“If tomorrow there were no transgenic crops in the world, a third of humanity would die of hunger,” advised Luis Montero, coordinator of Natural and Exact Sciences of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.
To reinforce his argument, he pointed out that “between 90% and 95% of the main crops in the world (corn, cotton, soybeans) are transgenic and an ecological catastrophe has not occurred.”
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This chemist was even harsher in assuring that “any process of denying technology is harmful”, since “pretending that it is healthier to live as one lived in caves is not at all progressive”.
“I would say that the best thing would be for agroecological agriculture to also assimilate new technologies and become more productive, including transgenics, because perhaps they would know how to do things better than the farmers who buy the technology from transnational companies.”
He remarks that “there is no contradiction between good agroecology and genetically modified organisms, there is no contradiction at all. Please use them… Any agroecologist who selects the best seed for mango or potato, that agroecologist is making use of science and technology; he is artificially, not naturally, selecting a certain organism.”
[Editor’s note: This article has been translated from Spanish and is edited for clarity.]
