Prince Charles comes in for criticism for all sorts of reasons, in particular from those who want to abolish the monarchy and replace it with an elected head of state. Those campaigning on that issue sometimes find it necessary also to attack the opinions Prince Charles holds, as if that will somehow strengthen their case. In the area where I work, campaigning to protect the environment and to move farming and food away from environmentally destructive, cruel and unhealthy systems that destroy small farms and agricultural jobs, Prince Charles has got it right. His interventions have made a real difference.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, anyone suggesting it was wrong for us to use the seas around our coast as a dumping ground for human shit, chemical discharges, and as an out-of-sight, out-of-mind dump site for toxic and nuclear waste, was seen as at worst mad, and at best irrelevant. In those days, Prince Charles was one of the only public figures to say what I think most British people actually feel, namely that you shouldn’t dump your rubbish in the sea.
This is true whether you’re a family picnicking on the beach, a water company getting rid of sewage, or British Nuclear Fuels dumping radioactive waste. When the generally conservative British media, and our broadly anti-environmental political and business establishment, were ignoring or dismissing the environmental case, an intervention by Prince Charles really made a real difference.
His critics, like Graham Smith of Republic, describe the prince as “some kind of intellectual dissident” musing on a range of things including the environment. Graham says the prince “never encounters opposition, never gets challenged on his views”. This is wildly inaccurate. In his support for organic farming and his opposition to GM, the prince has been attacked by Monsanto’s supporters all over the world. Pro-GM campaigners like Lord Krebs and Lord Taverne never hesitate to rubbish his views.
Now he has reached 60, there is clear evidence available about whether the prince has generally got it right or wrong in these hotly contested areas of environmental policy. On dumping waste in the oceans, he was right.
It is now against international law to dump sewage, toxic or radioactive waste and redundant oil rigs anywhere in the Northeast Atlantic. Organic farming and food is now far from being a flash-in-the-pan or a rich person’s irrelevant indulgence. A series of international reports from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Commission on Trade and Development, the UN Environment Program and even from advisers to the World Trade Organization, have spelt out the significant role that organic systems of food production will play in a future where we rely on the sun’s energy and plants to produce fertility, rather than nitrogen fertilizer made from fossil fuels. A report by 400 international scientists, the IAASTD report, produced in the same way as the IPCC’s international scientific assessments of climate change, champions non-GM, more ecologically based approaches to feeding the world. The system of farming that the prince has argued for over many years is coming into its own, as people face up to the prospect of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from farming by 80 percent, and to the need to change our diet to halt the £7.7 billion annual cost to the NHS, and the £20 billion per year cost to society at large, of diet-related ill-health.
In the area where he has come under huge criticism from vested interests, GM food, scientific evidence is increasingly showing that the prince got it right. Earlier this year, scientists discovered that GM crops engineered to contain insecticide leak the chemical from their roots and damage beneficial organisms in the soil, with unknown consequences. This week, the latest of just a tiny number of studies that have looked at the health consequences of eating GM has shown that GM maize “severely impairs reproduction in mice”. The scientists, funded by the Austrian government, say that there is an “urgent need for further studies”.
In the meantime, the only major country where GM is widely eaten, the US, is facing a consumer backlash. The introduction of labels showing milk not produced with a GM hormone led to a collapse in sales of Monsanto’s GM hormone injected into cows to boost milk output. Major dairies and firms like Starbucks and Wal-Mart stopped using GM hormone milk, and Monsanto sold off the business.
Barack Obama favors labeling all American food that is GM, and hundreds of US food companies have got together to launch a GM-free label next year. Whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of Prince Charles’ constitutional position, on the evidence, it is impossible to sustain the argument that he has been wrong on the environment.
