Kevin Myers: We need to produce much more animal meat, and if that means mass-feeding our livestock with GM foodstuff, then so be it
It was when I saw the sign in Superquinn boasting "No Genetically Modified Foods here" that I realised that Feargal Quinn's days as a supermarket boss were coming to an end, and his career as a politician and media personality were just beginning.
I like Feargal Quinn. Everyone likes Feargal Quinn. But for any commercial organisation to be boasting about a blanket ban on technological advances is like Wells Fargo putting up a sign: "No steam here." If the entire world were to take his example and ban GM foods, then sooner or later we should have a catastrophe that could dwarf the Ukrainian Famine, the Chinese Famine and the Bengal Famine.
The defining and distinctive feature of these 20th Century famines is that they were all man-made -- the first two by communist regimes, and the third, essentially, by Winston Churchill. A worldwide ban on GM foods has the making of yet another 100pc man-made famine: in Africa, probably.
Now, naturally, the IFA welcomed last week's visit of the Chinese vice-president, Xi Jinping. China's population is 3,000 times larger than ours. China has 22 cities that each contain more people than the entire Republic, most of which you can't name. Equally, even a well-educated Chinese person would probably be unable to name a single Irish-born person, living or dead. So -- if only briefly -- pity the unfortunate people in the Chinese department of foreign affairs who were saddled with the job of planning Mr Xi's trip here. (He's going where next? What? To Irand? Oh phuk me Wong, where the phuk is that?)
Globalisation is globalisation. Do you get that? It means that the 10 million people in a city you've never heard of are now in the same supermarket queue as you. The consequences of this are as predictable as the effect of an aligned sun and moon on the tides: food prices -- and meat prices in particular -- will rise. Indeed, we could soon see the day when many Irish people will not be able to afford Irish meat, because the peoples of Asia -- the billions of them -- are able to afford to pay the high prices that the market commands, and we shall be back to eating soil again. Which apparently is better than eating GM.
We are not alone in this self-righteous, scientifically ignorant, posturing denunciation of GM products: the EU, for the moment anyway, shares the delusion that it is possible to live in a protected GM-free zone in the middle of an otherwise GM-consuming world. Yes indeed: and the air in Europe has more oxygen in it, because Brussels has ruled that it should. Yet the truth is there for all to see, GM foods are already here. If you eat sweetcorn, it has almost certainly been genetically modified. Cattle feed containing maize means that the beef that you eat, and therefore you, are also probably composed of GM produce.
The moral and intellectual war is over. The next phase is legal. What GM products do we authorise? How do we ensure compliance? How do we protect copyright? How do we prevent monopolistic exploitation of the marketplace?
If you didn't realise that that was the consequence of Mr Xi's junket here, well you do now. Last weekend, we entered the real food world, which we no longer share with the few million people in Britain and France who already eat Irish beef, lamb and pork, but with three billion people in Asia. We need to produce much more animal meat, and if that means mass-feeding our livestock with GM foodstuffs, so be it.
And yes, it might well be that the returns on GM food are disappointing; that will be a commercial decision, but not an ideological, sanctimonious one, like the outright ban on GM food, to go along with our ban on nuclear energy, our fictional wind energy and our prating neutralism.
We are economically living alongside the Chinese, who probably regard our calendar with much the same respect that we look on that of the Mormons. Moreover, when the Chinese enter a marketplace, it stays entered. After the French opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, it was widely expected that the price of claret would drop and never recover. Instead the reverse happened, as the Chinese have replaced the Americans in the wine market. The Chinese demand for 2008 vintage Chateau Lafite drove the price from £2,500 (€2,980) for a dozen bottles to £10,000 (€11,920). The reason? The shrewd Lafite marketing folk embossed the final digit of the year on the bottle, "8" being not merely a traditionally lucky number for the Chinese, but for Chateau Lafite also.
Let that be a warning. The days of cheap meat in Ireland are coming to an end. One way of hastening that process is by turning our backs on technological developments, just like those Shell-to-Sea Luddites, whose endur- ing and cretinous obduracy has cost us millions. (What a terrible pity that, as proof of our splendid political will, our Chinese visitors were not shown Rossport, or Lossport as they might more accurately say). Last weekend, GM foods in Ireland finally became a historic certainty. Brace yourself.
