So why do it at all? You 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. The testing phase is finished. And you know that things like potatoes can be quite poisonous if they are green (they contain alkaloid poisons called solanine) and that some types of cassava, a staple food in the tropics, contain cyanide (a deadly poison) unless carefully prepared.

But you know almost nothing about GE foods. Maybe you think it's worth experimenting on whole countries full of people and their kids to see if they're okay. And if you do think that, you must also think there is some very good reason why GE foods will somehow be better than ordinary ones. Otherwise there is simply no point in taking the risk. So far, all the GE foods grown have been for the corporations to make money and gain control of the supply of seeds. Is this a good reason to try them out on millions of unsuspecting people? 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 probably quite sensible. But I don't buy the 'feeding the world' idea at all. Corporations 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?

Here's a few examples of known risks involved in growing GE plants:

• Genes can jump from one species to another. Researchers at Jena University (Germany) collected young bees that had eaten pollen from GE rapeseed (canola) flowers. They found the engineered gene (for herbicide resistance) in the DNA of bacteria and yeasts which live inside the gut of the bees. These accidentally 'modified' bacteria and yeast cells did not die when exposed to the herbicide which suggests that they too have become resistant to the herbicide. So the GE 'resistance' gene has jumped from GE plants, through bees, to microrganisms [8].
• Back in 1997, Canadian research had already shown that the risk of wild viruses hijacking genes from GE crops could be far higher than anyone thought. Genes could be hijacked by viruses to creat new hybrids and new diseases. Not enough is yet known about risks of recombinant (splicing) technologies. [1]
• Dutch research shows that GE bacteria can transfer their antibiotic resistance genes to gut bacteria, something that was not supposed to happen. [2]
• Pollen from GE (Bt-producing) maize drifts onto the famous Monarch butterfly's food plant - milkweed - and their caterpillars die as they eat the pollen-dusted leaves. [3]
• Farmers may need to douse their fields with yet more pesticides to get the best out of GE plants. [4]
• Experiments show that insect-killing toxins from GE maize plants leak into the soil and persist for weeks. The toxin residues could also harm benign soil organisms, or select for pest resistance to them. [5]
• A single genetically modified fish could wipe out local populations of its species if released into the wild. [6]
• Potatoes engineered to resist aphid attack can harm ladybirds which eat them. They live half as long with 30% fewer eggs that hatch. [6]