NFU president Peter Kendall has been forced to defend comments he made earlier in the week comparing a man arrested for interfering in a trial of genetically modified wheat with “Nazi book burners” who destroyed texts which did not conform with Nazi ideology in 1930s Germany.

The President qualified his remarks following an interview on BBC radio and a Twitter storm in which he was accused of “overstepping the line” and “headline grabbing.” He made the inflammatory comments at the launch an NFU-led PR campaign aimed to boost the image of farming in Britain.

Speaking on Monday, Mr Kendall described damage done to the trial by Hector Christie, a farmer and aristocrat from Devon, as “The wilful imposition of ignorance, directly comparable to Nazi book-burning in the 1930’s.”

However, the clearly premeditated comparison has drawn severe criticism and Mr Kendall was forced to defend his comments on the BBC Today Programme earlier this week. He denied having called Christie a Nazi and said he chose the comparison to exhibit robust condemnation of the farmer’s interference with the trial at Rothamsted Research Institute, Hertfordshire. Kendall also denied that he accepts GM as a foregone conclusion, although he has publicly expressed support for the technology in the past.

Mr Kendall said on the Today Programme that he believes GM crops will be an essential tool for feeding the 9 billion people projected to inhabit the Earth by 2050, however, this view, widely expressed by GM supporters, has been summarily rejected by most respected food policy experts who believe more equitable distribution of resources and effective knowledge sharing will play a much more significant role in establishing food security around the world.

He said on Tuesday, “I’m not saying anyone is a Nazi, what I am saying is that destroying knowledge and the development of knowledge is very similar to what happened in the thirties. It’s that message of trying to suppress knowledge which I think is so outrageous.”

Mr Kendall was accused of obstinacy by the BBC’s Sarah Montague, who suggested that researchers, politicians and industry leaders including Mr Kendall have called for open “dialogue” over the contentious issue of GM, but assumed from the outset that this must result in sceptics ‘coming round’ to the point of view of GM supporters. She argued that, if a hostile public does indeed need “convincing” of the benefits of GM, it may be better to continue to engage in dialogue with sceptics instead of resorting to comparisons to the Nazi party.  

Researchers at Rothamsted are trialling a variety of wheat which expresses a hormone that deters aphids, however, opponents of the trial assert that the insects will develop resistance to the hormone, as has happened with weeds and pests in other crops modified for resistance.

The debate over GM crops in the UK remains a fierce one; GM-sceptic group Take the Flour Back is planning a mass protest against the trial at Rothamsted on Sunday. The group claims the trial is a waste of research money, which would have been better spent on finding agroecological solutions to Food Security problems, rather than ones which support an unsustainable model of farming. Eleanor Baylis, one of the group’s spokespeople, said earlier this week, “The only certainty about this trial is that there's an absolute market rejection of the product it's testing.”

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