“In the fall of 2006, Friends of the Earth publicly asked governments in the hungry African countries of Ghana and Sierra Leone to recall American food aid that contained genetically modified rice.”
On the one hand, it is easy to be an environmentalist, when others must go hungry for your cause.
On the other hand, I remember reading that the issue was that it is normally made impossible for genetically modified crops to yield viable seed.
Translation: Biotech crops have the potential to yield yearly income to Biotech stockholders, since farmers MUST buy seed yearly.
If the yield increase is enough to pay the extra to the Biotech company with yield to spare, it would be worth it. If that's NOT true, nobody would buy the stuff in the first place. The laws of economics still work, even for biotech.
Why do farmers in the U.S. buy seed yearly if they could save some of the seed and replant it?
I can cite the following examples:
1) China--the famine was caused by the civil war, the invasion of China by the Japanese, and the highly-misguided Great Leap Forward.
2) India--much of the famine-like conditions are caused by the unfortunate caste system.
3) Africa--most of the famines were caused by civil wars and deliberate government policy to drive out "prosperous" farmers.
4) Soviet Union--who can forget the infamous collectivization of farms in the Ukraine from 1928 to 1933 that in the end may have killed 14 million Ukrainians?
5) Europe--they almost had a major famine just after World War II but the Marshall Plan helped Europe revive its own agricultural output.