Salmond's Leap Into The Dark

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond was as ebullient as ever this week as he triumphantly announced a new trade deal with China in Scottish salmon. Eagerly ogling the huge Chinese market, Salmond effused that the Chinese Deputy PM had pointed out to him that if just 1% of Chinese eat a salmon, Scottish output will have to double to meet demand.

Alex Salmond - First Minister of Scotland

This, of course, raises the prospects of massive increases in fish farms, sited in Scottish lochs and rivers, their livestock crammed together, coated in layers of hormones to propagate ever faster growth and "swimming" in chemicals to sterilise their living environment. Needless to say, the frequency of chemical spills and leaks is high, poisoning the local ecology and damaging wild fish stocks. In 2010, a near disaster occurred when over a hundred thousand farmed salmon escaped though broken nets and, like a plague of locusts, devoured the natural fauna for miles around. It put the habitat of genuine wild salmon at risk and was one of many such incidents.

Yet this is just one of tens of thousands of examples of how the international food trade promotes the most ludicrous and damaging artificial farming of what most consumers associate in their minds as healthy food. Like the popular view of chicken and other types of fish as healthy, salmon is portrayed as a lean meat; salmon, wild and free, mysteriously tamed and brought bloodlessly to your table. But of course, unless you seek out increasingly rare and expensive wild fish from sustainable sources, it is essentially a lie. The meat may be lean - of nutrition - but packed with added extras, like the chemicals and growth hormones passed as fit for fish (and ultimately, human) consumption.


Fish farms - not a pretty sight

Britain flies apples to New Zealand and they return the favour by flying apples back to us. We catch prawns off the Scottish coast which are flown to Thailand to be shelled and packaged, before flying them back, and so on. These latter examples at least are either inanimate in origin or in such a state of being by the time their journey begins.

But worse still is the massive trade in live animal transport - we fly day old chicks in sealed containers from the UK to Japan; we transport cattle thousands of miles to slaughter them after they have been traumatised by the most awful conditions. And if you've ever been to Greece and wondered how lamb and mutton features so prominently in the local dishes but you only see goats rather than sheep - just go and wait for the next ferry and the truckload of live sheep driven thousands of miles packed into trucks all the way from Britain.

And even if they are not transported, the animals marketed by the likes of Bernard Matthews via pictures of happy animals roaming lovely green fields are more likely to have spent their short lives in artificial light, in cramped conditions and under permanent stress. Sometimes animals will be heavily drugged to counter diseases rife in such places; other times, they will be blatantly brutalised, as in the infamous "Turkey Baseball" games sadistically enjoyed by some staff in Bernard Matthews factory farms. Immoral? Certainly. Healthy? Absolutely not.

Even milk, pushed from cradle to the grave as a health drink, is frequently of dubious provenance. Dairy herds are biologically manipulated to keep producing milk when they are well past any state of natural lactation. Nearly all non-organic milk comes form herds where their udders have been pumped mechanically to and beyond the point where their body tissue has become infected with mastitis sores, resulting in sterilisation of the milk being as much to neutralise the large quantities of pustule in the bovine liquid as to counter diseases such as salmonella. Legally, in the EU, a litre of milk is allowed to contain as many as 400 million cells of pus - in the USA, the FDA permits a whopping 750 million.

Healthy? Well, one medical study found a direct correlation between human acne and dairy consumption and a glance at rosacea forums will show how many sufferers trace a link between milk consumption and their condition. It stands to reason what goes in must come out again somehow. We are poisoning our environment and our animals in order poison ourselves as much as feed ourselves.

Yet, as global warming and rising population squeeze food supply and drive prices up, rather than call for a food revolution via massive, small scale, organic and local production, Governments and the huge supermarket conglomerates are increasingly pushing genetically modified foods as the Great Answer. Manipulation is moving to frighteningly greate depths at the DNA level, esentially purely for commercial gain. For example, the American FDA has just approved the commercial farming and sale of GM fast-growing super-salmon. These poor creatures will grow to near double their natural size in a much shorter time - allowing rearing costs to be reduced and profit levels to be higher. The stock markets loved the idea, with share prices in American fish farms soaring.

And so Mr Salmond may grin as widely as ever, like a Cheshire cat contemplating a gloss white bowl of sterilised cow-pus. But if his artificial salmon ever leap, then it will not be a leap homewards, but rather into a dark unknown where we can only guess at the consequences, and pray we are wrong.

                        

                             CAUTION - VIDEO CONTAINS POTENTIALLY DISTRESSING MATERIAL



What was wrong about "What the Green Movement got wrong"?

Channel 4 in the UK has just shown a very lengthy, two-part mockumentary provocatively titled "What the Green Movement Got Wrong" . Unlike a previous programme of this ilk, The Great Global Warming Swindle, it did not particularly challenge climate change, but rather tried to show that green campaigns, when successful, have done more harm than good. Three examples:

- malaria in African slums could be reduced by making the chemical toxin DDT available to spray inside houses "in small quantities", but campaigns by Greens in the 1980s to have DDT stopped from being heavily used in agriculture had led to outright bans of DDT in many countries. This in turn left people living in squalid shanty towns vulnerable to mosquito bites and malarial infection - all because of the greens. At least, that was what the scientist Dr Florence Wambugu, who had previously worked for agri-chemical giant Monsanto, was given free rein to argue. (The programme skated over the fact that Greenpeace dropped its opposition to small scale use of DDT nearly a decade ago).






The real solution to malaria - DDT powder or slum clearance?

  On the other hand, just how safe is DDT, even at low levels and especially over any protracted period? Rather than DDT, wouldn't proper investment in clearing the slums and providing decent accommodation to the people living there be better?

- genetically modified food: the successful green campaign in the European Union to ban the sale of genetically modified (GM) foods was contrasted with how widely used it is in the USA - 70% of foodstuffs in many regular restaurants in the USA are GM and declared "delcious" by a contributor. Meantime, African farmers were shown harvesting low nutrition sorghum, grown as it is resistant to drought. Much better if they could grow GM crops designed to provide better nutrition in such bad climatic conditions.

Yet, given the contrast between the health of the average American and that of the average EU citizen, perhaps the jury is out on this for now. And as for the farmers, would a better solution not be found in reforming the trade system that denudes Third World countries of its food? GM could have untold consequences for other crops.

- nuclear power: Mark Lynas, who has written powerful articles on global warming, including the book "Six Degrees", visited Chernobyl, wistfully reflecting on the dreadful legacy of the 1986 disaster. It was an old reactor, he concluded. The new ones would be much safer, he was sure. The nuclear industry had cleaned up its act since 1986 - the implication being that Chernobyl and Three Miles Island could never happen again.

More than that, because the greens had spearheaded a reaction to these disasters which led to the cancellation of planned nuclear reactors, governments instead commissioned more coal powered electricity, leading to millions of tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. A former Greenpeace activist, Patrick Moore, was put up to denounce the "anti-science" of the green movement. But there again, he is now a paid lobbyist for the nuclear power and logging industries, so could he be trusted to say anything else?

Another view, summarily dismissed in the programme, would be that given the hugely uneconomic cost of nuclear reactors, governments have shied away from building the things. The argument presupposes a choice limited to coal or nuclear, ignoring the clean alternatives - such as solar, wind and waver power- which greens argue for in place of both these different but dirty and dangerous forms of energy production. It is bizarre to hold the green movement responsible for the decisions of others.

Channel 4 devoted 2 hours to this misleading polemic. Like previous efforts in this field, it was full of holes, half-truths and dissimulation. Greenpeace set out the very real corporate lobby interests of those contributing to the programme in the guise of "new environmentalists", allegedly able to see the science and weigh up realistically what is needed for the future. Others in the green movement were portrayed as wild-eyed evangelists, proselytising for a mythical past and hostile to anything modern. "The greens can dish it out, but they can’t take it," Lynas smirks, evidently revelling in his self-assigned moniker of "turncoat".

Lynas may or may not still have as alarming views of our likely future as he has expressed often enough, but if he thinks his efforts this evening in any way will assist the long battle to stop global warming, he is sadly deluded. Even if a complaint to OfCom, the broadcast regulator, of being badly misled by the producers from one of the contirbutors is upheld, at least some damage will have been done.

Channel 4 has a remit to be controversial and, of course, any and all sides of any debate have a right to be aired. But there needs to be a distinction between what is presented as documentary fact and what is simply the personal opinion of individuals - in the latter case, where is the balance? Will the green movement now be given two hours to put a counter-case? Or will this supposedly objective film be left standing for unquestioned use as propaganda by those who wish to carry on as usual?

Everyone involved in this enterprise should be searching their consciences. Self-publicity and audience ratings can come at a high cost to others - and to the planet.

Channel 4 - what is it up to?