Imagine, for a moment, this nightmarish sci-fi scenario. The thorough application of science to agriculture produces, over time, a wonder food. This food is so nutritious that almost on its own it can form the staple diet for a healthy, thriving population. It can solve the perennial problem of hunger, giving even the poorest of the poor a reliable source of vitamins, protein, carbohydrates, calcium and iron, yet without the saturated fats that contribute to cancer and heart disease. It will grow in poor soil and needs no expensive tools for either planting or harvesting. It is astonishingly resistant to disease.
This wonder food is at first an extraordinary blessing, wiping out hunger and staving off sickness, giving the wretched of the earth a virtual guarantee of survival. It becomes the essential buttress of whole populations. And then, completely out of the blue, the wonder crop begins to die. It is hit by a mysterious fungus that seems to have come from nowhere, and that even the scientists cannot identify or control. Completely dependent on the wonder food and with nothing to fall back on, the people starve. Horrors walk the earth. Huge global movements of population are set in train, whose effects are felt for centuries, even in faraway continents.
This may sound like an apocalyptic scare story invented by mad environmentalists to create panic about genetically-modified foods. But it is, of course, history. Our history. The society we inhabit in Ireland is the direct result of just such a series of events. The bulk of the Irish population became utterly dependent on that extraordinary wonder food, the lumper potato. For a long time, the humble spud supported a population that, though materially poor, was remarkably healthy by the standards of the time. And then a completely unforeseen natural occurrence, the arrival of potato blight, wiped out the crop and caused a traumatic transformation whose consequences are still with us.
As it happened, the Irish potatoes were descended from a very narrow genetic stock that had all sorts of short-term virtues but that turned out to be highly vulnerable to the blight. The genes that had seemed ideal for Irish conditions could not stand up to a new and unforeseen threat. The result was a terrible disaster. The potato could remain a staple food for the Irish only because researchers were able to find new strains of the plant in Mexico and in the Andes, where the species had originated, and to develop for Ireland a spud that was less vulnerable to the blight.
This week, when environmental activists uprooted a genetically-modified crop of sugar beet sewn by the multinational Monsanto in Shanagarry, Co Cork, the company's business manager, Dr Patrick O'Reilly, accused the anti-GM lobby of having a "Luddite, oxen-and-plough mentality towards agriculture." Monsanto and the other companies involved in the GM business would like to construe the argument as one between science and ignorance, between progress and superstition. But real science is marked by two things - an awareness that every scientific theory will turn out, over time, to be at best an incomplete explanation of reality, and a willingness to learn from experience. In Ireland, of all places, the development of GM crops should be regarded with the acute scepticism that any proper scientist brings to the claims of those who have a huge vested interest in one version of the truth.
The most obvious truth about GM crops is that they are part of a long-term attempt to privatise nature. One of the quiet, barely noticed, but extraordinarily profound developments of the 20th century is the gradual transformation of a natural, commonly-owned resource - seeds - into patented intellectual property. Whereas, at the start of the century, farmers around the world had their own stocks of seeds, which they swapped or traded with neighbours, now much of the seed stock has been purchased by a small number of global companies. By patenting seeds, these corporations have engineered a situation in which farmers must pay fees for what was, for millennia, a shared resource.
yet there is, at the heart of this process, a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the biotech companies depend for their success on a rich variety of crop types. In order to be able to mix genes in new combinations, you need to have a large stock of different genes in the first place. The corporations are essentially gene miners, extracting their materials from the abundance of naturally occurring plants. The problem is, however, that the effect of their activities is drastically to reduce that very abundance. By encouraging farmers to switch to a single, modified hybrid, they are making the gene pool ever more shallow. If current developments persist, the solution to the Irish potato disaster - finding new strains in faraway places - will not be possible in the coming decades.
And this is not Luddite scaremongering. It is scientific fact. In the last 80 years, 97 per cent of all vegetable varieties in the US, where the process is most advanced, have become extinct. All but 900 of the 7,000 varieties of apples grown in the US in the last century have died out. There are now about 330 varieties of pears, whereas there used to be 2,600. Even in India, where there were more than 30,000 varieties of rice plant in use 50 years ago, 75 per cent of the crop is now accounted for by just 10 modern varieties. Taken in tandem with the destruction of plant species that is going on through deforestation and other developments, this represents a huge impoverishment of one of the world's greatest resources.
It should be remembered, too, that the aim of a corporation like Monsanto is not to feed the poor and liberate humanity from the fear of hunger. It is to sell chemicals. Monsanto makes weedkiller, most notably Roundup. What it wants to be able to do is to sell farmers patented seeds that are resistant to Roundup. The beet-grower can then lash the Roundup on his fields in the knowledge that it will kill the weeds but not the crop. The basic result is that more poisonous chemicals get poured into the soil, making the weeds increasingly resistant to Roundup and requiring ever more liberal does of the same product. As a commercial strategy, it is brilliant. But let's not dignify it with the rhetoric of scientific progress.
Let's not pretend, either, that there is any scientific basis to Monsanto's claims that it is merely conducting carefully regulated field-trials in Ireland. These trials are a scientific nonsense, an exercise in self-evident absurdity. They are meant to test the risks of genetic pollution through the escape of pollen or seeds. But if they are "carefully regulated", then they don't mirror the conditions of the real world and are useless. And if they are not "carefully regulated", then they are not scientific trials. Either way, they are, in the words of Jeremy Rifkin, "an elaborate fiction giving the appearance of scientific legitimacy without the substance."
We don't need to prove our modernity by falling for a narrow and self-interested notion of scientific progress. The future of Irish agriculture would be much better served by taking a stance against GM crops. And, in the process, we would show some awareness of our own past.