 Britain's chief scientist said on Tuesday genetically modified crops should not be shunned as agriculture sought to respond to rising food demand and climate change threatened production. "It seems to me to be insanity to throw away potential solutions of scientific problems and to practical problems that the (farming) industry have," the UK government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, said. Beddington told the National Farmers Union's annual conference that, however, it was vital to assess any potential harm the crops could do to the environment while downplaying concern they might damage human health. "GM produce has been eaten for the last decade or so in Brazil, the USA, China, Argentina without as far as I am aware any undue health consequences. In terms of some of the concerns that were properly raised 10 years ago, I think there has been a real move on," he said. There has been significant opposition in Britain and some other parts of Europe to genetically modified crops. Beddington said demand for food was rising, particularly in China and India, while climate change was likely to reduce agricultural production. "The demand from these two major countries as well as the rest of Asia and Africa will mean that prices for feedgrain and livestock are likely to go up," he said. "The level of Chinese consumption is extraordinary." Beddington said there had been very substantial increases in grains and oilseed prices as stocks fell. "The dropping down (in grain stocks) to somewhere below 60 days of consumption is startling," he said. He said there was real potential in biofuels but also significant concerns. "Quite clearly some biofuels are just ludicrously unsustainable and actually make things worse. One of the areas which seems to me to be just mind-blowingly dumb is to actually cut down rainforest to grow crops for biofuels," he said. "Hopefully we will be moving away quite quickly from that." He said the valuable by-products could be produced by some biofuel plants such as high protein animal feed, improving, for example, the potential for using grains to make bioethanol in Britain. "These things are not likely to be really workable unless there is some change in wheat or some change in the price of biofuels," he said. Biofuels can produce fuel from grains, vegetable oils or even waste produce such as used cooking oil. They are seen by advocates as a way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Beddington succeeded David King as Britain's chief scientific adviser as the start of this year. 