Market News & Headlines >> Frankenfood or Ecological Boon?

With 90% of U.S. field corn now genetically modified varieties, it goes without saying that farmers have a vested interest in the acceptance of GM technology. Yet most leave it to the seed companies to defend it, while anti-GM activists infiltrate schools, write books and spend millions to sway public policy against it.

Talk to any city teen or 20-something today and you will discover they favor no-GM and organic food. They are largely unaware that GM seed has allowed a reduction in use of crop protection chemicals.

It is almost unthinkable that the world’s poor countries, where the World Health Organization calculates 250 million children suffer from vitamin deficiency, which can lead to blindness, due to subsistence living on rice, would spurn Golden Rice, which produces vitamin A. Yet that is the case – and one applauded by groups such as Greenpeace.

This anti-technology, as well as anti-big farm, attitude on the part of tomorrow’s consumers is a megatrend that will increasingly affect agriculture, even as the need to increase production intensifies with a growing and more demanding global population.

For more information on this topic and key factors shaping agriculture going forward, get your copy of “Ten Megatrends Reshaping Agriculture” from Brock Associates (414-351-5500) for Amazon.com ($30).