Struan Stevenson's prescription for a genetically modified alternative to organically grown food for the Third World goes no distance towards solving this most critical of problems (Letters, 20 August). In recognising that, by 2030, world demand for food will be 50 per cent higher than current production, he approaches the reality of the matter.
Third World population is increasing at a rate of circa five offspring per woman of child-bearing age. Unless the growth rate of these hapless populations can be controlled there is no prospect of escape from a population explosion, with dire consequ
ences for humanity.
Western aid, in whatever form, merely causes an immediate rise in birth rates. Aid to Ethiopia in the famines of the early 1980s has left that benighted country with a population far in excess of its ability to sustain itself.
Without attached conditions of birth control, western aid is pointless. In tandem with material and financial aid must go a scheme of subsidised birth control measures to reduce the stricken populations immediately.
China has stabilised its population by despotic limitation of family size. Such procedure is not open to democratic governments. Western aid, however, could have the attached option of being granted to Third World nations which paid women to limit their families to one or two by way of sterilisation. In a relatively short time, not only would the fatal poverty of those countries be alleviated but the health of their sorely put-upon young women would improve.
The politically generated taboo on Third World overpopulation must be abandoned in the West or the insoluble problem of feeding the multitudes will never be solved.
ALASTAIR HARPER
House of Gask
Lathalmond, FifeI am astounded by the blinkered pronouncement of Struan Stevenson MEP. He observes, correctly, that we need to produce more food to meet the expanding world population but he then goes on to suggest, incorrectly, that "only genetically modified foods offer a potential way out of this looming crisis".
Genetically modified foods provide no significant improvements, in terms of yield, over non-GM crops.
If he wants to see truly significant increases in food yields, Mr Stevenson should advocate reduction – and eventually removal – of livestock from the human food chain. Livestock waste 70-90 per cent of the food they eat in maintaining their own metabolic needs. GM crops can never come close to a 700 per cent improvement in yield.
JAMES BOYLE
Glazert Road
Dunlop, East AyrshireThe full article contains 411 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
