Posts Tagged 'Anti-GMO'

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Is Organic Agriculture “Affluent Narcissism?”

Published November 27, 2012 Agriculture 6 Comments
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(…) consumers who buy overpriced organic foods in order to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on 0.01% of the pesticides they consume. (…) 99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.

Physician and molecular biologist Henry I. Miller reviews the furor generated by the recent article by Stanford University researchers that was dismissive of health or nutritional benefits of organic foods. Dr. Miller provides some excellent references to give needed context to the unwarranted fears of pesticide residues — which are presumed to be more harmful in conventionally-farmed produce. 

(…) Ironically, the designation ‘organic’ is itself a synthetic construct of bureaucrats that makes little sense.  It prohibits the use of synthetic chemical pesticides – although there is a lengthy list of exceptions listed in the Organic Foods Production Act  – but permits most ‘natural’ ones (and also allows the application of pathogen-laden animal excreta as fertilizer).

These permitted pesticides can be toxic.  As evolutionary biologist Christie Wilcox explained in a September 2012 Scientific American article (‘Are lower pesticide residues a good reason to buy organic?  Probably not.’): ‘Organic pesticides pose the same health risks as non-organic ones.  No matter what anyone tells you, organic pesticides don’t just disappear.  Rotenone is notorious for its lack of degradation, and copper sticks around for a long, long time.  Studies have shown that copper sulfate, pyrethrins, and rotenone all can be detected on plants after harvest—for copper sulfate and rotenone, those levels exceeded safe limits.  One study found such significant rotenone residues in olives and olive oil to warrant ‘serious doubts…about the safety and healthiness of oils extracted from [fruits] treated with rotenone.’’  (There is a well-known association between rotenone exposure and Parkinson’s Disease.)

There is another important but unobvious point about humans’ ingestion of pesticides: The vast majority of pesticidal substances that we consume occur in our diets ‘naturally,’ and they are present in organic foods as well as conventional ones.  In a landmark research article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues found that ‘99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.  Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods.’

The bottom line of Ames’ experiments: ‘Natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests.  We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.’

In other words, consumers who buy overpriced organic foods in order to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on 0.01% of the pesticides they consume.

(…) 

In an article entitled ‘The Organic Fable,’ New York Times columnist Roger Cohen had some pithy observations stimulated by the Stanford study.  ‘Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.’

(…) 

Please read the entire article.

Hyped GM maize study faces growing scrutiny

Published October 15, 2012 Agriculture Closed
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10/10/2012 in Nature News & Comment: 

Last week, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin both issued initial assessments slamming the paper, bluntly asserting that its conclusions are not supported by the data presented. “The design, reporting and analysis of the study, as outlined in the paper, are inadequate,” says the EFSA in a press release, adding that the paper is “of insufficient scientific quality to be considered as valid for risk assessment”.

(…)

In an exceptional move, the ethics committee of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) last week decried the public-relations offensive as inappropriate for a high-quality and objective scientific debate, and reminded researchers working on controversial topics of the need to report results responsibly to the public.

But the damage has already been done by the Seralini media management.

Bad science about GMOs: It reminds me of the antivaccine movement

Published September 25, 2012 Agriculture Closed
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Surgeon/scientist David Gorski at Respectful Insolence has posted an excellent critique of Séralini et al:

(…) The bottom line is that this study is about as bad as studies get. The editors of Food and Chemical Toxicology, the journal in which this pitiful excuse for a study was published, ought to be ashamed. As it was so aptly put:

But it could more simply mean the GM maize and the herbicide had no measured effect, and that is why the dose made no difference. “They show that old rats get tumours and die,” says Mark Tester of the University of Adelaide, Australia. “That is all that can be concluded.”

Indeed. That is about all one can say about the study. Certainly we can’t say whether the GMO maize increased the propensity for tumors. It’s also interesting how the authors included so many photos of the rats and their tumors, photos that quacks like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola eagerly post on their websites, but failed to include photos of the control rats.

(Via Respectful Insolence)

Genetically modified corn and cancer – what does the evidence really say

Published September 25, 2012 Agriculture Closed
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This study has shown that old Harlan Sprague-Dawley rats get cancers and other diseases. This has been shown before.

What this study does not show is that exposing these rats to GM corn and/or Roundup makes any difference to the frequency of cancers or other diseases. It can’t because no statistical tests have been applied, and perhaps most worryingly, the authors do not comprehensively report on why rats in the control group died.

To answer the captioned question – the Seralini study show that an extremely cancer prone strain of rat gets cancer during its lifespan. Ashley Ng has published a devastating critique of the Seralini study. Dr. Ng is a Post Doctoral Fellow and Haematologist at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Snippets:

Rat selection

The study focuses on cancers in rats. For this they use the Harlan Sprague-Dawley strain of rat, which is known to be predisposed to getting cancer. Lots of them. Over 70% of males and 87% of females from this strain reportedly get cancer during their lifetime, whether they have been fed GM corn or not. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of Seralini’s rats were found with cancer.

To make sense of this study you have to ask the simple question: “does feeding rats GM corn and/or Roundup increase the frequency of cancers compared with rats that have been given non-GM food?”

To do this, the authors of the study split up 200 rats into ten groups. One “control” group (ten male and ten female) were fed non-GM corn and had access to plain water. The researchers monitored for the development of cancer over a period of two years.

Nine other groups of twenty rats (ten male and ten female) were also monitored, but this time, these groups were given food containing 11%, 22% or 33% of NK603 GM corn, 11%, 22% or 33% of NK603 GM corn with Roundup spiked in their drinking water, or just Roundup spiked in their drinking water at different concentrations.

The male and female rats in the control group lived for just under two years. Other studies identified that these rats die from cancer or kidney failure around this time. But the authors don’t mention this. They simply write:

“ After mean survival time had elapsed, any deaths that occurred were considered to be largely due to aging.”

They have effectively chosen not look at – and therefore don’t have to report on – why rats in the control group died. This assumption alone is sufficient grounds for rejecting this paper from publication.

Treatment group vs the control

In the study, Figure 1 (view here) shows Kaplan Meier plots the number of rat deaths by “control group” and other “treatment groups”.

What do these mean? Well, not much because the authors failed to use a statistical test to tell if there was a difference between the control groups and treatment groups.

This is important, as all their claims relate to the incidence of cancers (and other “diseases”) in the “treatment group” compared to the “control group”. These comparisons can only be made if a statistical test shows that what you observe is not happening by chance.

The Harlan Sprague-Dawley strain of rat is predisposed to getting cancer. jepoirrier

Overstating the evidence

Still on Figure 1, we see that several “treatment groups” of male rats receiving GM NK603 corn (the 22% group and 33% group) actually had fewer cancers than the male control group at their arbitrarily determined point of assessment.

Similarly, a treatment group of male rats receiving 33% GM corn and Roundup had no difference to the control group, and two treatment groups receiving Roundup (A and C) had the same or less incidence of cancer compared with the control group.

By their perverted logic, they could equally claim that for male rats:

a) high percentages of GM corn (22% and 33%) was “protective” against getting cancer compared to group of control male rats

b) having 33% of GM corn with Roundup showed no difference to the control group and therefore wasn’t harmful to male rats, and

c) using 0.5% Roundup in the drinking water was protective against cancer in male rats compared to the the male control group.

But you can’t. You can no more make these statements than the claims about the increased incidence of cancers in the female rats in the various treatment groups. No statements can be made because no statistical test has been applied.

The full picture

One sentence that should set alarm bells ringing is the claim that “All data cannot be shown in one report.”

The retort to that statement is, “Oh yes it can. Please show it to me”. If you are reporting data, you need to show all the data.

Do read Dr. Ng in full. Then sign the petition to force Seralini to release their data.

 

 

The GM Corn Rat Study

Published September 21, 2012 Agriculture 1 Comment
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Neuroscientist Steven Novella examines the propaganda:

By all accounts this study looks like the perfect storm of ideologically motivated pseudoscience. French researchers Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen, who have a history of opposition to GM food, have published a highly dubious study allegedly linking consuming the GM corn or exposure to the roundup pesticide with increased risk of tumors and death. However:

In an unusual move, the research group did not allow reporters to seek outside comment on their paper before its publication in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology and presentation at a news conference in London.

So – they presented their controversial findings, which they consider “alarming,” but prohibited journalists from doing their job before presenting the results. That’s more than suspicious – I think it’s unethical. Transparency in science is critical, especially when that research has immediate implications for public safety and can have a profound effect on public opinion.

It is much easier to provoke fear than to reassure with careful analysis. It’s almost as if the researchers wanted an undiluted initial shock reaction to their research before the careful analysis could even take place.

But the internet moves fast these days, and that careful analysis is already beginning – leaving those news outlets who swallowed the press release in the dust. The New Scientist has an excellent analysis, based partly on a French blogger who has dissected the study. Problems already identified with the study include the following:

- The population of rats used have a high propensity for tumors.

- There were only 20 rats in the control group, and 80 in the exposure groups, an atypical asymmetry.

- The data reports that “some” of the test groups had a higher tumor incidence, while others did not – sounds suspiciously like cherry picking the data.

- The statistical analysis done by the team was atypical, characterized by nutrition researcher Tom Sanders as ”a statistical fishing trip,” while a more standard analysis was excluded.

- Exposure to GM corn or the herbicide Roundup had the same negative effects. It is inherently implausible (admittedly not impossible) for such distinct mechanisms to have the same effect.

- There was no dose response at all – which is a critical component of demonstrating a toxic effect.

- The researchers did not control for total amount of food consumed, or fungal contaminants, both of which increase tumors in this population of rat.

These are only the most obvious problems with the study – the kinds of things that journalists would have been told if they were allowed to show the study to other scientists before reporting on the study.

Frankly, if a journalist if given such a restriction I think they should either refuse to report on the study, or solely report about the odd restriction, or ignore the restriction and show it to other scientists anyway. The integrity of the science reporting process is more important than this one study or this one research group.

This group has a clear conflict of interest in that they have a history of strong opposition to GM foods and have published dubious researchin the past overcalling the risks of GM food. However, I do not believe that an apparent conflict of interest automatically condemns research, if the research is rigorous and transparent.

However, when you combine a conflict of interest (in this case a strong ideological bias) with questionable research methods and then squirrely dealings with the media, you have cause for concern.

Already the French government has ordered a probe into the possible safety concerns of GM corn. That seems like an overreaction to this one questionable study, but as long as they do an honest inquiry into the science the end result should be legitimate. I just hope they publicize the outcome of their investigation, even if negative, as much as the “alarming” research that provoked it.

Should there be required labeling of GMOs?

Published September 20, 2012 Agriculture , California Proposition 37 1 Comment
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Tyler Cowen has made a serious study of the food supply chain. So he offers some of the best critical thinking on Prop 37

Here is one on-the-mark take (of many):

…there have been more than 300 independent medical studies on the health and safety of genetically modified foods. The World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and many others have reached the same determination that foods made using GM ingredients are safe, and in fact are substantially equivalent to conventional alternatives. As a result, the FDA does not require labels on foods with genetically modified ingredients because it acknowledges they may mislead consumers into thinking there could be adverse health effects, which has no basis in scientific evidence.

Or try the National Academy of Sciences from 2010:

Many U.S. farmers who grow genetically engineered (GE) crops are realizing substantial economic and environmental benefits — such as lower production costs, fewer pest problems, reduced use of pesticides, and better yields — compared with conventional crops, says a new report from the National Research Council.

Here is a good NYT summary Op-Ed on that report. There is not the scientific evidence for Mark Bittman’s recent evaluation that:

G.M.O.’s, to date, have neither become a panacea — far from it — nor created Frankenfoods, though by most estimates the evidence is far more damning than it is supportive.

It’s the tag there that is problematic. He doesn’t offer a citation, nor has he in past columns offered convincing material to back this evaluation (you can read here for a somewhat more detailed account from Bittman; it simply minimizes benefits and does not support “by most estimates the evidence is far more damning than it is supportive”). This earlier critique of Bittman is on the mark on virtually every point.

The standards of evidence being applied here are extremely weak. In that last Bittman link he wrote that:

…The surge in suicides among Indian farmers has been attributed by some, at least in part, to G.E. crops…

The link is to a sensationalistic Daily Mail (tabloid) story, yet that gets translated into “has been attributed by some.” In that story, the suicides were caused by indebtedness and supposedly the debts were in part caused by a desire by farmers to buy GMO crops. In comparable terms one could write that anything one spends money on could cause suicide through the medium of indebtedness.

By the way, the Wikipedia treatment gives some more detailed citations suggesting that GMO crops are not a significant cause of farmer suicides in India. The most careful study of the matterreports this:

We first show that there is no evidence in available data of a “resurgence” of farmer suicides in India in the last five years. Second, we find that Bt cotton technology has been very effective overall in India. However, the context in which Bt cotton was introduced has generated disappointing results in some particular districts and seasons. Third, our analysis clearly shows that Bt cotton is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the occurrence of farmer suicides. In contrast, many other factors have likely played a prominent role.

I would in fact be more supportive of the GMO labeling idea if renowned food writers such as Bittman, and many others including left-wing economists, would come out and boldly proclaim the science about GMOs to their readers. Too often the tendency is to use a “I’ll try not to say anything literally incorrect, while insinuating there are big problems” method of scoring points against big agriculture. (Another common trope is to switch the discussion to “distribution” and to suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that a net benefit technology such as GMOs is somehow unnecessary or undesirable; dare I utter the words “mood affiliation“?) GMO labeling is the one issue which has gained legal traction, so critics of “Big Ag” just can’t bring themselves to give it up.

Bittman’s whole column is about GMOs, but he gets at the important point only in his final sentence:

[With better information] We’d be able to make saner choices, and those choices would greatly affect Big Food’s ability to freely use genetically manipulated materials, an almost unlimited assortment of drugs and inhumane and environmentally destructive animal-production methods.

Overuse of antibiotics and animal treatment (both cruelty and environmental issues) — now those are two very real problems, backed by overwhelming scientific evidence. The fact that the California referendum is instead about GMOs — which have overwhelming scientific evidence for net benefit and minimal risks — is the real scandal.

It’s time that our most renowned food writers woke up to that difference. In the meantime, they are doing both us and themselves a deep disservice.

 

 

 

Small business under Proposition 37 (GMO labeling in California)

Published September 20, 2012 Agriculture , California Proposition 37 Closed
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I do not think it is very well thought through.

Unless you are a trial lawyer or lobbyist — one of the designers/backers of prop 37. Then for you prop 37 is a sinecure, you kids to Stanford and Harvard and early retirement. Tyler Cowen:

I advise anyone who favors Proposition 37 to read the text of the law. It is full of bad ideas and questionable distinctions, many of which are not apparent from the more superficial descriptions of the proposal. Here is one of them:

Retailers (such as grocery stores) would be primarily responsible for complying with the measure by ensuring that their food products are correctly labeled. Products that are labeled as GE would be in ,compliance. For each product that is not labeled as GE, a retailer generally must be able to document why that product is exempt from labeling. There are two main ways in which a retailer could document that a product is exempt: (1) by obtaining a sworn statement from the provider of the product (such as a wholesaler) indicating that the product has not been intentionally or knowingly genetically engineered or (2) by receiving independent certification that the product does not contain GE ingredients. Other entities throughout the food supply chain (such as farmers and food manufacturers) may also be responsible for maintaining these records.

I call this the “how to kill off small farmers and retailers” provision. And what would it do to local farmers’ markets to have the burden of proof so shifted? Who is best situated to handle possible lawsuits or shakedown lawsuits? The larger corporations.

It is interesting to see what receives an exception from the labeling provisions: alcohol, restaurant food, and animal meats raised from genetically engineered crops. (Lobby much?) For varying reasons, those are some of the outputs most likely to be harmful to you or to the environment.

Prop. 37 also exempts milk, cheese, and meat and it exempts “small” amounts of transgenic material in foodstuffs. According to critics of the bill it exempts 2/3 or so of the food products which Californians consume.

I do not think it is very well thought through.

 

Proposition 37 – California Food Labeling Initiative: Economic Implications for Farmers and the Food Industry if the Proposed Initiative were Adopted

Published September 14, 2012 Agriculture , California Proposition 37 Closed
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There is a new paper by UC Davis professors Julian M. Alston and Daniel A. Sumner [PDF]. Particularly useful is Appendix C: Costs of Segregation, Monitoring, and Enforcement. We can only estimate these costs, but it is critically important that California voters learn how real-world agriculture works. If we could conduct a poll designed to test understanding of the process impact of this regulation, I will happily predict nearly zero correct responses.

Another valuable reference provides a quick overview of the farm gate to retail prices for organic premia: Table 3. Price Premia for Organic versus Non-organic Products in U.S. Markets.

The Executive Summary begins with this tidy summary:


A Costly Regulation with No Benefits. Proposition 37, would impose significant costs on California’s food and agricultural industries, as well as consumers.

  •   Proposition 37 would cause food manufacturers and retailers to change the methods used to produce many of the foods Californians eat, and would make those foods more expensive. Among consumers, the burden would be greater on the poor who spend a larger share of their income on food.

  •   As well as imposing costs on consumers, and others in the food supply chain, Proposition 37 would be costly to farmers, including many California farmers who do not produce any genetically engineered (GE) commodities, because their products are often used as ingredients in foods that also contain ingredients from GE crops.

  •   Proposition 37 would impose about $1.2 billion in additional costs on California food processors to meet segregation, monitoring and certification costs.

  •   Proposition 37 would not provide any meaningful benefits, in the form of improved information, improved product safety, or an expanded range of choices for consumers. In fact Proposition 37 would reduce choices by driving some food products containing GE ingredients from the market.

  •   Imposing “unnatural” restrictions on the use of the word “natural” on food labels would mislead and confuse consumers because producers of farm commodities such as fruits, vegetables and tree nuts that are simply dried, roasted, juiced or otherwise lightly processed, in many instances on the farm, would be precluded from using the term “natural” on the product label. 

Lastly, it’s good to see full disclosure on the title page before the authors’ affiliations.

The work for this project was undertaken with partial funding support from No on 37. The views expressed are those of the authors, based on their analysis, and not attributable to any institution or organization with which they are affiliated or associated.

Norman Borlaug: “World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa”

Published September 8, 2012 Africa , Agriculture Closed
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While John Tierney wrote this piece in 2008, it is just as relevant in 2012. If this surprises you, then I recommend you also read Attention Whole Foods Shoppers by Robert Paarlberg.

I hope you will be persuaded to try to enlighten your “green” neighbors – that they are part of the problem, not the solution:

Farmers and consumers in poor countries are now paying the price for decisions made by well-fed Westerners, as reported by my colleagues Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin in their front-page article on cutbacks in financing for agricultural research. They explain how the Green Revolution faltered after Western governments and agencies slashed funds for agricultural research, partly to shift money to other areas, like environmental projects, and partly because of opposition to high-yield agriculture from advocacy groups.

If you find it hard to imagine how anyone could be opposed to growing more food for poor people, read Gregg Easterbrook’s 1997 Atlantic Monthly article on Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose achievements through the Green Revolution may have saved a billion lives. Mr. Easterbrook wrote:

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of his work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding institutions have also cut support for the International Maize and Wheat Center — located in Mexico and known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT — where Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world’s population now depends for sustenance. And though Borlaug’s achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug’s long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.

Pressure from environmentalists was the chief reason for these cutbacks, Mr. Easterbrook reported:

[By]the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there. “The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa,” says David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too — though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. “World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa,” Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, “a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn’t stand were sticking to me.”

Dr. Borlaug didn’t disguise his anger in summarizing his feelings about greens to Mr. Easterbrook:

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

(…)UPDATE: 

My colleague Andy Revkin notes parallels in financing for energy as well as agricultural research: short-sightedness seems to reign.

 Continue reading John Tierney.

Doubling Global Food Supply by Engineering Food for All

Published September 1, 2012 Africa , Agriculture , Development 1 Comment
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Regarding food supply and demand: in the next forty years the global demand for food will double. We are already utilizing 35% of the planet’s ice-free land area for agriculture, an area 60 times that of all cities and suburbs. The supply to balance that demand doubling needs to be achieved at affordable prices, on a per calorie basis, using less land, less water, less nitrogen runoff, less pesticide and a smaller carbon footprint.

In a new op-ed at the New York Times, Pennsylvania State University biology professor Nina V. Fedoroff explains how we can do this:

FOOD prices are at record highs and the ranks of the hungry are swelling once again. A warming climate is beginning to nibble at crop yields worldwide. The United Nations predicts that there will be one to three billion more people to feed by midcentury.

Yet even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.

These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods. This is because the gene modifications are crafted based on knowledge of what genes do, in contrast to the shotgun approach of traditional breeding or using chemicals or radiation to induce mutations. The results have been spectacular.

For example, genetically modified crops containing an extra gene that confers resistance to certain insects require much less pesticide. This is good for the environment because toxic pesticides decrease the supply of food for birds and run off the land to poison rivers, lakes and oceans.

The rapid adoption of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant soybeans has made it easier for farmers to park their plows and forgo tilling for weed control. No-till farming is more sustainable and environmentally benign because it decreases soil erosion and shrinks agriculture’s carbon footprint.

In 2010, crops modified by molecular methods were grown in 29 countries on more than 360 million acres. Of the 15.4 million farmers growing these crops, 90 percent are poor, with small operations. The reason farmers turn to genetically modified crops is simple: yields increase and costs decrease.

Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.

Yet today we have only a handful of genetically modified crops, primarily soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. All are commodity crops mainly used for feed or fiber and all were developed by big biotech companies. Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government’s three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

Decades ago, when molecular approaches to plant improvement were relatively new, there was some rationale for a cautious approach.

But now the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.

It is time to relieve the regulatory burden slowing down the development of genetically modified crops. The three United States regulatory agencies need to develop a single set of requirements and focus solely on the hazards — if any — posed by new traits.

And above all, the government needs to stop regulating genetic modifications for which there is no scientifically credible evidence of harm.

The evidence from developing countries already shows us that doubling of demand will include increased demand for meat (which requires more land and water than grain calories). So please tell me how we are going to achieve this revolution in agricultural productivity without utilizing all the available science and innovation? Must we continue hobbled like children in a sack rack?

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