fer from their garden variety neighbours. But there is a broad scientific consensus that the present generation of GM food is safe. Even so, this does little to reassure consumers. Food frights such as “mad cows” disease and revelations of cancercausing dioxin in Belgian food have sorely undermined their confidence in scientific pronouncements and regulatory authorities alike. GM food have little future in Europe until this faith can be restored.
The second big wrong about GM food is that it may harm the environment. The producers argue that the engineered trait—such as resistance to certain brands of herbicide or types of insects and virus—actually do ecological good by reducing chemical use and improving yields so that less land needs to go under the plough. Opponents retort that any such benefits are far outweighed by the damage such crops might do. They worry that pesticideresistant genes may spread from plants that should be saved to weeds that have to be killed. They fear a loss of biodiversity. They fret that the inbuilt resistance to bugs that some GM crops will have may poison insects such as Monarch butterfly, and allow other, nastier bugs to develop a natural resistance and thrive.
Many of the fears are based on results from limited experiments, often in the laboratory. The only way to discover whether they will arise in real life, or whether they will be any more damaging than similar risks posed by conventional crops and farming practice, is
