What is the problem this guide is addressing?

Crop improvement, whether by GM or conventional breeding, is just one component of a wider social and economic debate about agriculture, food and the environment. But unless there is better understanding and well informed discussion about GM, it will be impossible for the public and policy makers to judge what crop technologies can contribute to food security and natural resource and climate change management; and it will be even harder for the research scientists in our institutes to increase our knowledge and deliver on the urgent demands of agriculture.

There are some big gaps between perception and reality. For example, conventional plant breeding already exploits crosses between plants that would not occur in nature or induces random mutations artiﬁcially with radiation or chemical agents, so it isn’t really more “natural” than GM. “Eating genes” is something that everyone does every day, whether they eat GM foods or not. GM crops are grown in 23 countries, so the world isn’t and can’t be “GM-free”. Discussion about GM also seems to have become a proxy for other much-needed discussions about food shortages, economic power of multinational corporations, food safety, farming systems and trade agreements, which go far beyond this technology and its applications