The National Academy of Sciences has completed a comprehensive report on GMO crops.
The National Academy of Sciences — probably the country's most prestigious scientific group — has reaffirmed its judgment that GMOs are safe to eat …
The report tries to answer a long list of questions about GMOs, involving nutrition, environmental effects, effects on the farm economy and monopoly control over seeds.
The most basic conclusion: There's no evidence that GMOs are risky to eat.
That’s the good news. But the whole purpose in planting GMO crops to begin with is the promise that they’ll outperform crops generated through more traditional means of genetic manipulation, such as selective breeding and hybridization. On that front, the news was less glowing:
But the group's new report struck a different tone from previous ones, with much more space devoted to concerns about genetically modified foods, including social and economic ones. …
For instance, the productivity of crops has been increasing for a century, and that didn't change when GMOs came along. "The expectation from some of the [GMO] proponents was that we need genetic engineering to feed the world, and we're going to use genetic engineering to make that increase in yield go up faster. We saw no evidence of that," Gould says.
In some cases, GMO crops have allowed farmers to reduce pesticide spraying, but the report also worries that this aspect of GMOs might be a short-lived benefit leading to immunity among pests. Productivity of GMO crops was also good, but not exceptional.
There’s a third part to the report, one in which the Academy of Sciences recommends that GMOs be regulated more or less like any other form of crop, but that all agricultural products promising a particularly novel benefit come in for special scrutiny even if they were produced through what we now think of as GMO technology.
The report is available for free as a PDF from the National Academies Press site.
The general impression of the report is simply that food crops produced using GMO technology are little different from crops produced using more traditional means. They’re not monstrous, unsafe Frankenfoods. They’re also not miraculous, water-sipping, self-farming wonder crops. They’re just ... crops. And they should be treated with the same level of acceptance, and the same level of caution, as other crops.
The bigger issues lay not in the technology, but in general issues revolving around rules that agricultural companies apply to the use of seed and intellectual property rights—which are issues that apply to more traditional techniques, as well as GMOs.
Note: I only downloaded the report this morning, and have only made a single fast-pass through the material, mainly focusing on the executive summary. I’ll have more to say when I’ve digested the complete report.