The US and Europe last week traded new blows over genetically-modified food and fresh exchanges seem inevitable in the months and years ahead, but beneath the row is a scientific debate that is far from conclusive.
Taking the side of the US biotech lobby, US President George W. Bush accused Europe of being swayed by hysteria, saying its "unfounded, unscientific fears" about GM crops were blocking the technology in famine-threatened African countries.
His attack stirred deep indignation in Europe, where opposition to these novel foods, boosted by the mad-cow scare and other food safety scandals, runs deep.
EU countries will lift a four-year de-facto ban on GM food if the European Parliament next month approves tough new laws on the labelling and traceability of food with these ingredients.
The US last month filed a suit against the ban at the WTO and its industry has spoken out angrily against the proposed EU laws.
At stake in the squabble is billions of dollars in trade in raw crops and processed food, but also the future of a technology that is as exciting as it is controversial.
The latest attempt to reach consensus starts on Monday, when 600 experts in food safety and international trade gather under UN auspices in Rome to assess import inspection regimes for GM food and standards for additives derived from transgenic ingredients.
Looking for clear scientific light in this heated debate is rather frustrating, though.
With the exception of that small minority of scientists who enthusiastically back GM crops, most scientists with a training in biology are reserved.
In general, they give a flashing amber light that says "proceed with caution," rather than a stop light or a green one.
Typical of this is the judgement delivered last year by the French Academy of Sciences, which found no evidence so far to back allegations that GM crops could be a danger to health or the environment.
Even so, it insisted on precaution, saying the technology should be introduced only on "a case-by-case, prudent and reasoned" basis.
The reason for this is that less than a decade has gone by since the first generation of GM crops were planted.
That, say most experts, is too soon to say conclusively that there is no lasting impact on on health, say for people who suffer from allergies, or if pollen from these modified crops could leap, as environmentalists fear, to other plants, possibly creating ineradicable super-weeds.
In a study published in February, British scientists warned that the risk of these so-called jumping genes may be rather higher than thought.
Manchester University researchers inserted two non-functioning "marker" genes into tobacco plant chloroplasts -- the energy factory of a cell.
They then painstakingly looked to see if these tell-tale genes showed up in the cell nuclear of 250,000 of these plants' offspring.
Eighteen out of the 250,000 had the marker, a probability that is a remote one-in-16,000 but still many times higher than expected.
"It is a low frequency, but not when you consider the global acreage of the crop," according to one of the researchers, Anil Day.
GM, or transgenic, crops are plants that have genes added to them from foreign species which confer certain benefits.
The present generation, most of which is grown in the US, includes corn and cotton that exude a poison to kill pests, wheat, sugar beet, soybeans and oilseed rape that are resistant to herbicide and potatoes that are resistant to fungus.
Next-generation products will include bananas and rice with additional proteins that defenders say could help overcome malnutrition in poor countries, or foods aimed at western consumers, such as decaffeinated coffee and onions that do not make you weep when you peel them.
There are also tough questions about future GM animals, such as farmed fish, cows or pigs that are engineered to grow quickly or provide high milk yields. How can they be stopped from contaminating wild counterparts with their genes?
One of the arguments put forward for GM crops is that they benefit the Third World.
Activists, though, say poor farmers would benefit far more from having a stable political structure, a fair and effective judiciary, a decent economic and financial infrastructure -- and open markets in rich nations.
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