A senior U.S. official blasted EU plans for greener farming on [October 27], accusing Brussels of risking worldwide starvation by refusing to embrace genetically-modified food.
While transatlantic ties are often stormy over farming, Ted McKinney, the under secretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs at the U.S. agriculture department, struck an unusually abrasive tone …. “Europe is choosing to export this philosophy and dictate to other countries around the world,” McKinney said during a webinar organized by the Farm Europe think tank. ”What do we say to our kids and our grandkids when famine and starvation sets in, and it will, it will.”
The European Commission this year unveiled its Farm to Fork strategy under the Green Deal, aiming to shift European food production to a more sustainable model by 2030 through policies such as reducing the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers while boosting organic farming.
McKinney extolled the virtues of the controversial herbicide glyphosate, which American farmers use in tandem with genetically-modified crops like soybeans and corn, and lambasted the EU for rejecting GM technology and taking a cautious approach to new techniques such as gene editing.
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