Another Life: The glossy leaves of our sweet-corn thicket reflected the heat-wave to perfection. Between the shifting banks of sea-fog, sun glinted in the plants' flowering spires, their anthers strung with pollen like chandeliers, and gleamed in silken tassels on the swelling cobs below, writes Michael Viney
Out in the cool before breakfast, swishing the garden hose about, I could easily credit the scenario that our western valleys will soon be a-rustle with alien corn.
How alien, is what we wonder. We are not talking here of the gardener's tasty, even multi-coloured, cultivars, tested with a thumbnail for the right day to harvest, or of mid-winter orgies of corn-on-the-cob gnawed at, beaver-toothed, with buttery chin.
The 20,000 hectares grown now for fodder in the southern counties - squeezed into silage or stripped of rattling grain for winter rations - are of relatively old fashioned farming sorts, their grains unsweetened by plant breeding, their genes unmodified by biotechnology to poison insects or shield the plants through showers of herbicide. But how long will this cornflake innocence persist when, as Ireland warms, maize silage replaces grass silage and when the more moist west, in particular, offers maize grain yields dramatically above the current national average? Both trends are predicted in the new EPA report on climate change.
We should, in theory, have no immediate call for GM products such as "Bt maize", the kind which borrows genes from an insecticidal bacillus found in soil. This was devised chiefly to poison the larvae of the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis, a small and nondescript moth. Its wriggly grubs tunnel into the stem of the maize and there, safe from any normal insectidal spray, chew away to cause poor grain yields or even the plant's collapse. In the GM maize, every mouthful is potentially toxic to the insect.
The moth is a native of Continental Europe and, fatally introduced to America, became its most notorious pest.
Back in Europe, Spain has been the country worst hit by it, losing up to a third of its maize crop. This is why it became the exception in seizing on Bt seed when planting was controversially authorised by the EU in 1997. Some countries banned the GM product outright and others agreed to restrict the planting to 25,000 hectares in Spain.
Ireland and Britain had no problem with this, since Ostrinia nubilalis does not figure noticeably among the moths of these islands and no one was asking to grow Bt maize. But how long will this last, as climate warms and maize invades the fields of Athenry? Then, the extra cost of Bt maize may have to be set against its promise of better yields (in Spain's extreme conditions, an extra 15 per cent has been claimed).
Meanwhile, the genetic modification with more immediate relevance is tolerance to herbicides (not only in maize, but sugar-beet, oilseed rape and potatoes). In Irish maize fields, the rampant growth of scutch grass is becoming a problem when maize plants are small; how convenient to spray Roundup and watch the crop prosper in a mat of dying weeds. This is the GM effect now under study in field trials across the EU.
Earlier this summer, the voluminous Internet material, pro- and anti-biotechnology, was joined by a study of the potential benefits of GM crops to European countries, funded by Monsanto, Syngenta and BIO, three of the leading GM multinationals, and carried out by the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy based in Washington (www.ncfap.org). Despite its name, this is a "private, non-profit, non-advocacy research organisation" with a posh list of trustee academics.
Among the promised gains from planting GM products, Ireland is singled out for just one crop - potatoes. According to the study, biotech researchers have transferred a crucial gene from "a wild plant species related to potato that exhibits complete resistance to late blight". Used across 14,000 hectares, it calculates, the transformed potatoes would eliminate the need for 108,000 kilos of fungicide, add nine million kilos of spuds to the yield and €5 million to the growers' net income.
As it happens, potatoes seem likely to be the one commercial crop Ireland will lose over coming decades - or so the new EPA climate report suggests. Perhaps biotechnology will leap to the rescue with drought-proof genes transposed from cactus. Or perhaps we could just grow the old-fashioned sort here in the more moist west.
In September 1997, a small group of protesters destroyed a trial acre of Monsanto's GM sugar beet in Co Carlow. Six years on, despite some reassurance from UK field trials, the big doubts remain about damage to biodiversity and the spread of genetic pollution.
While our government pins more and more of its hopes on the promise of biotechnology, we are getting far too used to living without trust.