The ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s helped developing countries avoid much-predicted mass starvation using new hybrid varieties of crops with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. New agricultural techniques – including genetic modification – promise a second green revolution, raising yields, reducing losses from pests and allowing crop production in the least promising of environments. Another agricultural boom has come from palm oil. Oil palm trees, growing in tropical Malaysia and Indonesia in particular, are an astonishingly productive crop, producing nine times more oil per hectare than the next most productive oil crop, rapeseed. As a result, palm oil is appearing in a wide range of products from chocolate to cosmetics, and providing a substantial income for poorer farmers, particularly in underdeveloped Borneo.

Yet these new developments have proved to be controversial. Environmentalists accuse agribusiness of imposing new products on poor farmers, forcing them to buy pesticides alongside overhyped GM crops. Prince Charles and others have accused GM seed producers of driving farmers into debt, leading thousands to commit suicide. GM crops themselves have been criticised for unnecessarily interfering with nature. Palm-oil producers has been widely criticised for burning rainforest in order to clear land for more plantations, threatening biodiversity in general and endangered species, orang-utans in particular. Friends of the Earth bluntly says that ‘palm oil expansion is bad for people and bad for the planet’.

More balanced voices have suggested that GM technology is neither poison nor panacea. Rather, the debate reflects wider attitudes. As author Ramez Naam argues: ‘The GMO debate is often an emphatic and barely-disguised metaphor for our larger debate about whether technology is destroying the world or saving it, whether we should try to control nature or live within it.’ Is agribusiness exploiting developing countries and despoiling the environment? Is the drive for profit coming at the expense of people? Or have developing countries benefited from the investment made by agribusiness and the new techniques and crop varieties that have emerged? Are worried Westerners making things harder for the developing world by turning their backs on products like GM crops and palm oil? Is the image of downtrodden poor farmers and evil capitalists actually patronising to people in developing countries who often welcome these developments?