As front pages go, the cover of Nature is scarcely a stunner. It depicts two rows of trees facing each other across the page. One row is tatty, the other clean and healthy. And apart from a few grubby bushes in the background, that’s your lot. It makes a gardening catalogue look exciting. But this restrained imagery rewards closer inspection. Those trees, bearing papayas,

are growing in a Hawaiian plantation and the difference between the two rows has critical importance to the world’s mounting food crisis.

It transpires that the stunted trees on the right, each bearing only a handful of fruit, are victims of papaya ringspot virus, a disease that devastates yields and is endemic in Hawaii. By contrast, the papaya trees in the other row, on the left, are healthy and disease-free, because they have been genetically modified to resist ringspot.

As a demonstration of the potential of modern plant technology, the image speaks volumes. Transgenic crops may be disparaged and dug up every time scientists grow them as part of their trials in the United Kingdom, but as Nature’s cover shows, the technology seems ripe to help feed a planet whose population will rise from 6.5 billion people, many of them already hungry, to around nine billion by 2040.

It is a point stressed by crop experts such as Professor Chris Pollack of the University of Wales. “To stop widespread starvation, we will either have to plough up the planet’s last wild places to grow more food or improve crop yields. GM technology allows farmers to do the latter — without digging up rainforests.

It is therefore perverse to rule out that technology for no good reason. Yet it still seems some people are willing to do so. That picture of transgenic papaya plants on Nature’s cover shows how wrong they are.”

The trouble is that GM crops represent everything that the environment movement has come to hate, though it was not the technology itself that originally made greenies froth at the mouth. It was its promotion and marketing by international conglomerates such as Monsanto a decade ago that raised the hackles. As a result, GM crops have become a lightning rod for protests about globalisation. “GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we

eat is owned by them,” claimed campaigner George Monbiot.

Perhaps he is right. However, it is questionable to go one step further and insist, as some campaigners do, that because GM technology has been misused by biotechnology conglomerates, it is therefore justifiable to ignore its usefulness completely. The science can still help feed the world, particularly through the introduction of drought and disease resistance to staple crops such as potatoes and rice. “Britain and Europe have isolated themselves from the rest of the world over transgenic crops,” says Bill McKelvey, principal of the Scottish Agricultural College, in Edinburgh.

“We have decided the technology, for no good reason, is dangerous.The rest of the world doesn’t thinks so and has got on with using it. For example, GM soya is grown throughout America and Asia.

It doesn’t worry people there for the simple reason that no one has ever died of eating genetically modified food. On the other hand, a lot of people could soon die because they have no food of any kind.” — The Guardian