Greeny News

with a review of John Vidal 'Handbook on agricultural technologies and the future demand for food, a recent Royal Society, discussed the artificial (or "cultural") meat as a solution for the 21 st century (Artificial food? "Food for Thought 2050 , 16 August). To clarify, the "artificial meat" Mr Vidal referred to is anything but. Cultured meat is a genuine meat, identical to the conventional product down to the DNA level, the major difference being that cultured meat is produced without the animal.

Grown in isolation, cultured meat is free of food-borne pathogens and cannot transmit diseases such as swine flu. It does not require pasture land, allowing local production in urban centres. It does not ruminate and thus neither produces manure nor contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only form of meat that does not require animal slaughter.

The current barrier to cultured meat availability is the threshold of innovation. The demand for meat in the developing world is expected to rapidly increase. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) has risen to the challenge, offering a $1m award to the first research team to develop a "commercially viable" cultured chicken product. As a catalyst for innovation, Peta is directly supporting scientific research at the Medical University of South Carolina for the development of cultured meat.

In a world of finite resources, our species is forced to make a choice. We can neglect the consequences of current agricultural practice and suffer Malthusian catastrophe or embrace the future by confronting crises with innovation.

Nicholas J Genovese

Peta postdoctoral research fellow, Medical University of South Carolina

• Thank you for sounding the alarm regarding speculative trading and its relationship to hunger (How greed begets hunger, 14 August). But another alarm needs to be sounded. What is not mentioned is the concentration of food commodity trading under the control of the few transnational corporations involved in global finance and global economic transactions. Transnational corporations work inside and outside the UN system and in UN agencies. Is this why the three Rome-based food and agriculture security agencies have failed to alleviate hunger and poverty? Are they on the speculative agricultural path rather than sustainable agricultural developmental approach? These transnational commodity corporations represent the interest and promotion of commercial industrial agriculture such as monocropping, use of imported pesticides, fertilisers and GM seeds. This has become the "speculative" formula for the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in spite of their appalling failures over the last 10 years to alleviate hunger and to promote sustainable rural development.

FAO policy management of hunger is profit-helpful to the oil and chemical industry and not to increased and improved domestic food production. It should come as no surprise to those of us working on trying to improve domestic food production to find ourselves in conflict with the vague policies of these Rome-based agencies. We have seen that this approach to agriculture has not alleviated hunger; what it does do is influence national and international agricultural policies insisted upon by the transnational political arm of the private sector. The hungry and the poor are completely left out of the picture. Until this is changed, economic gangsterism and greed begetting hunger will continue. Today the figure for the hungry is one billion â€" what will it be tomorrow?

Bettina Corke

L'Aquila, Italy

• There is a revealing link between this week's stories on biodiversity loss and rising food prices â€" overconsumption of meat and biofuels in the industrialised world. Producing cheap meat and dairy uses two-thirds of the world's agricultural land, and relies on vast imports of soya from South America that are trashing Amazon forest and grasslands, threatening wildlife, and raising carbon emissions. Growing biofuel crops is having the same effect â€" and increasing demand for both is driving up food prices.

tasks the government with protecting nature, then seeing through Robert Flello MP's sustainable livestock bill should be the first job on the list.

Andy Atkins

Executive director, Friends of the Earth

, 17 August). He continues, in reference to the recently published Royal Society papers on food supply, "there are grave questions about whether or not a growing population can continue to be fed".

Well, it pains me to report that George is as much a victim of denial as anyone else. Read his previous articles about environmentalists who raise population growth as a concern, for example that of 29 September 2009, In which he refers to crude stereotypes to justify yourself from having to face up to questions, for example: "It 's no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth after reproductive rich white people. "If this is the ISN 'dangerous abandonment of environmental constraints, it' s hard to imagine that there is.

Chris Padley

Lincoln