GM farming will end in ecological disaster

The Guardian website, on 13th August 2008, reports on what Prince Charles had said about genetic modification farming and how it could lead to disaster. It says,

Prince Charles has warned that the adoption of genetic modification in farming has set the world on course for "the biggest disaster, environmentally, of all time".

In an outspoken assault on GM crops, the prince accused unnamed "gigantic corporations" of "conducting a gigantic experiment with nature, and the whole of humanity, which has gone seriously wrong".

"We [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness," the prince said.

"What we should be talking about is food security, not food production - that is what matters, and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think it's somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another, then count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

This is not the first time Prince Charles has gone a little overboard in scaring us about some future threat or impending disaster. He was in the headlines some years ago talking about nanotechnology and gray goo.