What Papaya Can Tell Us About Ending World Hunger

I cannot stress enough on the importance of GM foods to even think about making the world a better place. First, we should trifurcate our food source as Organic, Non-organic and GM foods. Now we should assimilate organic and GM food (and no, it's not an oxymoron). The only issue with GM food has nothing to food itself but everything to do with selfishness (which is good up-to a level). So instead of eschewing GM food, we should try to fix the patent laws and make away for open source food revolution. Here is a great post - Revival of Hawaiian Papaya:

"To appreciate the value of genetic engineering, one need only examine the story of papaya. In the early 1990s, Hawaii's papaya industry was facing disaster because of the deadly papaya ringspot virus. Its single-handed savior was a breed engineered to be resistant to the virus. Without it, the state's papaya industry would have collapsed. Today, 80 percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered, and there is still no conventional or organic method to control ringspot virus.

The real significance of the papaya recovery is not that genetic engineering was the most appropriate technology delivered at the right time, but rather that the resistant papaya was introduced before the backlash against engineered crops intensified.

Opponents of genetically engineered crops have spent much of the last decade stoking consumer distrust of this precise and safe technology, even though, as the research council's previous reports noted, engineered crops have harmed neither human health nor the environment.

In doing so, they have pushed up regulatory and development costs to the point where the technology is beyond the economic reach of small companies or foundations that might otherwise develop a wider range of healthier crops for the neediest farmers. European restrictions, for instance, make it virtually impossible for scientists at small laboratories there to carry out field tests of engineered seeds.

As it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.

The stakes are too high for us not to make the best use of genetic engineering. If we fail to invest responsibly in agricultural research, if we continue to allow propaganda to trump science, then the potential for global agriculture to be productive, diverse and sustainable will go unfulfilled. And it's not those of us here in the developed world who will suffer the direct consequences, but rather the poorest and most vulnerable."