GM crops? We don’t have a choice

…There aren’t many quick and easy solutions in the food arena. Take tomatoes for instance – they were one of the topics I included in my Birmingham speech. Should we be buying English tomatoes or Spanish?

It sounds obvious – local is best because it means less food miles. What’s more English tomatoes use far less pesticides than Spanish ones. But Spanish ones actually have a smaller carbon footprint, even when transport emissions are counted – they don’t need heated greenhouses because there’s enough sun to ripen the tomatoes in situ.


But then again the Spanish tomatoes take up far more land space and regularly replace their plastic polytunnels, creating waste – I don’t know if this plastic film is recycled. And tomatoes need large quantities of water to grow, which is more scarce in Spain. So what’s the conclusion?

And we haven’t even covered GM tomatoes, which were first introduced in this country in tomato puree. It was cheaper (because less tomatoes were needed to make it) than the non-GM brand and people were happy to buy it until GM hit the headlines and the puree was whipped off the supermarket shelves in a jiffy.

Telegraph