The Knowledge
Centre

GM Food Is Good For You

(Summary)

Steve Connor writes in The Independent:

If Sir Walter Raleigh were alive today it is unlikely that his proposal to introduce a doubtful-looking vegetable tuber from South America would ever get approval from the many food committees that today safeguard the British diet.

The idea that natural means healthy, wholesome and ultimately good is at the heart of Prince Charles's latest broadside against genetically modified (GM) food, delivered as his contribution to the Reith Lectures, broadcast on Radio 4 last night. But in reality, the world is more complicated.

The smallpox virus is natural, so is botulism and plague. An African child dying from diarrhoea as a result of drinking cholera is a quite natural event. So are children born in the industrially developed world with inherited gene disorders.

Interfering with Nature has enabled the human population to grow to unprecedented levels. Between 1960 and 1995, rice and wheat yields have increased more than twofold thanks to unnatural events by breeding strains that can resist drought and pests and by adding artificial pesticides and fertilisers to boost production.

The Green Revolution, however, has run its course, and GM technology offers the most promising solution in that it allows better crops to be developed more quickly than is possible by conventional breeding.