I’m sitting at my desk eating a small jar of South River Miso. The stuff is delicious, marked by a light, lemony tang. The packaging, by contrast, is a heavy-handed assurance of purity. It proclaims that the product is certified organic, aged for three weeks in wood (sustainably harvested?), unpasteurised, made with “deep well water”, handcrafted and – the part that most piques my interest – free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Genetic modification (GM) is a form of biotechnology used throughout the world. Forty-five million acres of land are planted with GM crops. Almost 80% of corn and 90% of soya grown in the United States is genetically modified.

Despite its global popularity, the mere mention of GM technology is likely to spark a brawl. Greenpeace has deemed it “a greater threat to the environment than nuclear wastes or chemical pollution”. Mae-Wan Ho, the British scientist, claims that it will precipitate “the end of the world at large”. And as far as public opinion goes, the most popular image associated with “frankenfoods” seems to be that of a scientist in a Haz-Mat suit investigating crops for GM contamination, as if testing for anthrax.

The opposition hinges on the perception that there’s something creepy about messing with the internal architecture of food. A GM crop results from the insertion of a gene from one organism into the DNA of another to convey a desirable trait, such as insect resistance. The process is not viewed as especially appetising.

Setting aside the point that traditional plant breeding techniques accomplish the same goal as GM technology but slower, it remains true that such alterations could lead to unpredictable allergies, drive some native plants into extinction or create human resistance to antibiotics. The fact that they haven’t doesn’t really matter to the opposition. They could. Playing it safe might seem reasonable.

Something quite valuable, however, is lost in a strict adherence to the precautionary principle: GM technology has the potential to improve our health and the health of our environment.

Consider the case of nitrogen fertiliser. Few products have wreaked more environmental havoc. The problem is that not all nitrogen is absorbed by plants, leaving the residual nitrogen to leach into water and create algae-packed “dead zones” inhospitable to aquatic life. In response, leading biotech companies are genetically engineering grains capable of absorbing higher percentages of added nitrogen. They’re on the verge of making radical improvements, firing a gene gun rather than the trial-and-error approach of traditional breeding. For farmers from Nebraska to Asia, this technology could lead to dramatic improvements.

Or take cows. The culinary craze for grass-fed beef ignores a downside: cows that eat grass emit four times the amount of methane compared with cows that eat corn. The problem with methane is that it’s a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent as CO2 in causing global warming. Gramina, the Australian biotech company, has produced a GM grass that could crack the methane problem. The reason for a cow’s high methane output is lignin, a substance in grass that triggers the bovine digestive system to produce the gas. Gramina’s GM grass eliminates the lignin, potentially lessening environmental damage without upsetting grass-fed beef eaters.

Intensive pig production has also come under fire. Pig manure contains excessive levels of phosphorus, an element that destroys aquatic ecosystems when delivered in heavy doses. In response, Canadian scientists have developed the “enviropig”, a pig genetically endowed to produce an enzyme (phytase) that reduces the phosphorus content in porcine manure by 60%. Somewhere in a paddock near the University of Guelph, in Ontario (where the “enviropig” was pioneered), are seventh-generation porkers whose ancestors have reliably passed on the original genetic modification.

Whether or not these environmentally valuable genetic modifications will benefit humans, however, remains an open question. None of the GM innovations mentioned above is on the market – because food producers fear the bad publicity that might come from anti-GMO invective.

Given the potential of these products to reduce the environmental impact of farming, it’s ironic that traditional advocates for sustainable agriculture have successfully campaigned to blacklist GMOs irrespective of their applications. At the least they might treat them as legitimate ethical and scientific matters deserving a fair public hearing. Such a hearing would not only please farmers who were truly concerned about sustainability, but would also give the rest of us a more accurate source of scientific information than the back of a jar.

James E McWilliams is the author of American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT and an associate professor of history at Texas State University

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