Organic food is nutritionally no better for you than conventionally produced crops, according to scientists at the authoritative Food Standards Agency.

That won’t stop people buying it, of course, and nor should it in a free country.

If you want to pay over the odds for a pack of air-freighted green beans in the deluded belief that you are somehow saving the planet, then that’s your look out.

Similarly many consumers have been frightened witless by tabloid scare stories of “Frankenstein Foods” and have boycotted genetically modified produce as a result.

Yet, there’s not a scrap of evidence that GM food is bad for you. In fact millions of people have been eating GM food for years without a single documented case of anyone coming to harm.

But these irrational prejudices have nothing to do with science – they are lifestyle choices.  They show the incredible self-indulgence of well fed people who are lucky enough not to have anything more serious to worry about.

Alas, the same cannot be said of the impact on Africa, where the anti-science hysteria whipped up by the green movement has devastating consequences.

This week former chief government scientist, Sir David King, accused aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green groups such as Friends of the Earth, of bullying poor nations into abandoning technologies that could help feed the poor.

He argued that GM technology could increase crop yields in Africa by ten fold and help reduce the 700,000 lives lost unnecessarily through malnutrition and unhygienic food and water each year.

Organic and GM-free methods may be acceptable in rich countries with surplus food, but in Africa the results are catastrophic.

By imposing organic and GM-free agriculture onto Africa, the aid agencies and their eco-allies are condemning millions of the world’s poorest people to destitution, disease and an early death.

If environmental campaigners want to make these choices with their own shopping baskets, then that is little more than a harmless eccentricity.

But imposing their anti-science bigotry on people far less fortunate than themselves is despicable.