The cultivation of GMO crops is the way out of hunger

The secretary of the National Biosafety Council of Iran, Dr. Alireza Morshedi with reference to food security issue at global scale said: “there are 1.2 billions of starving people in the world so we have no choice but to use new technologies.”

He added: “now the population of Iran is around 75 million. Using traditional methods for producing food is not the answer for the food security and growing demand for safe food in the country hence we must pay attention to the use of scientific new methods for producing food.”

“in addition to agriculture, this biotechnology can be utilized in other areas such as  producing drugs, gene therapy, production of biological pesticides and fertilizers, identify breeds and genetic diversity, the diagnosis of diseases and pests, production of enzymes and proteins, increase the oil reserves of oil, detergent and textile production and sequencing of human genome”, he added.

IRBIC: Iran has commercialized the first insect resistant GM rice in the year 2004, coinciding the international year of rice. The country has one of the most advanced pro science biosafety law emphasizing that the government should facilitate, production, commercialization and use of Living Modified Organisms. But due to some personal attitude among some of the middle class authorities, the commercialization step of GMOs in Iran is lagging behind several countries in the region in particular Pakistan and Egypt, in spite of the excellent advancement in science and research in the same field.

Source:    http://khabarfarsi.com/ext/1968070 (translated in to English by IRBIC)