Prince Charles warns of GMO crops "disaster"

Tim Castles - Reuters
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

LONDON (Reuters)
- Prince Charles said the widespread use of genetically modified crops would
the "biggest disaster environmentally of all time" in a newspaper
interview published on Wednesday.

The 59-year-old heir to the throne is well known for his support of organic
farming but his comments during an interview with the Daily Telegraph are his
most outspoken attack yet on GMO foods.

His views will strike a chord in Britain where biotech crops have
faced significant opposition, with concerns centred on both food safety and
possible environmental impacts.

Charles said multinational food companies were conducting a "gigantic
experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously
wrong."

Small farmers would be the victims if "gigantic corporations" took
over the mass production of food.

"We (will) end up with millions of small farmers all over the world
being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and
dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness," he declared.

He said "excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture" had
already damaged water supplies in India's
Punjab and in Western Australia.

"What we should be talking about is food security, not food production
- that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think it's somehow going to work because they are going to
have one form of clever genetic engineering after another, then again count me
out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally
of all time." His intervention comes as a wave of food inflation has
reopened the debate on the ways science can boost agricultural production.

Earlier this year Britain's
chief scientist John Beddington said GMO crops should not be shunned as agriculture
seeks to respond to rising food demand, particularly from China and India, at a time when climate
change is expected to hit yields.

(Editing by Steve Addison)

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