Activists are doing poor people a grave disservice by continuing to oppose genetic modification, says a former director of agriculture and rural development for the World Bank. “Frankly, what I think Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have done is a crime against humanity in generating the opposition,” said Robert Thompson, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “They’re going to be responsible for hundreds of millions of people starving in all likelihood if they continue to be as successful as they’ve been.”
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Thompson told the Canola Council of Canada’s annual convention in Saskatoon that farmers are going to need to at least double food production to feed a growing world by 2050.
He said the only way they will be able to accomplish that without knocking down forests to create more farmland is by using tools such as agricultural biotechnology to boost crop yields.
Unfortunately, there continues to be considerable consumer anxiety about GM crops in Western Europe and North America, said Thompson. “How do we educate our broader public when the scientific literacy is so low? That’s a huge question mark,” he said.
However, he said the technology continues to spread around the globe despite the misinformation. “My greatest source of optimism is that the governments of the big three, China, India and Brazil, are on board,” he said.
China is spending more than $3 billion in agricultural biotechnology, Brazil is “investing massively” and India is devoting significant capital to the industry despite anti-GM crop activism in that country.
“They just fired the minister of the environment who had been a significant barrier to adopting GMO eggplant,” said Thompson.
However, there are still significant pockets of resistance to the technology.
“The greatest tragedy is the opposition in sub-Saharan Africa where probably the need is the greatest,” he said.
