Genetically modified crops might once have proved useful. In the early days, in the 1980s, scientists I spoke to in India hoped to transfer genes from groundnuts (which are very resistant to heat and drought) into sorghum, the staple cereal of the Sahel, which is also drought-resistant but succumbs in the worst years. In California, there were advanced plans to produce barley that could thrive in brackish water of the [...]

Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof are good people, but it seems as if all the best intentions of those in the highest places are misguided - destined to make things steadily worse in Africa. "Development" is a good idea, but horribly misconstrued. Technology is vital, but only if directed at the carefully identified problems of people at large - which, for the most part, it isn't. Extreme poverty is vile, [...]

Fat, salt, sugar and miscellaneous junk kill a great many more of us than ciggies do. Besides this, people generally decide for themselves whether to smoke - while our dietary habits are prescribed for us in childhood. So the government's white paper proposing a ban on junk food ads on toddlers' TV, hard on the heels of its plans to reform school dinners (ever so slightly), is welcome.

But congratulations [...]

Originally published in 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang poses a question that is key to our own time: what should ordinary citizens do when their own governments do unspeakable things? According to some moral philosophers, the answer is nothing. Saint Paul professed to be against civil insurrection (though perhaps, given his devotion to the memory of Jesus, he was being disingenuous). And nothing, too, is the answer that Blair and [...]

Science - not science-based, "high" technology such as smart weapons or GM crops, but science itself - is losing its way. Since science is the most potent agent of change - the ultimately anti-conservative driver of world affairs - this concerns us all. Some scientists worry about the present turn of events. Some do their best to circumvent some of the secrecy and greed that are among its modern manifestations: [...]

Science is no good at telling us how we ought to behave, but it is very good at helping us to analyse problems. So it is odd, and in many ways shameful, that our government marches so abjectly to the drum of science if there is wool to be pulled over our eyes - when it wants us to eat Monsanto's genetically modified organisms - but ignores it when it [...]

Tony Blair has appointed Bob Geldof to tell us what is wrong with Africa. Radical thinking is clearly needed, and Sir Bob seems ideal. He is Irish, wears denims and swears on TV. But intellectually, Geldof is very conventional indeed. He favours the George Bush, big-money, high-tech, corporate approach. In a radio interview, he has stressed the complexity of Africa's problems, with special emphasis on Aids. Alarm bells should ring [...]

This ought to be the century in which, once and for all, we show that Thomas Malthus was wrong. Cleric, moralist and economist, he predicted at the end of the 18th century that the human species would go on increasing exponentially until we all starved. But United Nations demographers now predict that the human population will level out by 2050; and although it will then be ten times bigger than [...]

Most people in most of the world are nice. But most societies - including most alleged democracies - are ruled by nasty leaders. An inescapable, empirical fact, it accounts for almost all the trouble in the world - imperialism, the two world wars, the unspeakable regime of Saddam Hussein, and the unspeakable response to it by the minority government that now controls the United States and hence the rest of [...]

For the past few years, I have been writing a book about food: how much we need (each of us, and humanity as a whole); how to produce it; how to raise what is wanted without wrecking rural communities and the environment, while avoiding cruelty to animals; why BSE and foot-and-mouth disease happened (cut-price husbandry); and whether genetic manipulation is a good thing (it could be but, as things are, [...]