Charles warns GM farming will end in ecological disaster

Prince Charles has warned that the adoption of genetic modification in farming has set the world on course for "the biggest disaster, environmentally, of all time".

In an outspoken assault on GM crops, the prince accused unnamed "gigantic corporations" of "conducting a gigantic experiment with nature, and the whole of humanity, which has gone seriously wrong".

In an interview given to the Telegraph at the Castle of Mey, a Windsor family seat in Caithness, the heir to the throne reiterated his antipathy to industrialised agriculture.

He delivered a vividly-worded prediction that small farmers across the globe would be forced from their land into city slums through companies planting GM crops.

"We [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness," the prince said.

"What we should be talking about is food security, not food production - that is what matters, and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think it's somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another, then count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."