Simon Webster talks with Clive Blazey

A: When I was 15 I spent an outdoor education year at Mount Timbertop in the Victorian Alps. It wasn’t until we climbed up into the Howitt high plains that I saw a landscape that totally engaged me. Every weekend hike before that we had walked through eucalyptus forests that were monotonous and surprisingly silent but once we got above this tree line and onto the high plains with its log huts, stunted alpine gums and wildflowers, I was captivated. During my university days a few years later, I visited the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and decided that I wanted to live in a garden as beautiful as those.

A: Diggers was a pioneer of the rescue of heirloom vegetables and while the chefs and cooks were immediately excited, it took a long time for the superior tastes, colour and diversity of heirlooms to become mainstream. What was really happening was that the boring idea of the English meat and two veg diet was being swept away by new tasting experiences from the Italians, Japanese and so on. The organic movement has been very slow to gain traction because supermarket food, driven by mono-cropping production, which depends on high-impact chemicals, fertilisers and hybrid seeds, is currently profitable even though it destroys soil fertility. Fortunately, genetically modified (GM) food, particularly unlabelled GM corn, has not contaminated our food and soils as it has in the US.

Q: How do you think GM food will affect our world in years to come? Is it controllable or are the powerful agritech companies unstoppable?

A: It is difficult to gauge how dangerous Roundup Ready GM crops are to human health. Australia adopted the principle that GM seeds behave like existing seeds and don’t need trials. The only thing that will stop GM is when health impacts are proven or patents run out. Consumers will not willingly buy labelled GM food, so it succeeds because it is not labelled by regulators in the US. When Calgene [later acquired by Monsanto] offered the first GM vegetable, named Flavr Savr Tomato, in the US in 1994, it was surprised at how bad the consumer reaction was and the tomato was removed from the shelves very quickly. So GM-bred vegetables have no future, but a new gene-editing technique, CRISPR, which doesn’t transfer genes across species as GM does, will probably take over broadacre crops.

Q: What effect do you think the upcoming mergers of agritech giants will have on our food?

A: The acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer has just been given approval, which means that just three companies (rather than six companies two years ago) will now control about 66 per cent of world food grown from seeds.How regulators can see this as a good idea is beyond me. Bayer has bought Monsanto, China National Chemical Corp has bought Syngenta, and DuPont has acquired Dow. In effect, the world’s leading pesticide producers now own two-thirds of our seeds. This doesn’t mean that GM is inherently bad;it may lead to crops that use less water, chemicals or nutrients, but Monsanto has used GM technology exclusively to boost its Roundup sales, which can’t be good for our soils or our health. I don’t see the GM problem as a biological one of gene splicing in laboratories. I think the problem is that the patenting of genes gives legal rights over the public’s current ownership of 12,000 years of seed selection, thereby giving just three chemical companies control of our food supply. No species has ever survived that loss of control of its food.

Q: What are your favourite gardens in Australia and overseas and what do you like about them?

A: The Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) and Adelaide Botanic Gardens are so extraordinarily beautiful that I have been to both of them hundreds of times. Andrew Laidlaw’s plantings at the volcano and the children’s garden in the RBG are breathtaking, a perfect match to the wildness of Cradle Mountain [Tasmania] and the Crosscut Saw ridge in the Victorian Alps.

Q: If you could only grow one edible plant, and one ornamental plant, what would they be and why?

A: My favourite edible plants are heirloom tomatoes: Tommy Toe because it is Australia’s best-tasting tomato and has won taste tests for about 20 years, and Green Zebra because I know its breeder, Tom Wagner, and it is the perfect colour contrast on the plate to dull supermarket red tomatoes, with way better taste. My favourite flower has to be the lotus, exquisite in bloom, leaf and seed.