DAVID CARR WRITES that environmentalists are responsible for the deaths of millions of Third World people. And Nick Cohen basically agrees:

GM also upset the interests of the setters of style and taste. Marie Antoinette and her courtiers dressed up as peasants and shepherds. They invented a phoney authenticity and pretended to live the simple life while the real French peasantry was close to starvation. . . .

When it comes to the Third World, however, resistance to GM may be malign. The opponents of biotech emphasise that the industry isn’t interested in feeding the hungry any more than the pharmaceutical companies are interested in treating malaria. The developed world is where the profits are.

But there are inventions such as the ‘golden rice’, created by Dr Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, which aim to relieve suffering. Dr Potrykus modified rice to help the 200 million or so children who risk death or blindness from vitamin A deficiency. If it works, and if it is taken up in Asia – two big ifs – children will live who would otherwise die.

Dr Potrykus isn’t a pawn of Monsanto, yet he is vilified. He has been told that he has been used by the biotech companies and that people will have to eat impossibly large amounts of his rice to get a minimal benefit. He denies both allegations. When he learned that Greenpeace had reserved the right to take direct action against golden rice tests plots, he said it would be guilty of a ‘crime against humanity’ if it did.

Historians are likely to write more in anger than amused bewilderment if the GM phobia turns out to have been a European mania which was fatal for non-Europeans.

Some of us are angry already.