Introduction

It is frequently opined in the popular and scienctific media alike that crop production may have serious difficulties in coping with projected increases in the global human population over the next fifty years. It has also become commonplace to hear statements, from biotech companies, politicians and even some public sector scientists, that this putative crisis in food production can only be fully resolved by the global deployment of transgenic crops. Of course, over the past few centuries, we have repeatedly heard various Malthusian predictions about imminent famine, all of which have proven to be misplaced. As we saw in Chapter 4, it was forecasts of future famine that prompted the USDA to begin its programme of worldwide germplasm collections in the late nineteenth century. The spectre of overpopulation was a recurring theme during the twentieth century, but the most egregious instances of misguided predictions of imminent apocalypse occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.