ABSTRACT
Feeding the world’s hungry is what genetic engineering is all about -or so the food industry claims. Poorer countries are often plagued by adverse growing conditions - poor soils, drought, pests and diseases -although many were able to feed themselves until the introduction of cash crops, industrialization and war reduced the available land for growing food. In the 1970s, similar claims were made about the Green Revolution with its promises to boost yields and increase the efficiency of land use through the introduction of high yielding varieties of staple crops, such as rice. If the newly inserted genes confer a competitive advantage to the new variety, then the crop itself might become a pest, invading the local ecosystem and displacing wild flora. The use of genetic engineering to produce substitutes for raw materials such as sugar, coffee, palm oil and cocoa butter could devastate the economies of the poorer countries which depend on their production.
