Opponents of GM crops condemning millions to death, says MP Owen Paterson

Speaking to farmers, scientists and businesses in Pretoria, South Africa, after a visit to farmers growing GM maize, the former environment secretary said advances in plant sciences could end world hunger – but opponents to GM foods are preventing this from happening.

He said: "Progress in the plant sciences is opening up the promise of a second Green Revolution, one that can not only feed the nine to 10 billion people that will inhabit our planet in 2050, but feed them well – one that can finally end the shame of the nearly one billion who still go to bed every night hungry and malnourished. This is also a time, however, of great mischief, in which many individuals and even governments are turning their backs on progress.

"Not since the original Luddites smashed cotton mill machinery in early 19th century England, have we seen such an organised, fanatical antagonism to progress and science.

"They call themselves humanitarians and environmentalists but their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment. And their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques would decimate the earth's remaining wild spaces, devastate species and biodiversity, and leave our natural ecology poorer as a result."

Mr Paterson used the vitamin-A enhanced Golden Rice as an example of the opposition to scientific advances in agriculture. This has included the destruction of crops grown in field trials in the Philippines and similar attacks on GM wheat in Australia and elsewhere. Vitamin-A deficiency is a major cause of blindness and death among children in poor countries, accounting for two million young lives every year.

"Although these deaths are preventable, 6,000 children alive today will be dead tomorrow. By comparison Ebola has tragically killed about 9,000 in the last year: about 25 a day," he said. "Many of those millions of lives could have been saved if Golden Rice had been available in their diet."