Academic Argues GM Foods are Pure Good

CANBERRA - Sep 23/05 - SNS -- An economics professor from the United States will argue that genetically modified grains and oilseeds offer the only solution to feeding the world and that all opponents would rather see people die of starvation than violate their ideological preconceptions.

University of Houston Professor of Economics, Thomas R DeGregori will makes these claims in a keynote address to the third annual CSIRO Horizons in Livestock Sciences conference, being held October 2 to 5 at the Gold Coast, Queensland.

According to Professor DeGregori the impressive agricultural productivity gains of the past five decades will need to be repeated over the next half century to feed the projected human population increase of 2.7 billion by 2040.

"The only way this will be accomplished is with biotechnology such as transgenics and emerging sciences such as nanotechnology," Professor DeGregori argues.

"The anti-transgenic forces have lost every round of scientific argument, and every claim of adverse impact they have made has been massively refuted. Yet, most public opinion surveys in the US and Europe find about 70% of the public believes the scientific community is divided on the issue."

In spite of all the "wins" in scientific argument, and despite global growth in the planting of transgenic corn, soy, canola and cotton, Professor DeGregori argues that activists have successfully poisoned the public's mind, making the further use of transgenics in new food production difficult, if not impossible.

He asserts that partially successful attempts to stop US-provided maize being used for famine relief in southern Africa because some of it might be transgenic, creates the impression that activists would rather see people starve than eat food grown in violation of their ideological preconceptions.

Professor DeGregori is one of several high profile international scientists, invited to Australia to address the Horizons in Livestock Sciences annual conference, "Redesigning Animal Agriculture", organized by CSIRO.

"The explosion in genetic technologies gives us the power to conceptualize significant transformations of animals but is this where the Australian community wants its animal industries to head," asks CSIRO Livestock Industries Chief Shaun Coffey, another keynote presenter at the conference.

"The question that we need to be asking in countries like Australia is what do we really want our agriculture to do?"

The Horizons conference program will look at how livestock production systems can meet the growing diversity of global food demands. Emerging technologies will be linked to societal drivers to identify a future vision for livestock production systems.