That's a great question. I personally believe we can feed the world without GM technologies. I think that any technology is part of a social-political-economic system, so it doesn't actually even matter...technology is not determining the production or distribution of food necessarily. I think we have enough food in this world right now to feed everyone who exists on the planet, but it isn't moving to those people for a variety of reasons. We have people who are farming who don't own their lands, and they spend most of their time working in cities and moving back and forth, and they could be much more productive in their agricultural output if they didn't have to move to the cities to work.
I think we are going to have a greater population, and I don't really understand the idea that we should have fewer people producing food for that greater population. I think if we have more people, we can have more people producing food, and we can do it on smaller plots with more intensive agriculture. There are a number of places and examples where this is incredibly viable. Biointensive agriculture is being used in North America, as well as around the world. It is small-plot intensive agriculture that focuses on maximum yield for the smallest amount of acreage, while turning over soil fertility. It's an eight-step, very simple system, and it's produced unbelievable results for small landowners or people in more impoverished places, but it also works for farmers in Canada. We have farmers who are growing five acres of market garden vegetables, and they are averaging $25,000 an acre. They're aiming to make about $60,000 in income--and that's net--and they're doing it in Canada in this market today.
So I think we can think about agriculture differently. I believe we can think about field crops differently as well. We can produce them with companion planting. We can approach agriculture in a different system. Our program manager at FarmStart comes from India, and he was a farmer there for 20 years. He said he spent his education learning about the green revolution technologies, and he spent 20 years trying to unlearn them because he realized what they did to his yields, to the diversity in crops that he was actually able to produce, and to his bottom line. I think this experience has been replicated around the world, and people around the world are trying to unlearn the lessons we've learned in the last 50 years. And we need to help them. We need to help farmers farm better. We have a lot of tools, and there is a lot of knowledge out there that we can share with other people.