Genetically Modified (GM) Food

Genetic modification has merits. In the 1980s when it was new I was excited, as the scientists were, by its potential to solve real problems. Super-resistant sorghum was one early target - able to germinate in soil that fries your feet, and to shrug off the mildew that commonly claims half the crop - a big deal for cash-poor farmers in developing countries. Genes could be introduced from ground-nuts, whose heat resistance beggars belief. The possible dangers (super-sorghum might become a weed) seemed easily outweighed by the benefits.

But today's GM crops are not designed to improve people's access to affordable food whether in the rich world or the poor. The strategy, baldly stated, is to ensure that all the world's agriculture will be controlled by just a few high-tech companies. Today's GM crops and those in the pipeline are not intended primarily to raise total output or quality, but to make it easier to mass-produce crops with minimum labour. Mass production reduces costs while long-distant transport and storage can increase the selling price - and the difference between the two contains the profit.

There is nothing wrong with profit in itself. But modern corporations need shareholders and shareholders tend to demand maximum profit. So global commerce has become a global dogfight; the prize goes to whoever can undercut the rest. Such an approach, for agriculture in particular, is clearly extremely dangerous - but it's now official strategy, sanctified by the World Trade Organisation.

People in the highest places - in science (not least the Royal Society), governments (including Bush's and Blair's) and commerce (Monsanto) - are defending GM with arguments that are simply untrue. Thus we have been told that future populations cannot be fed without GM. But although its advocates always emphasise the need for evidence, there is none at all for their most fundamental claim.

The United Nations predicts that human numbers will rise to around 10 billion by 2050 - but then, the prediction goes, the world population will stabilise. So the task is big but finite, and it could be achieved without GM. Wheat, rice, and maize provide humanity with half our calories and about two-thirds of our protein, with wheat and rice by far the more important.

GM technology is being applied to both but not, in general, to increase output significantly. Neither do these crops need such technology. Cultivated rice has 20 or so wild relatives which between them contain all the genes likely to be required (for example, to resist the floods and droughts that will result from global warming), and these genes can be introduced by conventional breeding. GM maize is now commonplace, but is designed mainly to reduce the cost of labour.

This is now foisted on Africa as a life-saver - often replacing the traditional sorghum, while putting many farmers out of work. In the service of traditional agriculture science could work wonders but as the destroyer of agrarian economies it is an enemy of humankind. The westernisation of Third World farming that is current strategy would put billions, literally, out of work.

Champions of GM often scorn its critics as woolly-minded enemies of progress. But it's the experts and leaders who have got it wrong. We, humanity, can't afford to let this one go.