I'm now going to look at the second of the four new messages in the news this week that affect the terrible guilt I feel about what sort of food I should be buying...

1) http://www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/the-politics-of-food-par t-1-gordon-ramsay-94914/
2) Food prices, especially for staples like wheat and rice have rocketed hitting the poorest (see the article on crazy B's blog for one way of looking at that) http://www.thoughts.com/crazyb/blog/global-food-crisis-and-g overnment-neglect-91708/
3) UK consumers throw away about a third of their food untouched http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545785/Householders- throw-away-third-of-all-food.html  
4) Part of the looming food crisis might be being caused by the shift to producing crops fpr biofuels http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7186380.stm  

The world wide food price increase is largely to do with demand (well over 6 billion world population now and increasing prosperity even given the credit crunch...), and also to do with climate change. The quesiton this raises for me is another of my food dilemmas... if we need higher yield foods in order to try to combat the increased demand, is GM the way forward? Is genetic modification the new Green Revolution?
Instinctively I am against genetically modified food. This is partly to do with the "frankenstein food" potentially-damaging-to-human-health tinkering-with-things-we-don't-fully-understand fears that are quite legitimately held by some.
I don't really agree with the scientist view that this is really just an extension of the sort of crossbreeding of plants that humans have always participated in - changing something at a genetic level is not natural in the way that encouraging plants to crossbreed (you cannot get things that are not compatible to crossbreed no matter how much pollen on paintbrushes you have). But that's not actually my worry with GM.

I'm afraid that:
a) we'll get it wrong and that wrongness will cross into the untinkered-with plants through the natural pollination casuing the destruction of the untinkered-with plants; and
b) human greed will get in the way of the benefits.
In particular, I'm concerned that we will either cut corners, doing something the cheapest way rather than the best way which might lead to the problems at a), and I'm concerned in particular by the so-called terminator gene. Seed companies are already saying that they would need to protect their profits if seeds were higher yield. One way of doing this is to affect the genes to do with reproduction, effectively making GM plants sterile and requiring farmers to buy new seeds from the company every year. See again the problem at a) - the potential consequences are so serious that we risk destroying world agriculture if those gene modifications are allowed.

So, if we are going to use GM we need world-wide agreement that the terminator gene should be ilegal and severe enforcible penalties for anyone that tries.

What do you think?