The men in white coats are winning, slowly

IF YOU are a stay-at-home European or Australian, it is quite possible that never, knowingly or not, have you eaten any genetically modified (GM) product. But, unknowingly, you may well be wearing one right now: GM cotton is widely grown. And you may have been treated with a drug produced with the use of GM. Wide public support has enabled anti-GM zealots to win battles on the food front in Europe and elsewhere; and fear of losing trade deters GM in other countries that grow and export the stuff, even if they would readily eat it themselves. Yet, overall, the enemies of GM are losing the war.

That might sound unlikely: this year's big GM news was not an advance but an inglorious retreat. Monsanto, an American agri-business that is the main commercial promoter of the technique, and thus the arch-villain for its enemies, decided not to bring its GM wheat variety to market, not even in the largely GM-tolerant United States. But food is a special case. It is easy to shout “Frankenfood” and scare someone into taking no risks, real or imagined, with his bread or burgers; not so easy with his shirt. However the war may go in the supermarkets or cattle feed-lots, the non-food uses of GM technology have ensured that the technology is here to stay. And those uses are steadily multiplying.