from TreeHugger.com
by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California
With rising populations of people and shrinking supplies of food, it seems like ensuring access to three square meals a day for every mouth is an ever more impossible task. What have we done to get ourselves into this mess? The Guardian has an interesting piece called "How We Engineered The Food Crisis" on the hurdles we've placed in front of ourselves, not the least of which, the author argues, is regulatory barriers to the research in and use of genetically modified foods.
"...[P]rivate investment in R&D on innovative practices and technologies has been discouraged by arbitrary and unscientific national and international regulatory barriers - against, in particular, new varieties of plants produced with modern genetic engineering (aka recombinant DNA technology or genetic modification, or GM). Genetic engineering offers plant breeders the tools to make crops do spectacular new things. Can the flawed public policy that prevails in most of the world be rationalised?"
Would greasing the wheels of GMO research and implementation be a reasonable solution to the food crisis? Read the full article, and come back to let us at TreeHugger.com know your thoughts in the comments.
