Most of us in this country take it for granted that we get enough to eat. That isn’t the case everywhere. According to the United Nations, there are 870 million people in the world who are chronically undernourished. The pressure on the world’s food production is going to increase.

Partly that’s due to population growth. Between now and 2050 the number of people in the world is expected to rise from 7 billion to 9.5 billion. But it’s due too to rising living standards. As people in countries like China, India and Brazil get richer, so they want to eat a diet more like ours.

The demand for meat, milk and dairy products is rising sharply in the Far East and Latin America. Meat consumption in South Asia alone is forecast to quadruple by the middle of the century. More meat and milk means more land being used for fodder crops to grow food for livestock.

This all adds up to severe pressure on the world to increase food production. Yet already we are running into environmental problems caused in part by modern farming methods. Irrigation systems are a boon but they are contributing to the depletion of rivers. Artificial fertilisers have boosted crop yields, but when drained into lakes and rivers cause algae to bloom – eutrophication to use the technical term.

I don’t think that there’s any silver bullet to solve these problems. Trade policy can help by cutting production subsidies and import barriers in rich countries to help farmers in poor nations.

Well-directed aid can encourage sustainable agriculture. Modern communications can help: mobile phones are enabling even remote villages in countries like Turkey and Kenya to contact customers for their produce. But I think too that we need to review our approach to another new technology: genetic modification.

More than once in our history, science has made possible huge advances in farm productivity. It happened in 18th century England when hybridisation led to dramatic improvements in the quality of both crops and livestock. It happened on a global scale with the Green Revolution of the late 20th century when crop yields more than doubled but land use rose only 8%.

GM technology could give us plants that can cope with less water, or that need fewer pesticides or artificial fertilisers. It could help farmers worldwide to adapt to climate change. Most importantly, GM could help see a growing population properly fed. Already, a strain of GM ‘golden rice’ with extra vitamin A is being developed in Asia. At present, vitamin A deficiency is responsible for blindness in some of the poorest people in that region. In Uganda, scientists are working on a strain of GM banana that would include extra iron as well as vitamin A. Other teams are designing a potato free from potato blight, fear of which now leads farmers to spray potato crops up to 15 times a year.

This technology is with us. Already, there are 16 million farmers in 29 countries who are growing GM crops over an area that is six times larger than the entire surface of the UK. I think that it’s in all our interests that we look again at the rules we have both in Britain and the EU that are slowing its development.