Dear ETH Life,

I recently subscribed to the email service, and generally find your articles very fascinating. However, the piece by Michael Breu titled "Maize means life", failed, I think, to ask the key questions and in the process turned a good and exciting story into a rather mundane article.

There's no doubt that Genetic Modification is the issue lurking behind the article, but the only mention of it is in the final sentence as "biotechnology". That should be the lead - instead the lead is a citation from a UN document, as if the intention were to scare readers away.

These quotes were apparently being used to show that non-bio-tech agriculture is inadequate to feed the world's population. As I understand it, this is a profound distortion of the truth, which is that distribution, not production is the main cause of starvation.

I myself am undecided on biotechnology, but in the absence of an open debate I am against it. This article does not advance that debate.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Tait