UK researcher backs Phl GMO research

LOS BAÑOS, Laguna, Philippines – A British researcher and author of science books has taken the cudgels for scientific research on genetically modified organism (GMO) crops in the Philippines.

At the same time, Mark Lynas slammed anti-GMO activists who have launched a feverish campaign to stop field trials of biotech crops such as Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) eggplant, “Golden Rice” and Bt corn.

Lynas, an anti-GMO activist in the past two decades but now an advocate of biotechnology, was in the country recently in a series of speaking engagements that included a Media Conference on Biotechnology” at the Dusit Hotel in Makati City and a science forum at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) in the University of the Philippines, Los Baños (UPLB) campus here.

“I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid-1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment,” he told before Filipino journalists.

But Lynas, now 40 and a visiting research associate at the Oxford University (United Kingdom) and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, changed his perspective in the late 2000s after studying the science of biotechnology while researching on climate change.

Finally, last January, at the Oxford Farming Conference in the UK, he declared that he was now supporting biotechnology and apologized “for having spent several years ripping up GM crops.”

“Most of the anti-GMO case is mythology, and does not stand up to scientific scrunity,” he said at the Makati City media conference organized by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Application, SEARCA-Biotechnology Information Center, and Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program II.

As a young “freelance” anti-GMO campaigner in the 1990s, he participated in the uprooting of herbicide-tolerant transgenic crops such as maize, sugarbeet, oilseed and rapeseed.

The activists who oppose GMO crops “are funded by Western NGOs (non-government organizations) and ignore the realities of the science,” said Lynas, who is now a frequent speaker around the world on biotechnology, climate change and, nuclear power.

The supporters of the anti-GMO campaigns, he added, stand to be adversely affected as the success of biotech crops will mean reduction in the use of pesticides.

For instance, the use of pest-resistant Bt corn and Bt cotton has reduced pesticide applications worldwide by 500 million kilograms since 1996.

Focusing on Philippine research on biotech crops, Lynas said Bt talong could help reduce the pesticide burden on eggplant, now the country’s number one vegetable crop, and protect the people’s health.

UP Los Baños studies have shown that an eggplant farmer sprays his crop 80 times at most in one production season.

The UPLB experimental eggplants were destroyed on Feb. 17, 2011 by anti-GMO activists, mostly members of Greenpeace. The raiders have been charged before the municipal trial court of Bay, Laguna, where the UPLB research farm is located.

Recently, activists destroyed the research farm on “Golden Rice” of the Department of Agriculture-Philippine Rice Research Institute and International Rice Research Institute in Pili, Camarines Sur.

“Golden Rice,” Lynas said, could help tackle vitamin A deficiency which kills 6,000 children a day. “Preventing such projects which aim to move the lives of vulnerable young people simply in order to justify their long-held ideology is anti-humanitarian and bordering on the criminal,” he said.

Years back, activists also swooped down on research farms on Bt corn and Bt eggplant in Cotabato and Davao City, uprooting the experimental plants.