On GM Foods

My Dad's classmate forwarded me his response to a Readers Digest artcile:

"India was facing enormous shortage of food in early nineteen-sixties. None even wanted to accept  the portfolio of agriculture at the centre. C Subramaniam boldly accepted this challenge though he was heading a more glamorous portfolio that time. Immediately on assuming charge, he called a meeting of agriculture scientists and sought their opinion. One group suggested that we could import and try high yielding varieties of wheat  crop  developed by Dr Norman Borlaug in Mexico. But, another group vehemently opposed this  idea, asserting that importing seeds from a foreign country will also bring in pests and diseases into the country for which we did not have the control methods. Subramaniam, after careful analysis of these arguments, authorized airlifting of  first lot of 21 tons of wheat seeds from Borlaug. That was the beginning of Green revolution in India. Otherwise, India would have suffered  mass starvation and deaths as predicted by world economists that time.Similarly, today, GM Food is opposed more due to ignorance of the subject. This, in spite of the fact that many varieties of food that we consume daily like bajra, jowar, maize, tomato and capsicum are genetically modified ones! Today’s opposition to GM crops comes not from farmers who are in dire need  to increase their crop yields and profit to escape from poverty but from well educated city consumers based on their  inadequate knowledge."

(About him: B Sc (Agri), M Sc (Agri) and  Ph D graduate. Worked in Govt of India Public Sector Fertilizer Company for 30 years. His special  field of interest was production and use of bio-fertilizers. Worked in Ethiopia as FAO Expert to set-up facility for producing  this low cost agri-input.)