The chairman of Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company, has hit out at “well-fed activists” whose hostility to new food technologies was exacerbating a global food crisis by holding back agricultural productivity.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who is a high-profile critic of the European Union’s common agricultural policy, said that since 1990 the rate of global population in-crease had overtaken the rate of food production at least partly because of opposition to new food technologies by consumers in developed countries.