Anti-technology activists accuse corporations of "playing God" by genetically improving crops, but it is these so-called environmentalists who are really playing God, not with genes but with the lives of poor and hungry people. While activist organizations spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to promote fear through anti-science newspaper ads, 1.3 billion people, who live on less than $1 a day, care only about finding their next day's meal.

Biotechnology is one of the best hopes for solving the food needs of the poor today, when we have 6 billion people in the world, and certainly in the next 30 to 50 years, when there will be 9 billion on the globe.

Products from biotechnology are no less safe than traditionally bred crops. In fact, they may be even safer, because they represent small, precise alterations with the introduction of genes whose biology is well understood. Often these genes are derived from other food crops. Further, genetically improved products are subjected to intensive testing, while conventional varieties have never been subjected to any such regulation for food safety or environmental impact.

Traditional methods of developing crops involve wild crosses with weedy relatives of crop plants, and many characteristics such as resistance to disease and pests, have been routinely introduced into crop plants from their weedy and distant relatives over hundreds of years. Hundreds of unknown genes, of whose traits we have little knowledge, are also introduced into these food crops through these conventional plant breeding methods.

This cross-breeding has posed no serious threat to the environment in terms of crop invasiveness, gene flow to weeds, or biodiversity. Yet, these fears are invoked for genetically improved crops, which poses similar traits but which are developed through rapid genetic-modification processes.

Many of these "concerns" or technical issues could be addressed through appropriate research, and not through emotional debates or militant activism. But public perception is being manipulated by fringe groups opposed to progress and being taken advantage of by politicians.