Sir,

In my culture we say that the three most powerful emotions are love, envy and jealousy!

We have opinion makers making rash statements regarding the mighty USA.

One has stated that the USA is efficient in the production of food, another has praised the eating property of USA beef – but can he say hand on heart that the beef that he ate was American?

The USA imported 1.79million metric tonnes of beef from countries that raise their cattle on grass feed systems. They want lean cattle, so that they can mix the beef with their own over-fat grain fed systems, boosted by the introduction of chemical inputs that are banned in 160 countries worldwide.

Thumb rule – five steers to the tonne. That’s a lot of cattle!!

Beta agonist drugs, ractopamine, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone are feed added to all types of livestock, and with very little state control and in the most no control at all, so that most Americans and holidaymakers that eat meat product produced in-house get doses of those drugs, ractopamine being the most dangerous as it effects those with heart problems and the rest with reproduction ailments.

Have they ever heard of a group 'Moms across America'? They want all food content labelled. At present all US foods do not need to show the consumer where the food comes from, and how it was produced, was it GM produced or drug-laced.

Imagine if we didn’t have European rules to protect the public our animal product would be the same, as long as a big profit was in the making, who cares, as in America money is God!

The writing is on the wall for America, that is a no brainer, tarnishing food with chemicals, Monsanto saw the light when it sold out to Bayer.

The Trump government is in a trade war with the rest of the world, now its export of contaminated agricultural foodstuffs will come into the spotlight, as most of its agricultural exports go to the East – even last month Korea and Japan turned away boatloads of Canadian wheat that was GM contaminated.

So our SNP government have got it right – stay away from manipulating human foodstuffs with dangerous technology and drugs.

Better to be on the safe side the way we farm, rather than in a drug-soaked land!

Angus A Macdonald,

Balivanich,

Benbecula