The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup – recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil.
In April, California rebuffed a request by Ventria Bioscience, a small company in Sacramento, to increase its acreage of an experimental rice crop engineered to produce human proteins for use in nutritional supplements.
Some know it better as "Agent Orange" corn, a GE crop engineered to withstand exposure to one of the chemicals in the infamous Vietnam-era herbicide.
The risks they face from genetic modification are remote -- but unlike Europeans, the average African would benefit hugely from crops engineered to resist bugs or need little water.
As developing countries like India and China expand their production of genetically modified crops, engineered for traits like natural pest resistance or tolerance of herbicides, farmers are seeing costs rise.
Mr. Witherspoon said Garst would direct farmers who want next year's crops engineered to fend off the corn borer, a common pest, to use corn strains based on Monsanto's YieldGuard technology, which has government clearance for food uses.
The report also recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency extend its regulation to crops engineered to be resistant to viruses, most of which are now exempt from oversight, and which some fear have the potential to create so-called super weeds.
And while crops engineered to manufacture an insect-killing toxin have reduced the use of pesticides in those fields, the emergence of newly resistant insects now threatens to reverse that trend.
Indeed, in the first six years of commercial use, crops engineered to tolerate herbicides or resist insects reduced pesticide use by 31 million pounds, or about 2 percent, according to Dr. Benbrook's analysis of data from the Department of Agriculture.
The burgeoning population needs crops engineered to produce more and tolerate climate change.
