Tom Heap investigates whether British attitudes to GM food are holding back the fight against poverty, disease, and hunger.

Tom Heap: I'm just squeezing along on the narrow margin between the hedge and a field which is planted with the very beginnings of next year’s wheat crop. It looks very calm now but barely 10 years ago this expanse of mud and crops was definitely a battlefield.

[flashback to BBC radio news]

Nick Clark: The World at One, this is Nick Clark with 30 minutes of news and comment. And the headlines today: Greenpeace has said it was responsible for the destruction of a field of GM maize in Norfolk early this morning.

(GM crop trial farmer) William Brigham: About quarter past five in the morning, on 26th July 1999, I got a phone call from my brother saying, there’s a digger and I’m pretty certain it’s gone down the track towards the GM crop.

Nick Clark: The company involved in the trial says it may be necessary in the future to conduct such experiments in secret to prevent attacks by environmentalists. [end of BBC news piece]

William Brigham: We confronted them … They had a tractor with a cutter. They were proceeding to cut, I wouldn’t say in very agricultural methods, they were going round and round in circles but I think it was more for the camera than for effect.

Tom Heap: That was the Norfolk farmer, William Brigham, and much like the cutter, the argument has been going round and round in circles ever since. But, weed out the rhetoric and GM withered here for a simple reason: the public could see no benefit which justified the dangers, however small, of growing and eating GM crops. Even biotech enthusiasts admit the logic of that position, but it is based on a balance of risk vs reward, and today on Costing the Earth we're askin whether the passing years have tipped the scales, and if GM’s time has now come.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: There are going to be tremendous shocks to the global food system given that we're already in an unsustainable environment trying to feed thare holding back the fight against poverty, disease, and hunger.

Tom Heap: For over a decade Americans have been chowing down on trillions of GM meals, and there is no apparent human health disaster. Last year GM crops were planted over 1 million square kilometers, that's 4 times the area of the UK: where's the environmental catastrophe? And do the emerging pressures of climate change and 3 billion extra stomachs to fill by 2050 mean yield from our fields is a matter of life and death, or, put brutally, could GM help feed all of us, and be a lifesaver for the starving?

Dick Taverne, a member of the House of Lords science and technology committee, is in no doubt.

Dick Taverne: I think our present attitudes to GM are not just rather short-sighted, and ignore the evidence, but are deeply damaging to the fight against hunger, poverty and disease in the world. The trouble is, the new technology is not essential to Europe. Nobody here in Europe goes hungry. It's the developing world to which it's important, and on the whole people don't seem to care about that. Oh, they love big concerts, Let's Make Poverty History, let's promote things in Africa, but then they don't realize that what's holding back the fight against poverty in Africa is, amongst other things, the resistance to GM crops.

Tom Heap: Poor diet and simple hunger erodes humankind, the death toll so constant that it largely goes unnoticed. Prof Jeffrey Sachs led the UN's Millennium Project on Poverty and Hunger, and is now director of the Earth Institute.

Jeffrey Sachs: The urgency, no doubt, is to use the tools that we have to keep people alive today. Five million children will die of poverty and chronic hunger in Africa this coming year; this is a shocking unnecessary tragic disaster on the planet. Nearly 10 million children die each year, essentially of extreme poverty because the powerful tools that we have do not reach these households, these communities, the children who otherwise would be able to stay alive and to prosper. And it requires us not to turn our back on whole classes of technology, that would be simply absurd when we know we’re going to need much more powerful tools in the future, including genetic modification.

Tom Heap: Sobering statistics, and with a forecast of more people and an erratic climate, Jeffrey Sachs believes we need to invest more, to harvest more.

Jeffrey Sachs: In general, we need first a green revolution in Africa, right now. We have a continent that is extremely hungry, and where the productivity is very very low in yields per hectare. In that case, a lot of our traditional technologies, if brought to scale, would make a difference, but in the African case I would suspect