Intet er åbenbart så skidt, at det ikke er godt for noget.

As prices for bread and rice soar, dictators are tottering.

Oddly, one of them is Chávez, who lost a constitutional referendum in December partly because of the combination of soaring food prices and shortages he has inflicted on Venezuela. Another is Robert Mugabe, who to his surprise lost a presidential election in Zimbabwe three weeks ago, though he has yet to admit it. According to the U.N. World Food Program, the government of North Korea faces another food crisis; bread prices explain in part why Pervez Musharraf lost control of Pakistan’s government in February.

Fødevareministeren er ikke den eneste, der ser på de før så udskældte biotek-planter med nye øjne. Også andre steder i Europa er man ved at vågne op.

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. …

Even in Europe, where opposition to what the Europeans call Frankenfoods has been fiercest, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of genetically modified crops. They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated.

In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month demanding that “all resistance” to such crops “be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production.”

FN modsætter sig teknologi, der kan mindske udledningen af drivhusgassen CO2 og er derved med til at forværre det problem, organisationen ellers skal forestilles at løse. Sådan lyder kritikken fra en amerikansk molekylærbiolog, der i tidsskriftet Journal of Commercial Biotechnology rejser en skarp kritik af FN’s modstand mod genmodificerede afgrøder.

Many of the currently cultivated recombinant DNA-modified crops use herbicide resistance instead of tilling the soil to control weeds. This offers dual benefits: both the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the sequestration of carbon. Tilling not only requires the combustion of tractor fuel, which creates greenhouse gases, but also exposes the carbon in the soil to oxygen, thereby returning carbon to the atmosphere as CO2.

FN er ellers meget glad for den videnskabelige konsensus, når det drejer sig om klimaforandringer. Det kan derfor undre, at den ikke lytter mere til konsensussen, når det drejer sig om, hvor sikre genmodificerede organismer er.