A little more than two centuries ago the British cleric and economist Thomas Malthus made one of the most famous mis-predictions in history. He had noticed that the population of Britain was growing faster than the ability of Britain’s farmers to increase food production. The result, he said, would be famine or war.







That this did not come to pass was down almost entirely to technology. Throughout the 19th Century agricultural improvements meant that food production was not only able to keep up with the population boom, it was actually able to outstrip it. Coupled with international trade, the ability of the industrialised world to feed itself became ever more secure into the 20th Century and by the time the US economist Paul Ehrlich made his neomalthusian predictions in the 1960s that we again faced famine, such cassandras were starting to be mocked.





But we may have reached the limits of what current technology can deliver. The world’s population stands at seven billion – seven times what it was when Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798. And it continues to grow. Even the conservative, best-case-scenario predictions see the human tide topping out at between nine and 10bn by the late 21st century, before platueuing and beginning a slow decline into the 22nd and 23rd centuries. The question is, how are we going to get through the next 70 years, which will see a time when there will be more humans alive than at any period before, or probably after?

As in the time of Malthus, we will need technology and this, I am afraid, means genetic modification of some of our main food crops. I am afraid that the threat by the anti-GM campaign group Take The Flour Back to uproot a field of transgenic wheat later this month which has been planted at a crop research institute in Hertfordshire is not only absurd, but obscene – and profoundly undemocratic.

Since the late 1990s, when the first open-air trials of transgenic crops began in the UK, there have been a series of frankly risible attempts to ‘decontaminate’, or destroy, the plants concerned. The people doing this quote ‘public opinion’ or the ‘precautionary principle’ to justify their actions. But what they are doing amounts to no more than criminal damage by self-appointed environmental guardians who believe they are speaking on behalf of a public they never consult about anything.

Take the proposed ‘decontamination’. The field in question contains a variety of transgenic wheat designed to produce a chemical which protects the crop from attack by aphids. This wheat has not been produced by some sinister multinational, but by scientists at the taxpayer-funded Rothamsted Crop Research Institute, the oldest of its kind in the world. The scientists, who have released a letter this week pleading with the greens to desist, are paid by the British state. As such, their work has a democratic mandate. Destroying this work is akin to breaking into a University library and burning its books. It is destroying knowledge. The sceintists have asked to meet the protesters. This is laudable enough but one is temmpted to ask why they are asking to negotiate with criminals? Bank managers do not ask to 'meet' bank robbers, after all.

Is this what Take the Flour Back wants? The wheat in question has been created with the developing world in mind. The Green Revolution, initiated by the genius Norman Borlaug in the 1960s, has doubled then doubled again yields of staples such as rice and wheat, using conventional cross-breeding. But we are reaching the limits of what conventional farming can achieve.

Think of those figures. Best-case scenario, another 2.5bn humans alive on our planet by 2060 or so. That is an extra China, plus an extra India. And these 'new' people will not be Chinese or even for the most part Indians (places where the Demographic Transition has started to kick in, slowing population growth) but, overwhelmingly, Africans.

Africa teeters on the brink of famine. It only takes a limited drought or a minor war for hunger to start to take hold, even in relatively prosperous countries such as Kenya. Take one example: the Ethiopian famine which formed the backdrop to Live Aid took place at a time (1985) when that country’s population stood at 45m. Today, Ethiopia has a population of 90m and a recent study by the US Census Bureau predicted that by 2050 this impoverished nation will be home to 278m people. One of the things that has always struck me about Africa is how empty the place is, despite its image of ‘overpopulation’ and teeming masses. Clearly, this emptiness will not last.

The reason we see no famine in Ethiopia today is almost entirely due to foreign aid. But how much aid will we need to feed an extra 200m Ethiopians, as well as the rest of Africa’s burgeoning peoples? (the population of Niger is predicted to TRIPLE by 2050, as is that of Nigeria) This is a continent which cannot feed itself today, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation Africa will be largely responsible for global food demand increasing by 70% by mid-century.

It is very, very hard to see how we are going to meet this demand. We can press more land into production of course – and wave goodbye to the African menagerie as we do so. We can use huge amounts of extra fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides to extract greater yields from the land we do have, at huge costs to the environment. But, most scientists agree, this isn’t going to be enough. Sometime quite soon something is going to break and famines are going to break out – vast, unstoppable famines which will make the Live Aid hunger look like a walk in the park.

So, we need a rabbit and a hat, and fast. GM technology isn’t the only answer of course. But transgenic technology of the sort being pioneered at Rothamsted promises to be a valuable tool, and denying the right of the world to conduct this research (and, again, this is state-funded, not-for-profit, unpatented science and the team will allow farmers to access this technology at minimal cost if it succeeds) is something of an obscenity.

Like nuclear power, green opposition to GM is starting to look outdated, hysterical and profoundly anti-human. People like Prince Charles and Zac Goldsmith, champions of ‘natural’ organic farming may be well-meaning but they forget they live in a world which cannot possibly feed itself even at current population levels using the techniques they espouse.

In an ideal world we would not need genetic modification at all. In an ideal world we would be eating fresh, locally grown produce that has been mucked around with as little as possible. But this is not an ideal world, as the sky-eyed idealists with the pitchforks and scythes would wish it to be. It is a hot, overcrowded world which is about to get hotter and even more overcrowded. Malthus was wrong – we got away with it. But he may yet be proved right and we may not be so lucky this time. If these wealthy British idealists wish to deny the children of Africa the right to life in the coming decades well, that is their choice. But if famine does stalk the savannahs in the 2050s, then they may care to take a moment to consider just how posterity will remember the people who helped take away one of the tools that could have prevented this tragedy from happening.