A think tank study claims that by 2050, the UK will have undergone a “green revolution”, with farmers growing genetically modified crops that are self-fertilising, pest and drought resistant. The combination of self-fertilisation and pest resistance along with crops which are saline resistant and heat and cold tolerant will “significantly increase the yield per acre of many food crops”.
In addition, new strains will be developed through genetic engineering that have higher edible yields per plant – and each modified plant will produce more food than previous strains.
Many of these will be developed in UK laboratories and universities, including GM trees that can mature in six years instead of 50 – tree cover will be “many times what it is today”.
These are some of the predictions put forward for agriculture in a new “futurology” study entitled The UK and the World in 2050 [PDF], published by the Adam Smith Institute.
In a chapter titled “Green, green, green”, Adam Smith Institute president Dr Madsen Pirie wrote: “Agriculture will be far much more environmentally friendly by 2050; this will be true throughout the world, but especially so in the UK.
“The difference will have been achieved by the widespread, almost universal, use of genetically modified organisms (GMs).''
The UK will also pioneer technology to enable crops to be grown on land previously thought insufficiently fertile, according to the study.
“The effect will be to make much more land susceptible to cultivation, land that was previously thought of as wasteland,” it added.
Dr Pirie also predicted hybridised vegetables, created by cross-breeding and genetic modification, will be available to eat.
