Africa Fighting Malaria

GREEN MSP Mark Ballard walked out of a rural affairs conference yesterday after savage criticism of organic farming by "Cartesian rationalist" Jock Stewart.

Stewart, a chemist by training and a small scale farmer by inclination, had dismissed organic farming methods as seriously flawed and a prime example of how the green lobby had marginalised science.

This had resulted, he told a "People Too" conference at Perth, among other things in "weed infested middens" of farms and fields saturated with copper sulphate - poisonous, but the only control allowed against potato blight under organic rules.

Organic farming also meant lousy, worm-ridden, fly-struck sheep because modern disease controls were not allowed, he claimed, and he blamed flawed science, and Rachel Carson’s emotive book Silent Spring, for the banning of the malaria-controlling, life-saving chemical, DDT.

That was too much for Ballard, one of several MSPs invited to take part in a panel discussion in the afternoon. From the audience he called out to People Too chairman Kirsty Macleod, who was also chairing the conference: "I’m very disappointed that you do not have another speaker to balance those untrue statements. They have undermined what could have been a valuable conference."

Stewart’s criticisms of organic farming were invalid, he said, and there had been good scientific reasons to ban DDT as an extremely dangerous chemical.

Macleod replied: "My view is that in its entirety we do get a balance here."

The point of the conference - the basic belief of People Too, formed three years ago, is that people are the most important part of rural Scotland, but get a raw deal from government and conservation pressure groups - she said, was that "we do not live in a society where we get balance from government, or from pressure groups. We are trying to give an opportunity here to views that are not normally heard. Jock Stewart’s views are valid".

Ballard replied: "You are just doing exactly what you accuse pressure groups of doing... I am leaving and not coming back."

That produced applause from the audience of about 100, most of them of the "robust rural" and landowning sector.

But Ballard did return to take part in a panel session and said last night: "It was important to stay and try to restore some balance. We can reconcile environmental and economic concerns if we do it properly. But the unwarranted outburst about organic farming was not the way to do it."

Stewart said unrepentantly: "I have been fighting this fight for the last ten years and there are times when I despair. The creeping miasma of green drivel is everywhere."