View Single Post
  #5   Report Post  
Old 18-08-2003, 08:14 AM
Jim Webster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Animals avoid GM food (Was: biotech & famine)


wrote in message
...

On Sun, 17 Aug 2003 10:52:12 +0100, "Jim Webster"
wrote:

tonnes of GM maize have been imported into Europe and no one has noticed

any
difference


How many tonnes?


no one knows

Why are US farmers complaining that they have lost $200-$300 million
per annum in corn exports to Europe because of GMOs?


Unlikely, because last year maize exports fell to the UK because of a crop
shortage, the price for maize gluten went up from about £85 per tonne to
over
£100 per tonne due to lack of availability.
There was a shortage of maize, which meant that for the first time in
history the UK managed to export feed wheat to the US.

In the long term, maize has been displaced by wheat in UK diets purely on
price, the last round of CAP reforms cut the market price of EU produced
feed wheat which made maize comparatively expensive for feed compounders
using 'least cost' formulations. When I was a kid cattle feed was basically
a mixture of maize and soya, which is something the UK industry hasn't been
able to afford for over thirty years. With the MTR it is probable that the
amount of grain grown in the EU will fall, and indeed there looks to be a 15
million tonne shortfall anyway due to drought. Mind you the MTR could
produce a collapse in beef production anyway, which could further reduce EU
imports of maize.
The importation of Maize gluten is dropping more due to the fact that it is
a dried 'wet milling product' and its use is becoming more popular in the US
as a wet product. It is more profitable to sell maize gluten wet within the
US than it is to dry it and ship it.

Jim Webster