COMMENT from GM-free Ireland: The problem isn't the number of people, but our level of resource consumption and waste production. 20% of the population (in the rich countries) consumes 80% of the world's resource, and produce most of the wastes.

The solution advocated by Nina Federoff - GM crops - is unsustainable, since it relies on dwindling supplies of fossil fuel to produce the chemical fertilisers and pesticides which prop up the outdated chemical agribusiness paradigm.

Nina Federoff is still living in the dark ages of the Industrial Revolution.
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U.S. Official: Population on Earth 'Exceeds Limits'
NewsRoomAmerica.com, 1 April 2009:
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/usa/story.php?id=450010

A top science advisor to the State Department says the earth's population exceeds its "limits of sustainability," adding that current efforts to slow down population growth should be continued.

Dr. Nina Fedoroff, in an interview with BBC One, a British newscast, said, "We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people."

Federoff has been the science and technology advisor to the State Department since 2007, when she advised Condoleezza Rice. Now she advises Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state under the Obama administration.

When pressed to define her comments about the earth's current population, she replied, "There are probably already too many people on the planet."

"We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven," she said. "We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops.

"We accept exactly the same technology (as GM - genetically modified - food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century," she told the BBC.

"We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production," she said.

Federoff wrote a book in 2004 about genetically modified food. She believes critics of genetically modified maize, corn and rice are living in bygone times, the BBC reported.