Here it comes - Food crunch opens doors to bioengineered crops

Surging costs, population growth, and drought and other setbacks linked to global climate change are pressuring world food supplies, while soaring prices on the street have triggered riots and raised the number of people going hungry to more than 923 million, according to U.N. estimates.

With food demand forecast to increase by half by 2030, the incentive to use genetic engineering to boost harvests and protect precious crops from insects and other damage has never been greater.

In Europe, Africa and Asia, governments that have resisted imports of genetically modified foods and banned growing such crops are loosening those restrictions. Meanwhile, they are pushing ahead faster with their own research, despite lingering questions over the safety of such technology.

"Influential voices around the world are calling for a re-examination of the Genetically-Modified debate," says C.S. Prakash, a professor of plant molecular genetics at Alabama's Tuskegee University. "Biotechnology provides such tools to help address food sustainability issues."

Genetic manipulation to insert desirable genes or accelerate changes traditionally achieved through crossbreeding can help make crops resistant to insects and disease or enable them to tolerate herbicides. Livestock similarly can be altered by inserting a gene from one animal into the DNA of another.

the rest...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081130/ap_on_sc/food_s_future_gm_crops

making good food even harder to get... and the continued contaminating of organics... :-\

grz-

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