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With medicine, the benefit of biotechnology has been obvious. People readily accept it when they see how better drugs and clearer diagnoses improve their lives. Why is it different when biotech is applied to agriculture? The answer is that the clearest gains from the current crop of genetically modified (GM) plants go not to consumers but to producers.Indeed, that was what their developers intended: an appeal to farmers offered the suppliers of GM technology the best hope of a speedy return. For consumers, especially in the rich world, the benefits of super-yielding soybeans are less clear, the world, by and large already has too much food in its stores; developing countries principally lack money, not food as much. Yet companies still pitch their products as a cure for malnutrition even though little that they are doing can justify such a noble claim. In boasting the technology as the only answer to everything from pest control to world hunger,the industry has fed the popular view that its products are unsafe, unnecessary and bad for the environment.

Of the two main charges against GM crops, by far the weaker is that they are unsafe to eat. Critics assert that genetic engineering introduces into food genes that are not present naturally, cannot be introduced through conventional breeding and may have unknown health effects that should be investigated before the food is sold to the public. GM crops such as the maize and soybeans that now blanket America certainly differ from their garden variety neighbors. 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 cow”, disease and revelations of cancer-causing dioxin (二噁英） in Belgian food have sorely undermined their confidence in scientific pronouncements and regulatory authorities alike. GM food has little future in Europe until this faith can be restored.

The second big worry about GM food is that it may harm the environment. The producers argue that the engineered traits—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 pesticide-resistant genes may spread from plants that should be saved to weeds that have to be killed. They fear a loss of biodiversity. They worry that the in-built 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 to do more research in the field. Banning the experimental growth of GM plants as some protesters want simply deprives scientists of their most fruitful laboratory.

Companies introduce GM food to the market as a solution to all these problems EXCEPT ________.

GM crops are crops that ________.

The author suggests that the public does not accept GM food because ________.

Critics of GM food argue that the pesticide-resistant gene ________.

By presenting the case of GM food, the author of the passage probably aims to ________.