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Scientists support GM food production
Test-tube crops will be needed to save the world from mass starvation, scientists warn today.
A report from the Royal Society, voice of the scientific establishment in Britain, says there is no single answer to the "deeply disquieting" problems of the near future but genetic modification (GM) must be one of the answers.
It calls on the Government to find 2bn to spend over 10 years on
research into all the possible ways of feeding a booming world population.
The support for GM is low-key, and buried in an 80-page report, but it comes two days after the government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, re-opened the GM controversy by saying he saw no other way to produce 50 per cent more food by 2030.
He has previously talked of the danger of a "perfect storm" of different problems peaking at once to hit food production.
The Food Standards Agency announced a month ago it had been asked by the Government to resurvey public attitudes to so-called "Frankenstein Foods".
The Royal Society says it decided independently that it was time for today's report, Reaping the benefits: science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture.
It says the world needs crops which use less water and there is not time to develop them using conventional plant breeding alone.
But private companies cannot be allowed to hang onto all the rights for new GM seeds.
Royal Society president, Lord Rees of Ludlow, says in his foreword: "It is more than 200 years since Thomas Malthus offered his famously pessimistic prediction that the rise in human populations would outrun the growth in food supplies. Despite devastating regional famines, prognostications of mass starvation have not been fulfilled. Nonetheless, projections for the coming decades are deeply disquieting."
Sir David Baulcombe, chairman of the team that wrote the report, said: "In the UK we have the potential to come up with viable scientific solutions for feeding a growing population and we have a responsibility to realise this potential. If we wait even five to 10 years it may be too late."
But Emma Hockridge, political commentator for the Soil Association, dismissed the findings. "For over two decades, huge claims have been made about the potential for GM, which have not come to fruition," she said. "Why is an organisation like the Royal Society banging the drum for a failing technology?"
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
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