Feeding the World

In 1998 the GM giant Monsanto launched an aggressive advertising campaign to persuade reluctant Europeans they should accept GM foods: "As we stand on the edge of a new millennium, we dream of a tomorrow without hunger… Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them. Food biotechnology will."

Such claims drew a critical response not just from many development organizations with decades of on the ground experience of helping the poor and hungry in the developing world, but even from the head of GM firm Syngenta UK (then Novartis Seeds UK), Steve Smith. Smith told a public meeting, "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not…To feed the world takes political and financial will.

Feeding the World quotes

"We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves."

Delegates from 20 African countries to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN conference on Plant Genetic Resources, 1998

Non-GM breakthroughs

Introduction
Non-GM breakthroughs

Introduction

Does mention of allergen-free peanuts, striga-resistant cowpeas, salt-resistant wheat, beta-carotene rich sweet potatoes, virus-resistant cassavas make you think of GM?

If so, you've missed the great unpublished story - all the non-GM breakthroughs solving precisely the kind of problems (drought-resistance, salt-resistance, biofortification etc.) that GM proponents claim only genetic modification can provide the answer to.

Non-GM biotechnology is the future

"New cutting-edge technologies have made gene splicing and transgenic crops obsolete and a serious impediment to scientific progress."
Read more...

Golden Rice: A dangerous experiment

In February 2009 a group of 22 international scientists and experts addressed an open letter to Prof Robert Russell at Tufts University School of Medicine, who is in charge of clinical trials on GM Golden Rice, protesting at clinical trials of GM Golden Rice being conducted on adults and children.[1]

The authors say that the trials breach the Nuremberg Code, brought in at the end of World War II to prevent any repetition of the experiments conducted on people by Nazi scientists.