JENNIFER Marohasy, a respected biologist and Adjunct Research Fellow in the Centre for Plant and Water Science at CQ University, says Greenpeace campaigning on genetically modified crops has successfully and significantly reduced the competitiveness of Australian canola growers and achieved little else.
She says the Greenpeace is waging a fear campaign against GM technology and technological innovation.
Dr Marohasy is a columnist for The Land newspaper and past chair and founding member of the Australian Environment Foundation.
One of her primary concerns is that public policy on environmental issues is increasingly driven by moral crusading, rather than objective science or need.
Asked for her views in light of anti-GM protestors’ attempts to sabotage the WANTFA conference last week, Dr Marohasy said the Greenpeace anti-GM campaign had set Australian agriculture back at least a decade.
"In 1988 Australia was the first country to release a GM organism, the crown gall bacterium," she said.
"Two decades later we had made only one other release, GM cotton, first planted in 1996.
"The recent approvals in some States for GM canola was too long coming which has put us way behind Canada.
"I understand GM cotton is still banned in WA yet cotton is the one crop that could make the Ord irrigation scheme economically viable.
"Now grown on most cotton farms in QLD and NSW, the GM varieties reduced pesticide use by an average 88 per cent, allowing beneficial insects to return to fields and reducing the risk of pollution.
"Few people realise that about 35pc of the vegetable oil we consume in Australia is from cotton seed.
"Most of the rest of our vegetable oil is from canola."
Dr Marohasy said anti-GM campaigners had deceptively targeted GM canola as the first GM food crop and ignored GM cotton as an existing source of vegetable oil.
She said Greenpeace led a formidable campaign to prevent the commercial release of GM canola varieties in Australia, varieties that had been grown in Canada since 1996.
"For a long time we had a situation where State governments introduced or extended bans in one form or another on the commercial production of GM food crops with only cotton exempt, on the basis it is grown primarily for fibre," she said.
"Incredibly, for years State governments banned a technology that could help us reduce our ecological footprint, not only through reduced use of pesticide, but also through the development of more water efficient crop varieties.
"The ban on biotechnology epitomises our elites’ increasing aversion to science and technology as a solution to environmental problems."
Dr Marohasy said the Greenpeace campaign against GM was fundamentally a fear campaign against technology and technological innovation.
She said GM food was often referred to as "Frankenstein food" with reference to Mary Shelley and her book Frankenstein.
The book's sub-title is "The Modern Prometheus" with reference to Greek mythology, she said.
In it, Prometheus betrays the secrets of the gods to men.
"In Mary Shelley's book the scientist Frankenstein creates a monster by playing god," Dr Marohasy said.
"GM is often called "Frankenstein food" because it is seen as food which is a product of mankind playing God and meddling with nature.
"Those who are superstitious and against modernity believe this will inevitably result in disaster.
"Rights and freedom and technology and science are products of the enlightenment.
"Greenpeace and those who oppose GM are fundamentally fearful of technological innovation and individual rights."
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