Does GM have a Role for Feeding the Poor?
In the mid-1990s governments, industry and scientists claimed the moral high ground with the assertion that GM food was needed to “feed the world”. With global population likely to increase by half by 2050, they argued that GM would provide a second “green revolution” to improve the growth rate and yield from crops, and feed more people from the available land. This argument presents the problem as if it was primarily a technical one of ensuring enough gross food production. This view has been very widely challenged. At present, the causes of hunger are less about supply than the complex mixture of social, political, structural and economic factors, which result in a bias in favour of the rich. GM technology already shows the same bias as the problem it is intended to solve. In 1998, a Church of Scotland study examined this claim, but found disturbingly little evidence for effort directed to the needs of those who are hungry. A study of the Protestant Church in Gemany (EKD) in 2000 con
