MIKE Small, in his article in the Sunday National (The attack on food standards and transparency is an attack on democracy, May 29), hit many of the scientific and constitutional issues concerned with using genetic modification techniques to “improve” our food supply and the moves by the Westminster government to introduce these products into the UK market.

However, he – and to be fair many other commentators – is ignoring a large financial elephant looming at the periphery of these discussions: patents.

The companies that are developing these organisms will patent their products and hold a monopoly over their use. There are already precedents of companies suing farmers whose crops have been “contaminated” by neighbouring GM crops for illegal use.

This is dangerous territory, as large corporations are already creating situations worldwide that penalise farmers who resist the use of their products and demand that they buy seed from the manufacturer or face prosecution should they attempt to hold quantities of seed for future planting.

The report Monsanto vs US Farmers (2005), by the Center for Food Safety, is a salutary read outlining the way a large corporation can use its power to bully and punish farmers who are tied into coercive contracts and punished for inadvertent spread of “Monsanto-owned” seed.

We already have problems with large corporations appropriating land and water supplies across the world to the exclusion of local communities, and when profit-driven private enterprise holds the key to food supply, we are in a very dangerous place even before developments that could provide a legal basis for monopoly and cartel activity.

David Neilson
Dumfries

THE drive for a security framework logic in dealing with any crisis often ignores the politics that brought about a crisis in the first place. The impact of such policy decisions mostly exacerbate the cost of living for poorer and vulnerable communities where political agency is minimal.

When it comes to food, there is an overwhelming dependence on global markets. Governments and transnational corporations, along with the media, will distract our attention away from the operation of policies on agriculture and food systems – the main drivers of food scarcity – to focus on other events, such as the conflict in Ukraine, or the climate change crisis. What is missing from the current narrative regarding food scarcity is that energy prices, mineral fertilisers, urea, and nitrates – on which farming has been so heavily dependent – were already hyped up long before.

There is a history of global food regimes, which have had implications for land use and control. Colonial and settler economies produced cheap grains and meat for world markets. This shifted to large-scale, chemical-based, mechanised and heavily subsidised agriculture heavily reliant on inputs. Meanwhile, structural adjustment policies in the 1980s and 1990s by the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and NAFTA bankrupted small producers in the global south, leaving these countries with trade deficits, and the vulnerabilities of global food swings on the stock markets.

Initiatives such as Climate Smart Agriculture, Food for the Future, and recently the European Green Deal Farm to Fork Strategy further integrate small farmers into commercial markets under the banner of sustainable agriculture, and by lifting the de facto ban on gene-edited plant cultivation by claiming genetically modified organism (GMO) crops reduce the need for pesticides and fertilisers when this hasn’t been the experience in the Americas.

Farm to Fork will overturn the 2018 European Court of Justice ruling that treats CRISPR gene-edited plants or animals under the same strict “precautionary principle” rules for GMO. With no restrictions, gene-editing companies like Bayer-Monsanto, and other giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, will be free to introduce experimental and unproven genetically altered plants and animals into our diet with no labelling. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill is currently in the UK Parliament, with expectations it will be made into law soon. In Scotland, gene editing of plants or animals apparently is supported by the National Farmers Union. Have they not learned the lessons from the Americas? This takes control of food out of the hands of farmers and small growers and into those of the big players.

Land grabbing or land buy-offs can mean new arrangements for land. Emerging markets are interested in flex crops with multiple uses: food, feed, fuel, and industrial material. The commodification of land leads to dispossession. There is a need to return to food and land sovereignty, a term made known by La Via Campesina with its emphasis on localisation of the food system relying on agroecology, and less reliant on inputs. The land ultimately should belong to the people, and the people to the land, striving for a renewed relationship with the land rather than the proposed solutions coming from government and corporate policy-makers.

Joanna Nowicki
Forres