The path to riches is not in producing what people want, but in finding what they would want in 15 years. The more you intensify your farm, the harder it is to keep up with the weeds. The trouble is you can end up using much more herbicide with Roundup Ready crops which are more tolerant. We have a very important ecology in Kenya and we don't know what will happen if we introduced these plants. But the farmers know exactly what they do need, and that is more fertilizer and more credit to invest in machinery.
Biotechnology allows individual genes to be moved with precision from one plant to another.
It is much easier to know how one gene will work in its new setting. The likelihood of unexpected consequences, and the margin of error, are correspondingly reduced. Dr Bernard Dixon, member of the European Federation for Biotechnology's task group on public perception.