Dr William Rolleston
Climate change and genetic modification are two topics bound to produce minority reports and spawn conspiracy theories.
The difference between them is that minority reports on climate change tend to come from the political right, on genetic modification from the political left.
Science is blind to these polemics and where scientists are influenced by politics, time eventually roots them out.
So for the record, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is happening with humanity, including agriculture, playing a significant role; and that genetic modification is as safe as conventional breeding techniques.
The Government has called for public submissions on New Zealand's climate change targets post 2020.
Get this wrong and we put in peril our agriculture, our economy and our environment.
The recent Ministry for the Environment's Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990-2013 confirms what we all know anyway. The biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand is the agriculture sector.
But below the headline, the report states the proportion of emissions from the agriculture sector has generally been decreasing.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector went up 32 per cent, but the emissions from agriculture increased only 14 per cent in comparison.
The value of our primary exports grew more than six times in that same 1990-2013 period.
In other words, our agriculture products are more carbon efficient as time goes on.
Our industry can put a block of butter or cheese on the family table in London or Shanghai with far less impact on the environment than butter or cheese derived from English or Chinese cows.
Our greenhouse gas efficiency of final dairy product has increased by an average 1 per cent a year for the past quarter of a century.
Our research into pastures, gut rumens, selective breeding and a whole host of other interrelated factors, including the manufacturing process, means it makes more environmental sense to produce primary goods here in New Zealand and export to other countries.
How we treat agriculture needs to ignore the politics and recognise this fact if we are to protect the environment.
Our minority reporters and conspiracy theorist have had a field day with genetic modification. We have all heard of the fish genes in our tomatoes and frog genes in our potatoes. The movement of genes from one species to another (called transgenics) sounds like scary stuff and should be banned they say. But scientists have discovered transgenics in our own back yard in none other than that Maori staple -- kumara. Not through genetic modification, but through thousands of years of breeding.
It turns out that back in time a nasty bacteria attacked ancient sweet potatoes. As a result, some genes from the bacteria became embedded into the sweet potato, which now rely on them to function. Enter humans.
This plant function worked so well that the transferred genes were inadvertently but specifically selected by our early farmers and became the basis for all the 291 known varieties of sweet potato grown around the world.
They all have the transgenic bacteria genes, but no wild variety of sweet potato has them. Every time we eat kumara, we are consuming the tuber of a transgenic plant -- a plant-bacteria hybrid.
There is no doubt that other food will also turn out to be transgenic in a similar way.
Science challenges our notions of common sense -- it was once common sense that the sun revolved around the earth -- and our boundaries of right and wrong. We should cling to our values but they need to align with reality.