I'd also like to see the concerns regarding copyright addressed - the ideas that GM food can be designed to only produce a few crops and that farmers can't reuse seed from their harvest without infringing copyright.
--This allegation that GM only produces seeds farmers cant regrow is false and a convenient lie. The Terminatator concept might have uses in managing pollen flow but has NEVER gone beyond a preliminary idead and never been commercialised.

"why it is that whilst there is sufficient food produced each year to feed the world population, untold millions of our fellow human beings suffer from malnutrition,"
--Even In a rich world, made rich by technological innovation by the way, many poor farmers are still kept poor by lack of technology and resources. A good solution is to provided them with better assets to earn income and use their land with less environmental damage. Better farm productivity spares land. The Indian cotton industry these last 4 years illustrates what happens when commercial seed growing (including GM) is introduced- a new green revolution with near doubled output and average yield per hectare , greater farmer profit, after years of moribund yield improvement prior to the recent commercial seed industry expansion: QUOTE:"Of the current total, Bt cotton accounts for 3.8 million hectares, against fewer than 50,000 hectares in 2002-03. Since the 2003 period, India's cotton output has almost doubled, to 27 million bales weighing 170 kilograms each, and average yields are up around two-thirds, largely because of lower rates of pest infestation in the hardier Bt-cotton varieties...Higher yields for each hectare sown also mean better returns for farmers. Government studies of a few areas under Bt cotton show that on average, annual incomes of farmers can rise around 11,000 rupees, or over $270, a hectare.(WSJ June 5th).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118097690219423944.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

But this success and increased incomes to poor farmers has been kept from being told by anti-GM PR spin about alleged GM cotton failures. Activist delusions deny poor people a lift out of poverty.

Access to technology can help the poor and starving in a world in which on average we have plenty of food.

Jerrry Sachs (and Bono) in The End of Poverty explain how this works.

http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-rich-world-can-help-africa-help.html

How the Rich World Can Help Africa Help Itself

- Glenn Denning and Jeffrey Sachs, Financial Times (London) , May 29, 2007

...News from Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, suggests a powerful way forward in the fight against hunger and poverty...

In 2005, Malawi's maize harvest was one of the worst ever... National production was just 1.2m tonnes - 29 per cent less than in the previous year and 45 per cent less than the national requirement... By November, almost 5m Malawians faced food shortages and hunger, and the prospect of another disastrous growing season in 2006. Hunger and extreme poverty are known to increase the incidence of many killer diseases, unleash gender-based violence and theft, and decrease dramatically the rates of school attendance by children...

Despite the opposition of some of Malawi's donors, President Bingu wa Mutharika and his team introduced a bold farm-input subsidy programme to pre-empt the famine. At a cost of $60m, roughly $5 per Malawian, the government provided seed and fertiliser at reduced cost to more than 1m small-scale maize farmers. This represented a huge financial burden for Malawi's government, but would have been a pittance for the rich world.

...The results have been spectacular. Malawi's smallholder farmers are harvesting a bumper crop for the second year running, which may reach a record 3.2m tonnes. Yields have soared, helped by favourable rains. This year's estimates suggest a more than 1m tonne surplus for the country. Malawi plans to export grain to hungry neighbours.

... The impact has stunned the sceptics and the doomsayers. It seems that an African green revolution is possible after all.

The recent stereotypical response of Greens politician Dr DiNatale to this issue that "techology is never a fix" is an absurd and sad misjudgment. Devising access to resources - material, biological, and intellectual - by poor farmers is not simply a technological fix.

I guess my only problem with providing GM crops to third world countries is whether or not they will be regulated properly. I don't mean to sound arrogant but if there is a breakdown in good governance then this could improper use of GM crops.

For example with Bt cotton a section of the crop, say 20% is grown as a non-GM cotton refuge and is essentially sacrificed to cotton predators. This reduces selection pressure on the predators and slows the emergence of Bt resistance.

If you're in the middle of a famine there would be a lot of temptation to grow the entire crop as GM.

That's a very good point Sparky, many GM crops come with their own tecnical challenges and caveats that require explanation and training to use properly. For the use of Bt crops most companies require the farmers that want to use them to sign a licencing agreement so that they adhere to the guidelines of growing them, i.e. use of refuges etc. If any farmers do not adhere to these guidelines then they risk accelerating the evolution of resistance in pests, thus accelerating the loss of usefulness of that GM technology. Understandably the biotech companies want to minimise this risk, which is also why the GURTs technologies have also been proposed. And also why biotech companies don't want farmers that do not hold certification (i.e. licences) to plant their GM crop. Which is why the science is important so that people can understand before they get all indignant over this.

My guess is that subsistence farmers, or farmers that have only domestic/local markets, which is probably many of the 3rd world farmers, should probably not use this technology, it's just not economically viable and likely to be a threat to the technology itself, rather than their public health.

(and Sparky, I know you were only using Monsanto as an example You were also discussing the science, the others weren't.....)

To play the devil's advocate one disadvantage of not giving impoverished countries GM technology might be that GM crops from developed countries could be imported and sold at a lower cost than the traditional crops from the subsistence farms.

One way to get around this might be to use activator genes like t-GURT (Gene Use Restriction Technologies? I got the definition from wikipedia). In other words farmers could be given a chemical that allows the plant to mature, but only if they agree to proper safeguards for their crops.

The main problem with the above idea is that any activator is likely to be a chemical/protein the plant is deficient in and a black market for the activator will probably pop up for those who want to cut corners.

"Now forgive me if you’ve heard this before, but it seems to need repeating. GM crops are not science. They are technological products of science. To claim that those who oppose GM are “anti-science” is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons are anti-chemistry. Scientists are under no greater obligation to defend GM food than they are to defend the manufacture of Barbie dolls.

GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all...

No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else. At first they talked of enhancing consumer choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to the stick. Now we are told that unless we support the deployment of GM crops, our science base will collapse...

But the plight of the men in white coats isn’t much of a tearjerker. A far more effective form of emotional blackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian last week by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PR consultancy. “The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops,” he wrote, “is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease.”"

— George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2004