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A United States Scientific Advisor Is Pushing
For GM Foods and Population Reduction
There are too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one
of most influential science advisors in the US government.
Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans
had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".
Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the
US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza
Rice.
Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary
Clinton.
"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the
global population; the planet can't support many more people,"
Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much
better at managing "wild lands", and in particular water
supplies.
Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply
too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: "There are probably already
too many people on the planet."
GM Foods 'needed'
A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science
award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that
better land management must include the use of genetically modified
foods.
"We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going
rapidly towards seven.
"We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we
use water and grow crops," she told the BBC.
"We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in
medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the
19th Century."
Dr Fedoroff, who wrote a book about GM Foods in 2004, believes
critics of genetically modified maize, corn and rice are living
in bygone times.
"We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat
me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet
that's what we're demanding in food production."
In a wide ranging interview, Dr Fedoroff was asked if the US
accepted its responsibility to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide,
the gas thought to be driving human-induced climate change. "Yes,
and going forward, we just have to be more realistic about our
contribution and decrease it - and I think you'll see that happening."
And asked if America would sign up to legally binding targets
on carbon emissions - something the world's biggest economy has
been reluctant to do in the past - the professor was equally clear.
"I think we'll have to do that eventually - and the sooner
the better."
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