Re your final point, about "famine is mostly an economical problem these days, bringing in the likes of monsanto to 'solve' this will not bring relief to the starving and ill nourished people of the world".
It's worth remembering that whatever problems we have now will be exacerbated by:
- a growing world population (up from about 6 billion at the start of the century to around 9 billion by 2050?)
- a shift in desired diet as developing countries become wealthier (people tend to eat more meat as they become richer, meat uses more grain and multiplies the demand on food supplies)
- restricted resources (land suitable for growing food is fairly fixed, available water is constrained) mean we need to do more within the limits of what we have
- other random impacts from freak weather events, biofuel production, and 'futures' speculators
so we should be exploring a range of solutions, understand the benefits and disadvantages of each possible solution, and expect to use a complicated range of them. GM may well form part of that portfolio. Expecting a single "magic" solution such as the whole world reverting to subsistence farming or turning vegetarian seems quite unrealistic to me.
But maybe (given the tone of the debate so far), I've got unrealistic expectations of this forum...