A Prince's Dream

I like royalty that care about the environment. I wrote about the Swedish king's visit to Japan, when he hosted a symposium was about sustainable energy and global warming. And I wrote about Japan's Imperial Household farms, which are promoting organic farming (no chemical pesticides or fertilizers, and no genetically engineered seeds).

Prince Charles is another case in point: do read about his deeply felt resistance to GMO foods and his passion for sustainable agriculture.

"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of "gigantic corporations" taking over the mass production of food.

"I think it's heading for real disaster," he said.

"If they think this is the way to go....we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."

Telegraph: Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster

Grist: A prince's dream: Far-fetched fairytale or a real future of food?