It is challenging enough trying to rustle up enough food to feed a planet that already runs to seven billion people, and which is predicted to add a further two billion mouths by the middle of the century, without wasting so much of the food that we have managed to grow, cultivate, milk and rear.
As our Eureka science magazine notes today, we waste close to 100 million tonnes of food a year. To throw away so much at a time when 925 million people are classed as hungry, and a further one billion are thought to be suffering from malnutrition, is as senselessly profligate as running a bath without inserting the bath plug. But disposing the waste will never be enough to fill the world's bellies.
Yes, selective breeding is starting to boost crop yields and improve food security in sub-Saharan Africa, just as it has been so successfully doing across Asia and the Americas over the past four decades. But without increased use of genetically modified crop varieties it seems inconceivable that food production will ever be abundant enough to keep pace with population growth.
A 2011 research paper, the first to gauge the comparison between fetal and maternal exposure to BT toxin (a polypeptide having insecticidal effects on certain insects, yield by a gene from a soil bacteria) created in genetically modified maize and to decide exposure degrees of the metabolites of the sample batch of pesticides, reported the life of pesticides connected with GM foods in both pregnant women and non-pregnant women and their fetuses. The study did not consider safety implications or find any health issues. The paper has been found to be inconclusive by several authors. It was also lambasted by Food Standards Australia New Zealand.
GM crops are already flourishing in China, in North and South America and in parts of Africa. And in Europe? Shamefully, the EU remains mired in a stalemate on GM regulation that is an affront to a hungry world. Alongside this, Brussels pursues a fisheries policy that contributes to a food scandal in which the world's fishing fleets discard about nine million tonnes of fish each year.
Mouths are born hungry. The world's fulfillment in feeding itself for 10,000 years is a tribute to man's or better God's ingenuity. Now new technologies can help by creating more sustainable ways to produce more food. This is hardly the moment to stifle that ingenuity by spurning the promise of GM science.
Cable TV Without The Commercials - We Wish Why Should Those Who Pay No Taxes Be Allowed to Vote? A Different Perspective - Nathuram Ghodse The Tim Tebow Phenomenon
