what you think the role is of
0.03 C companies in ensuring that the GM
0.03 seeds that they create can remain
0.03 affordable and accessible in the
0.03 countries where they would be most
0.03 useful another excellent question I
0.03 think at a fundamental level there&;s
0.03 nothing wrong with intellectual property
0.03 and we should agree that especially as
0.03 I&;m a writer and I don&;t want you
0.03 parroting my books because I want to get
0.03 the royalties for them and so does
0.03 anyone else who has intellectual
0.03 property for something which they&;ve
0.03 creatively done whether it&;s a technical
0.03 invention or something different and and
0.03 there is an incentive to develop new
0.03 things if you have the IPR down the line
0.03 where you&;re going to get some kind of
0.03 financial reward from that then perhaps
0.03 you can consider that an investment so
0.03 if you take away intellectual property
0.03 completely from the picture then you are
0.03 going to have a disincentive for
0.03 innovation and for technological
0.03 progress and on the other hand there&;s a
0.03 lot being done in the public sector and
0.03 which is supported by the public sector
0.03 which doesn&;t need to have very
0.03 restrictive IPR attached to it and
0.03 Rothamsted made very clear with the GM
0.03 wheat trial that that would be
0.03 royalty-free and would be offered to
0.03 farmers for their own benefit on that
0.03 basis and I think that&;s the same the
0.03 same would be the case for a lot of the
0.03 nutritionally enhanced or dried drought
0.03 tolerant crops which being developed in
0.03 in Africa for example most of that&;s
0.03 done in the public sector because these
0.03 people don&;t have any money and so
0.03 there&;s no great commercial advantage to
0.03 anyone to do that and the states would
0.03 have to be offered again not free of
0.03 charge because nothing
0.03 as well display of charge but at a
0.03 reduced rate and I think there shouldn&;t
0.03 be any restrictions on farmers saving
0.03 seed if that&;s to their benefit although
0.03 of course that hasn&;t been the case with
0.03 hybrids I mean everyone grows hybrid
0.03 maize and you don&;t save the seed
0.03 because it won&;t be true and so I think
0.03 there&;s a lot of misunderstandings about
0.03 that too but I think we should all
0.03 support and the the taxpayer-funded
0.03 sectors here but the problem is that
0.03 these things can&;t be deployed as I said
0.03 in Kenya you&;ll do ten years in jail if
0.03 you take it out of the laboratory into
0.03 the field and the same is the case I
0.03 find it difficult to imagine Rothamsted
0.03 GM wheat being used in the fields in
0.03 Britain and over the next five years I
0.03 hope we can change that but there&;s not
0.03 much point in developing these things if
0.03 you can never use them
0.03 microphone one down here please
0.03 Martin talk with the RSPB and the NGOs
0.03 have taken a bit of a kicking this
0.03 morning for many speakers I thought
0.03 someone ought to speak up anyway and one
0.03 of the roles I think avenges is to put
0.03 its spotlights on Inconvenient Truth so
0.03 I think you have done that this morning
0.03 also for the record you say the RSPB did
0.03 support the GM farm scale evaluation
0.03 trials so I&;ve got a little bit of a
0.03 halo this morning but much of the debate
0.03 has thus far focused on the desire HAP&;s
0.03 understandably to increase yields but
0.03 there are other inconvenient truths out
0.03 there about the fact there are a billion
0.03 people who are currently obese and that
0.03 every night of billion children go to
0.03 bed hungry despite the fact that there
0.03 is enough food currently being produced
0.03 to feed the world so I wonder if you
0.03 want to comment on issues of
0.03 overconsumption and indeed access to
0.03 food for people in developing world yes
0.03 in particular the food security issue in
0.03 the developing world and if you look at
0.03 the the yield gap that you see between
0.03 the major food crops as they&;re grown in
0.03 sub-saharan Africa and places like China
0.03 India or the u.s. it&;s enormous I mean
0.03 the yields that they&;re getting our 1/10
0.03 of what of what what they should be
0.03 getting even with fairly depleted soils
0.03 that they have and if you could increase
0.03 the productivity of those small-scale
0.03 farmers there would be a additional
0.03 benefit in terms of food security and
0.03 poverty reduction there&;s no doubt about
0.03 that and you know if you only doubled
0.03 the the yields of or the productivity of
0.03 crops and sub-saharan Africa the
0.03 continent would be food exporting
0.03 and in given that people are subsidies
0.03 are people who are living subsistence
0.03 lifestyles they are eating their own
0.03 food productivity actually does matter
0.03 for their food security probably more
0.03 than anything else and it&;s simplistic
0.03 to say well these people in this
0.03 continents are eating more and eating
0.03 too much and these people in this
0.03 contents are eating too little I mean
0.03 it&;s not that you can truck all of these
0.03 extra calories across the Atlantic and
0.03 somehow make a real difference
0.03 this food is traded through the market
0.03 and there&;s a whole lot of other
0.03 economic factors which are at play there
0.03 too so that the the only way really in
0.03 the longer term where food security will
0.03 be protected is through increasing GDP
0.03 growth and accelerating the the economic
0.03 prospects of these countries luckily
0.03 that&;s the prospect which is already
0.03 well underway and in fact rates of
0.03 malnutrition have plummeted over the
0.03 last 10 or 20 years largely in Asia but
0.03 also increasingly now in sub-saharan
0.03 Africa thanks to these innovations and
0.03 again I should make absolutely clear GM
0.03 is just one of a whole panoply of
0.03 different options and but it should be
0.03 an option it shouldn&;t be discounted on
0.03 some kind of a rational basis but it&;s
0.03 not I&;m not saying either this is a
0.03 silver bullet mark talking about
0.03 nutrition we have to move into lunch
0.03 would you just all join me again please
0.03 in thank you thank you mark
0.03 [Applause]
.