Global population is increasing at about 87 million per year, and because of past population growth a very large number of people are just entering the child-bearing years. In Africa, however, food-production has failed to keep up with population growth. In addition, loss of land to urbanisation has meant that the amount of cultivated land supporting food production has fallen from 0.44 ha per person in 1961 to 0.26 ha per person now, and is projected to fall to 0.15 ha per person by 2050. The need for irrigation is increasing, climate is changing and as people become more prosperous, they replace plant foods with animal foods-which are less efficient in trapping solar energy. So about one-half of the grain produced in Europe, North America and Russia is already used as feed.
Modern biotechnology is one of the ways by which such improvements can be achieved.
On the other hand, others say that genetic modification is not needed to produce more food. They argue that the planet's food problems are solely due to economic and political problems, not because we can't grow enough. But distributing it that evenly will never be easy, even if the world's population was not increasing. Of course we should try to change some of these practises, but it seems perverse to me to walk away from a potential increase in the world's food supply. Conventional plant breeders see genetic modification as simply another tool to bring to bear on the problem.