Press Release: Date: 15th February 2013 Tide Turns on GM Agriculture

A vote of no confidence in GM technology came last week from a surprising source, US farmers. After increased pest resistance and crop failures in GM crops, resulting in smaller yields than their non-GM counterparts, farmers are considering a return to conventional seed. Reverting back to conventional production has its own problems as the vast majority of seed available in the US is GM and owned predominately by a few companies.

It’s all about cost benefit analysis,” said economist Dan Basse, president of American agricultural research company AgResource.”Farmers are paying extra for the technology but have seen yields which are no better than 10 years ago. They’re starting to wonder why they’re spending extra money on the technology.” The top performing countries by crop yield last year were in Asia, in particular China, where farmers do not use GM seed. This comes on the back of BASF announcing their withdrawal from the EU licence approval process for three GM potato varieties.

Kitty Scully from no2gm stated, ‘in light of these significant developments, this begs the question why Teagasc are wasting resources by continuing to trial a technology which is obviously failing in the field and in the market place’’.

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