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Stardate 20010712.1035 (On Screen): The "greens" are on the wrong side of this issue. I have been running into a lot of people who are afraid of genetically modified foods, even to the point of making up funny nicknames for it such as "frankenfoods". Such people show both ignorance of history and an apalling lack of understanding of the world situation. First, what most of them don't realize is just how heavily genetically modified everything we eat now already is. Humans have been crossing plants with each other (including doing cross-species pollination) for thousands of years. (The Maya had a saying that their maize crop would be improved by having a local grass called "teosinte" growing nearby. It's now known that maize is in fact a mutated form of teosinte and modern plant geneticists have been using wild teosinte as a source of genetic variability for quite a while to improve maize in a number of important ways.) Starting big-time about sixty years ago, genetic modification of food ceased to be something done at random by individuals and became a form of organized engineering. In the 1960's there was a real fear that by the year 2000 we'd be facing mass starvation (i.e. cumulative starvation deaths of more than a billion people). You may have noticed that it didn't happen. That's because the plant geneticists produced miracle crops which were then distributed widely, to the point where for a while India actually became a net exporter of food (instead of the place where chronic famine was expected). But the problem is not "solved", though much good has already been done. And while the overall situation is much better, you can still have small, or even microscopic, disasters.

The Green objection to GM food seems to be predicated on the following logic:

• There is plenty of food. (Just look at how high the shelves in the grocery store are stacked!)
• Genetically modified foods are qualitatively different than anything which has come before
• There's a chance that one of these experiments might go wrong and ruin some food crop.
• Since there's a risk and no potential for gain, we shouldn't do it.

If you go talk to a poor farmer in Kenya or India, though, you won't get the same story. For them, loss of their crop on their particular five-acre farm is disaster. There may be food but they won't have money to buy it, so if their crop fails, their children will starve. There's no single solution to this (and pouring huge amounts of money into the Third World is not the answer) but genetically modified foods can make a really big difference. We know that because they already have.

One of the things which has to be realized is that there is no fundamental difference between the results gotten with the new genetic techniques and the results which were possible before using straight cross-breeding and radiation and chemical mutagens. However, the new approaches do have the ability to focus better: it's the difference between a searchlight and a laser beam. The changes which can result from the new techniques are no more radical than before, it's just that the old techniques involved making a lot of variation and then preserving whatever came out of that which was best (whatever it happened to be), while the new techniques actually permit design. There are a number of ways in which this may help.

The single biggest cause of deforestation in much of the world is for firewood. This is a particular problem in Africa. In areas where there are few (and soon no) trees, the biggest source of burnable materials to prepare food and keep warm at night turns out to be dried manure (which burns quite well). But this is a disaster for farmers because they also need to use that manure to fertilize their fields. Since you can't eat most foods without cooking them that has to come first, and that has resulted in a decline in yields in many places as the land becomes exhausted from lack of fixed nitrogen. Some food crops, however, can fix their own nitrogen. This includes legumes, clover, alfalfa and certain other plants. None of the grains can do this, though, and grain is the primary source of food in the world. What if we could modify wheat or maize or rice to do this? We might be able to now.

One of the big disasters which can happen is attack by insects. If a 5-acre subsistence farmer has his crop wiped out, it doesn't matter if there is plenty of food around because he won't have the money to buy it, and his children will starve. (Which is why there have been suicides when this happens.) There has already been much progress on making plants which will be able to protect themselves against insects. Given that overall close to a quarter of the food we grow is destroyed by vermin, the potential gain from this should be obvious.

But another threat to world food production is limitations on the supply of fresh water. There are many places where there simply isn't enough, and this has lead to wars. There are also places where there is some, but the use of it causes salt to accumulate in the soil over time. The only solution is to thoroughly flood the land each year to wash the salt away. This means that vastly more water is required than would be needed simply to keep the plants alive, because the plants we need are extremely sensitive to salt and won't grow if it's present. But it doesn't need to be that way. There are many plants who ca