In a major intervention during a meeting of the European Parliament’s Agriculture & Rural Development Committee meeting on Wednesday (27.10.10), the Eastern Counties MEP, Stuart Agnew (UKIP), has strongly urged his fellow Parliamentarians to "stop fooling around" on organic farming, climate change and bio-technology.
Whilst acknowledging that organic farming has benefits to offer, Mr Agnew outlined its serious limitations, bringing in his personal observations of organic arable farms in the East of England. He described some of the crops he’d seen as "submerged in a bed of thistles, plastered with fungus or crawling with aphids." He said that such crops will not be harvested as "the cost of harvesting would be greater than the value of the crop." He said that "we cannot extrapolate this sort of thing on a large scale and expect to save the world".
He also urged the Committee to read the emails leaked from the Climate Change Unit at the University of East Anglia last year. Mr Agnew said that these scientists are a major source of information upon which the International Panel on Climate Change bases its reports. "These individuals came to a conclusion and then tried to make the facts fit it". The emails show "how determined these people were to make sure that their version of the truth got to the panel and no one else’s. We are taking all this climate change nonsense as fact!"
Mr Agnew was also forthright in his views on biotechnology. He said: "Politicians cannot change the weather but we can encourage scientists to produce plants that might manage the weather better. Far from something to be frightened of, it can be quite useful."
Above all he urged the Committee to "stop fooling around with organic farming, stop fooling around with climate change and allow scientists to do their jobs properly".
