No genetically engineered crop reaches the market without a patent. The second was its crude, even childish, supposition that any technology which produces more will feed the starving. The world is littered with the wreckage of such assumptions. Ethiopia's modern agro-industrialists were exporting animal feed to Europe throughout its devastating famine. The Kalahandi region in India suffers repeated famines, but produces surpluses every year.
Starvation occurs because of the distorted ownership of the foodchain.
The panel's third mistake was its inexplicable premise that biotechnology will somehow boost employment. You don't have to look very far for an answer. While people of every kind sat on the committee, all its biotechnology experts were drawn from the same ideological pool. It is not hard to see how Prue Leith, for example, well meaning as she doubtless was, would have felt obliged to defer to the superior wisdom of the former chairman of the advisory committee for novel foods and processes, or the Unilever research professor of biological sciences. When I suggest that the answer lies in a combination of land reform and organic or semi-organic farming, you'll think I've gone soft in the head.