A GENERALLY MODERATE VIEW

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales has delivered himself of a tirade against the continuing experiments in genetically modified agriculture. Needless to say, the journalistic commentators have taken the opportunity to diss the Prince as, more or less, an in-bred moron. “Does it matter” enquired Rod Liddle rhetorically in The Sunday Times “that Prince Charles is talking magnificently ill-informed bollocks once again? Only, I suppose, in that it makes irrational people like myself wish to rush out of the house and consume a genetically modified tomato before dusk, on the principle that if Chazza says something, it must be wrong”. Irrational? You said it, Buster.

Actually, HRH has the advantage over this particular thought policeman – or Rozzer as I shall henceforth call him – in that he is a farmer and Rozzer, as far as I am aware, is not. The environment editor of The Guardian – whose special knowledge also renders him a more reliable guide than Rozzer – subjected the Prince’s Daily Telegraph interview to careful scrutiny and found that nothing he had said was out of step with various United Nations agricultural agencies, “authoritative farm analysis groups” and other experts and NGOs or indeed the G8 itself. Perhaps Rozzer knows better.

The Prince reckoned the prospect of continuing GM experimentation would “guarantee the biggest environmental disaster of all time”. He scorned the agricultural future “all run by gigantic corporations … the classic way of ensuring that there is no food in the future … What we should be talking about is food security, not food production, that’s what matters and that’s what people will not understand”.

The Telegraph’s recording of the interview (available on its website) suggests that the Prince was talking off the cuff and that the paper’s business editor, Jeff Randall, may have taped him opportunistically. At any rate, the recording begins in mid-sentence and is abruptly curtailed and there is no questioning. You might say that the Prince ought to know better than to talk unguardedly to a journalist and that he ought to know that it is always better to present a complex and controversial argument in a carefully considered piece of writing (an article or a speech) than in an unstructured interview.

All that being said, I find myself broadly in sympathy with the Prince’s view. If he fulminated intemperately – well, as I say, that’s the nature of loose talk. At least he didn’t drop the dreaded name of Frankenstein, as those with a supernaturally based objection to genetics are apt to do. For my part, I am generally inclined, as one professional to another, to credit scientists with intellectual honesty and as keen a desire to do good in the world as any layperson may possess.

But scientists are as susceptible to manipulation as anyone else. Those psychologists, whose purely speculative testimony condemned to jail as child-killers the mothers of young children who had otherwise unaccountably died, carry a heavy burden of guilt for cruel misuse of the authority that their vaunted expertise bestows. And the question mark that hangs over the geneticists who are interfering with the DNA of crops is the one that the Prince raised in his phrase “gigantic corporations”. These scientists are owned by global capitalism. The food journalist Felicity Lawrence (whose book Not On the Label should be compulsory reading for the Rozzers of this world) remarked to The Guardian that the Prince’s talk of “corporate control” is “not exactly left wing but it is radical. I would place him in that tradition of philanthropic, experimental landowners like Robert Owen, who does things in a patriarchal and paternalist way but genuinely wants to leave the world a better place”.

There is a great non-conformist tradition in Britain, of which the Owenites were a significant part, and, if the heir to the throne identifies with such non-conformism, so much the better for his future subjects. There is no evidence that the likes of Monsanto have any interest other than yielding the biggest possible profits for its shareholders (of whom maybe Rozzer is one; I think we should be told). What the GM companies certainly want to do is to tie up the agribusiness and drive out the smallholder. Their terms for those farmers prepared to permit GM crops in their fields are notoriously rigorous and self-serving.

We are entitled to be sceptical about genetic manipulation. Like all research, it is an attempt to discover whether a theory works in practice. The trouble with intervening in natural processes and own-pace evolution is that it may upset delicate balances that even experts do not perceive, just as an extinction in nature can have far-reaching effects on other species of flora and fauna, way beyond any naturalist’s ability to anticipate. This is chaos theory, the proverbial beating of a butterfly’s wing in a rainforest leading to the collapse of a civilisation on the other side of the planet.

GM is a genie out of a bottle. However “controlled” the experiments are, the spores and seeds will get into the general crop population so that we can never be sure that any produce really is, as billed, “GM-free”. And the only way to determine what will be the effect of a genetic mutation over the course of, say, a century, is to let it loose for a century. If the effect proves baleful, what can then be done to reverse the invasion?