91av

I LED an all-party delegation of MPs to Bolivia last year and one thing we
learned there was how devastating banana disease can be for that country’s
economy—it’s one of the poorest in Latin America. So I had no doubts that
91av was fully justified in running its recent editorial,
“Banana drama”
(21 July, p 3).

A group of publicly funded institutes, the Global Musa Genomics Consortium,
intends to unravel the ever-popular fruit’s genome and to broadcast the findings
to help banana breeders tackle tricky problems for the plant such as disease
resistance and propagation. A super-banana that needs no spraying would spare
local workers a regular dose of chemicals, and could drag Bolivia back from the
poverty line.

Hilary Benn, a junior minister at the Department for International
Development, tells me that the European Union’s Framework Programmes for
Research and Technological Development has a programme that aims to support
research for development (called INCO-DEV). Its interest range, he says, covers
agricultural research in Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Asia and Latin
America. Britain, says Benn, contributes indirectly to INCO-DEV through its
subscription to the European Union. DFID is represented on the committee that
provides strategic guidance on the programme, including applications for
research funding. A project such as the Global Musa Genomics Consortium
proposes—to find a gene that could help improve propagation and protect
this delightful fruit against the banana leaf disease—would be examined
with great interest, says Benn.

I can’t but think that there’s a convincing case for taking a genetically
modified route to make everyone’s favourite fruit even better. However, care
will be needed if cheaper, disease-resistant GM strains are produced: they must
not be allowed to damage the livelihoods of the many plantation workers they are
intended to help.

LEWIS MOONIE, the junior defence minister admitted that when Britain
decommissioned its chemical defence establishment at Nancekuke in north Cornwall
after the Second World War, some of the substances involved in the production of
its chemical nasties were treated and then dumped in the sea. It was inevitable
that a few days after Moonie’s announcement, Candy Atherton, MP for the Cornish
constituencies of Falmouth and Cambourne, would want to know more about the
safety of the dumped chemicals. She asked Moonie specifically about the
chemicals that he had mentioned earlier. Would he, she asked, say what methods
were used to treat pralidoxime mesylate, arsenic chloride and a mixture of
ethylphosphonyl dichloride and ethylphosphonyl difluoride before disposal?

Moonie did so there and then, and with confidence. He would do, of course,
having been a community doctor and later a research pharmacologist before
becoming an MP.

Although research on chemical warfare agents and their precursors has now
been transferred to the government’s labs at Porton Down in Wiltshire, Moonie
said, the Ministry of Defence no longer prepares these materials in large scale
and so bulk treatment methods are not required. All laboratory waste is now
incinerated or sent to a hazardous waste contractor as appropriate, he
added.

Like Atherton, I am particularly interested in what happened at Nancekuke,
and have been since 1967. I would welcome any expert comment from readers about
the materials that Atherton and Moonie mentioned (see “Chemicals (Disposal)”,
column 708, Hansard, 20 July).