GM vital for hungry world: editor

By SIMON COLLINS

A New Zealander who is science editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper is home with a grim message: the good times are over.

Hokianga-born Tim Radford, who is here for a British Council media seminar, believes that genetic research will be needed to improve plant productivity to help a deteriorating environment.

"It's about feeding as many people as you can," he says.

"The number of people who will be hungrier in the decades ahead is going to increase for all sorts of reasons, including global warming and because land is going out of production because it's been degraded and desiccated.

"It's obvious that probably the good times are over, even for America, where the amount of land available to feed the world is going to start falling."

Radford, a former New Zealand Herald journalist who went to Britain in 1961, says genetic modification became unpopular in Britain when officials decided in 1996 not to require genetically modified soybeans to be labelled as such on the grounds that they were used in 60 per cent of all supermarket products.

"That was the decision not to be up-front that put the fat in the fire.

"Most of the dissatisfaction in Britain over nuclear power, nuclear waste, the handling of the BSE crisis, and most of all genetically modified foods, is because people had not known what was being done until it was too late."



Radford believes the public is entitled to be suspicious of GM food manufacturers which have been the main beneficiaries of the new products so far. He cites Monsanto as an example.

But he also believes the world needs the latest genetic techniques to accelerate traditional plant-breeding programmes to cope with a global population that is growing by 10,000 people every hour.

"There are now 23 countries which are facing an acute water shortage," he said.

"Supposing the essence of science was not to make Monsanto richer, supposing it was to make people's lives better, what would we want most?

"What about millet that can withstand drought?

"Why not a wheat that can grow in ground that is too salty for wheat at the moment?

"So inside the genetic engineering laboratories in Cambridge and Cornell and places like that, there are people working on really useful crops that might not actually need transgenic [cross-species] engineering - there will be the gene for drought resistance in the wheat family somewhere.

"It might be that if newspapers had done their job more aggressively - and in that I have to include me - then we might have persuaded people to be more interested in the direction of genetic engineering ...

"They might have put pressure on Governments, laboratories and biotech firms at the beginning of the process and not at the end."

nzherald.co.nz/ge

Report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification

GE lessons from Britain

GE links

GE glossary