Jeremy Cooke, BBC News 30 May 08;
I have to confess, until now the whole debate about genetically-modified (GM) food has pretty much passed me by.
Most of my career has been spent as a foreign correspondent.
But last summer I returned to the UK to start a new job with the BBC. I now glory in the title Rural Affairs Correspondent.
A big part of my new brief is to report on farming. It is my (sometimes painful) duty to attend agriculture conferences and seminars. I also meet many farmers on their farms.
And over the months, time and time again the issue of GM has been raised.
I have been left in no doubt that many UK farmers - and others in the food production industry - think that GM is an important tool which can improve their efficiency, but which has been denied to them.
All of this, you could argue, counts for very little. Of course, farmers want to increase yields, or get the same yield using less land, lest sprays, less fertiliser.
And anyway, did not we as a nation make up our minds about GM almost a decade ago?
You remember: environmentalists successfully branded GM "Frankenstein Food" - they warned us of the dangers of contaminating our environment, and of unleashing powerful and unpredictable forces into the British countryside.
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Lord Peter Melchett with the case against GM food
As a nation we came down on their side of the argument. Although there is no law against growing GM in the UK, the regulations mean it is a hostile environment for the agri-business brigade. And so it remains.
So why go back to the debate? Well, two reasons strike me immediately.
The first is that - unlike 10 years ago - we are now gripped in a global food crisis. Where there were once grain mountains there are now shortages.
The second thing that has changed is the fact that in other parts of the world GM is now being grown in massive amounts. It is reckoned that an area twice the size of Britain is now under GM crops.
And guess what? There have so far been no reports of the environmental or human health disasters which we were all warned about.
So with that in mind, I set out with a question: is it time to rethink GM?
AMERICA
Let us start in America.
While we in Europe have rejected growing GM crops, the United States has enthusiastically embraced the new technology.
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Inside the world's biggest GM company
Thousands of hectares of land are now covered in GM crops. Most meals consumed in America's ultimate consumer society will have some GM content.
It is something that Americans, generally, do not even think about. Certainly, throughout the four years my family and I spent in New York we must have eaten hundreds of meals containing GM in blissful ignorance.
The main GM food crops are soya - which produces important protein - and maize. Both have been genetically modified to produce bigger yields or the same yield for the less input (less herbicide, insecticide, fertiliser).
And behind it all (or almost all of it) is the giant Monsanto corporation. A multibillion dollar world-wide outfit that dominates the world of GM.
As a journalist, getting access to what the green lobby regards as the "heart of darkness" is not easy.
But after some gentle negotiating we were welcomed to St Louis, Missouri, Monsanto's global headquarters.
Here, some of the leading scientists in the field are working on ways to improve crops and yields.
Chatting to the technicians you can tell they are a little bemused at being labelled the architects of "Frankenstein Foods". They say they simply want to make things more efficient for farmers - and so better for consumers.
The chief executive Hugh Grant, originally from Glasgow in Scotland, seems puzzled at the European distrust of GM technology.
"The scientific case is very clear. This does now get down to people saying 12 years have passed, now's the time to make some calls.
"Europe continues to wait, while countries like India aggressively move ahead, and British scientists fill their suitcases and come here to do this research because they can't do it at home," Mr Grant says.
Monsanto is happy to provide stats which say that at least 90% of the farmers they deal with are happy with their product.
But there is no ignoring the fact that Monsanto is a hugely controversial company.
In the US, I found that for some farmers the problem is not so much a distrust of GM technology, but rather the way, they say, it makes them fall under the complete control of the biotech giants.
On his farm in Missouri I met Roger Parry. An old school good ol' boy, complete with battered old pick-up truck and equally battered base ball hat.
He is one of the minority of US farmers resisting GM. He told me that the big business of biotech is making it tough for farmers to make their own decisions about what to grow. Almost all of the seed available is GM seed.
