| Clinton's GM recipe to feed armies of the hungry (12/4/2006) | |
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Bill Clinton's been hyping GM at BIO 2006 in Chicago. Clinton's former Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman gave this insight after leaving office into the mindset of the Clinton administration: "What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good, and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. . . . And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. That, frankly, was the side our government was on. . . . You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view" [image caption: Future shock … a farmer rides through a sandstorm in north-west China this week. Photo: Reuters] The former US president, Bill Clinton, painted a bleak picture of a world where fertile land became dust bowls, the Maldives ceased to exist and millions of "food refugees" roamed the planet. Mr Clinton said the solution to feeding the poor lay in genetically engineered food. He told the Biotechnology 2006 conference in Chicago on Tuesday that the industry had a crucial role to play in saving the world from the effects of global warming and in helping remedy the inequality that left billions of people destitute and without basic food, health and education. Those involved in the debate on GM food should be driven by science, engineering and reason, not by assertion and fear, he said. Mr Clinton also spoke of the "calamitous" results of global warning. "In the last six months, we have seen an avalanche of evidence that the icebergs all over the world are melting quicker than we thought," he said. "We will have to evacuate the Maldives. We won't have to worry about it any more. What you do in agriculture is important because if the climate continues to change, we will see a continual erosion of the topsoil and dust storms." |
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