Food crisis: a greenlight for GM crops?

Food crisis: a greenlight for GM crops?
Today at 10:22
When a global crisis breaks, you can always bet that some technology that has been previously contested or shunned will be hauled out and proposed as the deus ex machina, offering deliverance at a stroke. Take global warming, for instance. After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy became in many European countries about as popular as a crocodile in a swimming pool. Now, given the snail-like efforts to tackle the danger from carbon pollution, nuclear is staging a magnificent comeback, including in countries where there was diehard opposition, as supporters argue about the atom's advantages over fossil fuels.
Idem for carbon storage and 'clean coal' (See an earlier post here). So here's my bet for the next Lazarus-style comeback - genetically modified (GM) crops.
GM breeding entails slotting a gene into the crop's genome. The present commercialised generation has, for instance, genes that make a crop resistant to herbicide (which means a farmer can simply spray a field to kill weeds, but not kill his crops) or exude toxins that kill pests.

Widely sold in the United States and Canada, GM crops have smashed into a wall in Europe, encountering consumer resistance, bans or restrictions on growing. Environmentalists say engineered crops could damage the environment if their novel genes hop to other species, creating for instance superweeds that would be immune to herbicides. They also say "Frankenfood" may harm health.

So far, the scientific evidence available has by and large given GM crops the all-clear. But critics say the research is too sketchy, sometimes biased and certainly too recent to give a long-term picture. Now the food crisis offers the pro-GM camp a terrific weapon to attack the environmentalists' wall, using the defenders' very own weapon.

Its argument is this: The switch from food crops to biofuels and drought induced by global warming are sapping our ability to feed Earth's ever-growing population. Gene power, goes the argument, could create a new generation of crops with bigger yields and which are resistant to water stress. I found it striking that at the height of the UN food summit, Monsanto chose to issue this press release (see here). All part of the global battle over headlines.

The US agricultural biotech giant says it will aim to double yields of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030, as compared with 2000, using "more precise breeding techniques" (the trigger word "GM", intriguingly, is not used). The big beneficiaries would be the world's hungry and farmers in poor countries. I think we are looking at the first shots in another battle for public and political opinion in Europe and elsewhere. Planet-saving claims for an infant technology will be met by counter-accusations of greenwash... And the scientists will complain that neutral, evidence-based assessments are being ignored.