Australia’s leading GM Crop commentator David Tribe [aka GMO Pundit] writes:
Voters in WA are being offered to make a choice about GM crop technology.
But if Labour still retains power after the election, choice about GM technology will be out of reach for WA farmers…
The current choice for voters is between the WA Labor policy of banning genetic modification of crops, which closes off options for crop innovation, and the Liberal’s policy which allows for farmer choice, and also opens up a future with profitable new cropping possibilities such as insect-protected cotton on the Ord River.
A good example of how Premier Alan Carpenter’s [pictured] GM ban stymies innovation is its entrenchment of WA canola grower dependence on atrazine herbicide.
Atrazine herbicide is currently banned in Europe, and is a marketing disadvantage when selling canola into that market.
The acceptable daily intake of atrazine is sixty-fold lower than that for the safer alternative glyphosate.
Labor’s GM ban prevents replacement of WA’s current widely used atrazine tolerant (TT) canola varieties with environmentally superior and better performing GM varieties that allow glyphosate to replace atrazine..
Labor’s Premier Alan Carpenter’s campaign slogan is Vision, Stability and Leadership.
Stability of sorts — more of the same — but precious little vision when it comes to capturing cost-savings and new market opportunities for farmers.
It’s a strange vision that seeks to promote the state a clean and green by locking farmers into using atrazine if they want to get good canola yields. Its tunnel vision that locks’s out viable cotton growing on the Ord.
To get away with this charade, Carpenter is hoodwinking city voters into thinking he’s protecting them from GM vegetables and fruits appearing in the supermarkets. He’s announced a million dollars of spending to test food products for content of GM components (undermining in the process the existing Food Standards Australia and New Zealand as the national food regulator), and posing for photos while making announcements in front of fields of radish.
There are no GM fresh vegetables being marketed in Australia.
Fortunately both the WAFarmers Federation and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association are standing up to protect farmer’s choice on this matter. And WA Liberal’s Colin Barnett is supporting trials of GM cotton and canola.
The big issue of the current global food crisis, and the part that modern crop science is playing in providing better food security has been getting a good run in the general media lately.
Lets hope that WA voters have been tuning into these serious big picture messages, and also that more voters (especially those in city electorates) realise that farmers deserve the right to make their choices about what they plant and don’t plant.
Decisions about how to make farms more profitable and sustainable have to be taken away from politicians like Carpenter.
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Tags: Allan Carpenter, David Tribe GMO Pundit, GM, WA
