Sir - Now that all the self-appointed "experts" on GMOs have had their say, I feel your readers are entitled to have the views of the most renowned plant breeder in the world - Nobel Prize winner and father of the Green Revolution, Professor Norman Borlaug.
The improved varieties of cereals and rice provided by Professor Borlaug in the 1960s and 1970s were the key to halving the percentage of undernourished people in the world during a period when the world population doubled.
At a recent conference on genetically modified food in Manila he had this to say: "Current agricultural technology and advances in the pipeline give the world the ability to feed 10 billion people. The problem we have is whether producers would be permitted to use this technology.
"Extreme environmental elitists seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks. While affluent nations can afford to pay more for food produced by the so-called `organic' methods, one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.
"Despite the success of the small-holder Asian farmers in applying Green Revolution technologies to triple cereal production since 1961, the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor Asians is far from won. Mushrooming populations have eaten up many of the gains of the Green Revolution.
"Agricultural researchers and farmers face the challenge, during the next 25 years, of developing and applying the technology that could increase cereal yields by 50 to 75 per cent to meet the demand from growing populations and rising affluence."
So there you have it. You can either believe the world's most renowned plant breeder, with an incomparable track record, or you can believe the scaremongers, most of whom have a vested interest, commercial or political or both, and no qualifications in this area, or track record to speak of. - Yours, etc. Tom Raftery,
(Professor Emeritus and former MEP), Agriculture Department, University College, Cork.