Frankenstein foods are not monsters
Biotechnology is starting to gain more acceptance throughout the world according to the following London Times article. This is great news! Read more below.
C.S. Prakash
Frankenstein foods are not monsters
The London Times
January 09, 2008
All hail Doctor Frankenstein, maker of monsters. God is in retreat, skulking outside the laboratory while modern imitators of Mary Shelley’s mad boffin brew potions, splice genes and bring more new life forms into profitable being.
Ten years after the Prince of Wales accused genetic engineers of taking us into “realms that belong to God and God alone”, those who trespassed into the Kingdom of Heaven have emerged triumphant with a bag full of swag. Monsanto, the American corporation that brought us maize that makes its own pesticide, is thriving, rolling in cash, its stock price ascendant.
A decade ago, Europeans could sneer at genetically modified crops, deriding them as a US-food industry phenomenon, invented to service the food needs of America’s burger-chomping fatties and as attractive as mechanically recovered meat. While we sniffed in our bunkers, the seed barons were winning hearts, minds and stomachs in Asia and Latin America. By 2006, genetically modified crops were grown on more than 100 million hectares in 22 countries, with farmers in China and India clamouring for the seed. The driver is demographics, economics and plain old commerce. Food prices have soared, prompting government agencies to engage in panic buying of wheat. Land is becoming scarce as cities advance and companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, its Swiss rival, make plants that repel predatory bugs and that use less herbicide. The promise for farmers is bigger yields at lower cost and, in a world that needs to feed an extra three billion people by 2050, the need is powerful.
These companies have won the commercial argument, making the right products at the right time, and have profited hugely. Syngenta’s share price surged by 50 per cent last year, while Monsanto’s grew by 140 per cent and the American company last week revealed that its net income in the first quarter had almost tripled to $256 million (£128 million). Its sales of seeds had risen by 23 per cent from the previous year because of soaring demand in Latin America, an astonishing achievement for a business that was almost on its knees in 2002, accused of poisoning the world for profit. So successful was the ideological assault against GM food that Zambia was persuaded to reject American food aid on the ground that it contained GM ingredients that might pollute Zambia’s biosphere.
