Human population has exceeded Earth's "limits of sustainability", says scientist

London, April 1 (ANI): One of most influential science advisors in the US government has said that the human population had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".

According to a report by BBC News, the statement has been made by Nina Fedoroff, the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007.

Initially working with Condoleezza Rice, Fedoroff now advises Hillary Clinton, under the new Obama administration.

"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing "wild lands", and in particular water supplies.

Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Fedoroff replied, "There are probably already too many people on the planet."

Fedoroff believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods.

"We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven," she said.

"We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops," she told the BBC. "We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century," she added. (ANI)