"The idea is that one might discover mutated crops able to resist insects or disease better, or more able to tolerate salty or dry soils.",

or even talk, walk and - one day - eat with their razor-sharp teeth.

I needn't worry - I've seen little shop of horrors plenty of times so I know how to defend myself, simply make friends and sing with your plant (whilst occasionally satisfying its bloodlust).

It's nice to see one agency out there who are trying to out-crazy DARPA.

I for one look forward to the super-powered veg-of-tomorrow. Teleportatoes, Quantum Stringbeans, DoomSprouts and finally Carrots that can actually help you see in the dark / through walls / the future.

going by GM, one bunch will say "feed the millions, we want Nuke food, the other will say "let them starve, we don't want Nuke food".

bit like the twats at EON yesterday.

"We don't want coal power stations we want green energy". Fine let stick 10,000 windmills on the moors and open countryside. Oh and a half dozen nuke plants just outside your town.

"The IAEA nuke boffins are keen to emphasise that their "induced mutation" plans are not the same as genetically modified (GM) crops."

That is so awesome. They've managed to come up with a description that sounds EVEN SCARIER to the people who don't like the idea of GM, and purposefully distance themselves from the less worrying-sounding one.

Scientists! More inventions like this, please!

The highest land productivity in the world is not produced by mutating single crops, but by planting several crops in the same field. Agroforestry produces far more, but requires more labour. In the Third World there is plenty of labour to go around, so there is no need for the GM or radioactive mutations.

How would mutant super-crops help Zimbabwe? They wouldn't.

I'm not against the idea though.

Mine's the one with Mustard and Cress growing on it.

If you feed people, you just get more people and then what do you mutate?

Obviously it would be better to mutate people so they eat and fornicate less.

you can't solve starvation with more food (or at least not in a real world situation).

If we were suddenly able to produce enough food to prevent starvation now (and someone was willing to give it away), then the population we fed it to would simply grow [rapidly], soon the need for food would again far outstrip the new supply and then starvation would start again, only there would be more people starving (and arguably therefore more suffering).

Sounds harsh, and of course I'd want food if I was starving, but the reality is we make this problem worse by artificially tilting the balance. Let it return (i.e. in this instance allow affected populations to reduce) and the suffering will soon diminish rapidly.

Vitriolic responses please. . .

The Atomic Energy agency pushing mutated crops to poor people? Regardless of the actual benefits, that's the single worse piece of marketing I've ever seen.

Ahh, you just reminded me of the "Sprouts of Doom".

"Ohhhhhhhhhh Blimey!"

If I believed that this wasn't a thinly-disguised attempt by agro-businesses to sell more product I'd be happy. But there needs to be a will to actually feed the poor. I cant see that. I can childeren starving to death, see farms plowing crops under, fields lying fallow, other artificial means used to prop up prices, big business making money from selling modified seeds, but no-one giving away their excess crops to needy nations. When that starts I'll change my mind.

They'd be better off mutating arms dealers and manufacturers into human beings.

The world is perfectly capable of producing enought food to feed itself.

Most starvation comes about because of loss of access to food because of war.

Or, in the words of Brecht

What keeps mankind alive, the fact that millions

Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed

Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance

At keeping its humanity repressed

For once, you must not try to shirk the facts:

Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

It strikes me to be similar to the infinite number of monkeys at typewriters trying to randomly create the works of Shakespeare. Will zapping them with some gamma rays speed up the process?

"The IAEA nuke boffins are keen to emphasise that their 'induced mutation' plans are not the same as genetically modified (GM) crops."

That's right. They apparently think that randomly changing an unknown number of thousands or millions of characteristics just to "see what happens" is going to be a much more efficient method of improving crops than intentionally varying one at a time, which they have a pretty good idea what it does, under tightly controlled conditions. And I can design a better computer circuit by randomly soldering a bunch of tranistors together! Or better yet, let's just dump a bucketful of them into a pail of molten solder a million times and see if one assembles itself into a computer.

Bzzz. Fail.

Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

No wonder the poor welsh sheep are scared.

So, you radiate the stuff and see what happens? You get a potato that resists some pest better, so you grow a lot of the potatoes and years later you find out it has been producing a teratagenic posion that kills the pests but also causes genetic mutations and defects in the people who have been eating the taters.

Sounds like a really stupid plan - create a frankentater then spend years testing it to find out what makes it different from normal taters so you be sure it won't poison everyone.

GM sounds a lot more reasonable. You pick a trait in another plant that you like, determine the genes that cause that trait and transplant them into the DNA of your planned supertater. Once you've got true breeding supertaters, you can test and see if the change worked as planned and see if it did what you wanted and that nothing else was changed. Relatively safe, with less chance of unwanted changes.