John McHugh, Clondarrig, Portlaoise, Co Laois

DEAR SIR: Increasingly, we read of agricultural commentators and farmers expressing their frustration at Irish and EU regulations, prohibiting the growing of GM crops, the disadvantage this puts our farmers at and how we need to embrace this technology to feed a world population expected to reach 9.6 billion people by 2066. Opponents of this technology are accused of burying their heads in the sand and of being “anti-science”.

The unsettling and inconvenient truths of climate change, desertification, environmental pollution, species extinction etc have become a legacy of chemical farming and the solution being presented to us is to continue doing what we have been, but more efficiently – what we were doing since the onset of the “green revolution”, when many of these problems came about.

It is time we as farmers started to embrace good science again, but not the commercialised version being hailed as our only option.

Science knows that humus or biologically active carbon forms the basis of all soil fertility and this can only be created by certain soil biology. Commercial science pays lip service to humus, then ignores it and tells us soil fertility is bought in a bag, in the form of artificial nitrogen, acid phosphorous and chlorine-based Potash, all products that suppress and kill the very biology we need to make fertile soils.

Science knows healthy food comes from healthy soils and to have healthy soils we need to look after the chemical, physical and biological aspects of soil and not just the chemical at the expense of the other two.

Science knows that species diversity in our crops leads to increased production and that greater genetic diversity leads to higher survival rates over time. Monocultures and mono-varieties within monocultures is counter to this, and we pay for this in the vast amounts of rescue chemistry we now use on our crops and animals.

Science recognises the huge cost of artificial nitrogen is having on the environment. The massive amounts of carbon released in its manufacture, of the 80 million tonnes spread globally only 17 million tonnes ends up in our food leaving vast amounts to pollute our soils, waters and atmosphere.

This cost is not bore by chemical agriculture but is a cost both we and our future generations will pay for and the longer we ignore it the more interest compounds.

The biggest treat to feeding this growing world population is “globalisation”. This is leading to greater specialisation in agricultural regions, further removing any balance in production systems and the synergies they bring. It is worth noting that despite Ireland’s much lauded agricultural system producing enough food to feed over 30 million people, Ireland is actually a net calorie importer.

We are currently a wealthy nation who can afford to import our shortfalls from other countries but how will this system stand up when the almost inevitable shortfalls appear as the world moves towards 9.6 billion people. Will we too become dependent on bio-tech companies developing a variety of potatoes that can meet one of our many deficiencies created by an unbalanced diet?

The only winners of this globalised market are the speculators who profit from every boom and bust cycle this system creates, and the chemical companies that we become increasingly dependent on.