Merribee,

The whole world is plotting against you. The naughty Monsanto has fooled everyone including most of the Australian farmers, the North American farmers to part with their hard earned cash, the CSIRO to verify its results, and the state ministers for agriculture etc.

Only you have the real truth, and are fighting to save the world against this evil. Please share with us this font of true knowledge so that we might open our eyes. We have only the feeble testament of our scientific institutions and as a result are ignorant of the one true light that you bring.

Merri bee, as an agronomist I know that whether yields of a crop are higher or lower depends very much on the system and how it is used. If Shadow Minister is talking about what Western Australia growers are doing, Shadow Minister is correct. In the WA climate, GM canola outperformed a lot of other canola last year. Quite a bit of that was to do with hybrid genetics in GM canola, but a lot was to do with how they grew it. GM canola is more suited to dry seeding because weeds can be controlled after the crop is planted rather than before and in a drought year like last year that allows for better WUE and higher yields.

Of course that doesn’t suit everyone and other growers will find different benefits or no benefits.

Cotton farmers are so disillusioned with GM that 98% of cotton farmers in Australia planted GM cotton last year. That is a lot of disillusionment there. They will do so again this year. Perhaps you need to talk to some real cotton farmers about how GM cotton works for them.

So you consider Bob Phelp’s prediction from 1999 that GM crop plantings will stall and the industry would collapse very soon entirely accurate? I think it has not played out that way.