Climate change is a big factor behind changing attitudes. Studies suggest that farm productivity falls 10 per cent with each degree Celsius of warming, which implies a drop of up to 40 per cent worldwide in the coming decades. Agriculture experts overwhelmingly agree that conventional methods are not enough. With the earth’s population set to tip 9 billion by 2050, farmable land is disappearing. Recent studies predict that developing countries could lose 135 million hectares of arable land over the next half century to erosion, declining water tables and encroaching settlement. That means farmers will have to grow more food on less land with less water. Gene splicing can achieve in a matter of weeks or months what takes decades for traditional cross breeding.

“Look at where people are malnourished today—in dry, non-irrigated land, mostly occupied by small farmers,” says Wellesley College political scientist Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science on the biotech ban in Africa. “To feed these people, you need new technologies to use land and labor more productively. This is where GM will help feed the poor.”
-MAC MARGOLIS (Newsweek)