In an exclusive interview filmed and published by the London Telegraph , the Prince highlighted Australia's problems with salinity, revealing an increasing anxiety and passion about the dangers of meddling with nature.

"Look at Western Australia," he said.

"Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it.

"Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture.

"If you are not working with natural assistance you cause untold problems which become very expensive and very difficult to undo.

"It places impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become more difficult to sort out."

Prince Charles expressed great concern that the world's food supply was being whittled away by soil damage wreaked by scientific research.

Big companies, he said, were using humanity and nature as a "gigantic experiment" that had gone "seriously wrong".

"Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?" he said.

The Prince made similarly controversial statements to the Telegraph in 1998 when he accused genetic scientists of taking humanity into the "realms that belong to God and God alone".

In the interview published on Tuesday, he insisted that reliance on global corporations for food would result in "absolute disaster" and this would ensure the "absolute destruction of everything … and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future".

"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 again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

The Prince's forthright comments will reopen the debate about GM food in Britain, where the Government has already allowed more than 50 genetically modified crop trials in the past eight years, and there is increasing pressure to allow more genetically modified products on the market.

Prince Charles, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, said he would like to see the British agricultural system encouraging more family run co-operative farms.

He said he was not being atavistic.

"It's not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long."