Prince Charles Condemns Gene-Modified Crops, Telegraph Says

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, said widespread cultivation of genetically modified crops may cause the Earth's worst environmental disaster.
Relying on the ``gigantic corporations'' that sell genetically modified seed ``would be the absolute destruction of everything'' and put future food supplies at risk, Charles told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in an interview.

``If they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another, then again count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time,'' said the prince, who founded the organic-food company Duchy Originals Foods Ltd. and has a farm that produces organically grown crops.

We will ``end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,'' he told the London-based Telegraph.

The modified crops range from corn to oilseeds whose genetic material has been altered to increase yields by producing beneficial traits such as resistance to weed-killing chemicals.