GM Foods 'needed'
A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science award),the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods."We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven."We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops," she told the BBC."We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century."Dr Fedoroff, who wrote a book about GM Foods in 2004, believes critics of genetically modified maize, corn and rice are living in bygone times."We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production." In a wide ranging interview, Dr Fedoroff was asked if the US accepted its responsibility to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be driving human-induced climate change. "Yes, and going forward, we just have to be more realistic about our contribution and decrease it - and I think you'll see that happening."And asked if America would sign up to legally binding targets on carbon emissions - something the world's biggest economy has been reluctant to do in the past - the professor was equally clear. "I think we'll have to do that eventually - and the sooner the better."
The full interview with Dr Nina Federoff can be heard on this week's edition of the new One Planet programme on the BBC World Service
By Steven Duke Editor, One Planet, BBC World Service
By Steven Duke Editor, One Planet, BBC World Service
As in the days of Noah...