Charles in GM ‘disaster’ warning

Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster "of all time", Prince Charles has warned.

GM crops were damaging Earth's soil and were an experiment "gone seriously wrong", he told the Daily Telegraph.

A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.

The government said it welcomed all voices in the "important" debate over the future potential role of GM crops.

However, BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said the prince's "robust" comments were "likely to rankle with the government", which has given the go-ahead to a number of GM crop trials in the UK since 2000.

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"Even for a prince who's a long-established champion of organic farming and critic of GM crops, these are comments which verge on the extreme," our correspondent said.

Prince Charles told the paper huge multi-national corporations involved in developing genetically modified foods were conducting a "gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong".

Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food would end in "absolute disaster", he warned.

"That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future."

What should be being debated was "food security not food production", he said.

He said GM developers might think they would be successful by having "one form of clever genetic engineering after another", but he believed "that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time".

'Unsustainable'

Prince Charles, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, said relying on big corporations for the mass production of food would not only threaten future food supplies but also force smaller producers out of business.