Humans have a very strange attitude to risk. Probably the most
dangerous thing most people do is travel. Loads of people die
in road traffic accidents. But they still travel - more and more
- and by doing so, they are probably taking the greatest risk
of all: messing with our planet's climate system (see my guide
on global
warming for more on this). But how
are genetically modified organisms? Nobody knows for sure. But
I don't think anyone would go so far as to say there is absolutely
no risk in eating GE food or of releasing
organisms into the environment.
People
have plenty of food to eat from natural plants and animals.
And you know a great deal about what things you eat are bad
for you, which ones might give you tummy ache or which are poisonous.
You know that because you've been eating these things for thousands
of years and so you know from practical experience what's good
and what's bad. You know that things like potatoes, for example,
can be quite poisonous if they are green (they contain an alkaloid
poison called solanine) and that some types of cassava, a staple
food in the tropics, contain cyanide (a deadly poison) unless
carefully prepared. Why bother with new GM food?
During the 1990s, there
were major protests in Europe over the safety of GM crops. But
there were no such protests in North America and as a result,
people there have been eating GE foods for 20 years or more.
None of the catastrophes predicted by the environmental movement
in Europe have occurred so it would seem that genetically engineered
foods are not the danger that people thought they might be.
The companies have carried out a great experiment, trying out
their GM food crops on millions of people around the world.
Fortunately for them, it has been successful... so far.
Most
of the GE foods grown so far have been for companies to make
money and gain control of the supply of seeds. They are not
nutritionally better for people and expensive for farmers to
buy. The bottom line is that people who think GE foods are really
needed must have much better reasons than just making lots of
money. They do, of course, and
some of those reasons are quite .
But will GE crops 'feed the world'? 
Private
companies have one overriding aim: to make money for the people
who own them. Feeding the world is not something they would
be interested in doing... unless, of course, the hungry people
could pay for the food. 
But
hungry people are almost always hungry not because of lack of
food, but because they have no money to buy it and no land to
grow their own. Perhaps the companies will change and become
really kind and generous and give away food to starving people
in the future. I hope so. What do you think? Happily, there
are other moves afoot which could
mean useful GE becoming more freely available to poor farmers
in developing countries.
To learn more about the
risks of genetic engineering, visit the Union
of Concerned Scientists.