Whether Bt corn is safe or not depends on whom you ask. The European Federation of Biotechnology “contends that the great majority of [scientific] papers show that Bt corn does not pose any environmental risk,” but what do you know—it’s an industry group. Other papers show Bt corn having subtle effects—for example, on milkweed, which gets coated with Bt pollen when it grows near cornfields; on the monarch butterflies and water insects that feed on the milkweed; on the speed of maturation of caterpillars, who are then exposed to predators for longer; on bees; on birds; on…us?

Subtle effects…

It’s simplistic to think of the growers of Bt corn, often demonized, as the bad guys here; they’re locked into a vicious cycle where hyperproduction is the only means of getting along. And even though the seed companies monopolize the market, withhold the seeds from researchers who want to conduct independent tests, and wield an extraordinary amount of power in legislating this debate (a five-year tax abatement and tax breaks for bringing new jobs to Ankeny, Iowa, for example, or an unbelievable hat trick that got the USDA to give farmers in four states a 2007 break on federal crop insurance premiums if they plant brand-name GM seed corn containing herbicide, which follows the break even more enthusiastically passed and implemented in 2000), even despite all this….it’s true that Bt corn can feed a lot of people.

Do we want it to? That’s the question Europe’s now faced with. For most of the rest of the world, it’s too late.