A firestorm has been created over a report that says GM crops fall short of their public claims.

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a scientist with the U.S.-based Food & Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says there’s a large difference between yields under ordinary farming conditions and yields under ideal conditions. That is, conditions in which infestations of insects, plant disease and foul weather aren’t taken into account.

He says that farmers have been duped into believing they are getting more than they have paid for.

The science editor of Reason Magazine, Ronald Bailey, says Gurian-Shurman’s view, that genetically-modifed crops should be abandoned because they don’t increase yields, is based on wrong information.

Bailey agrees that because of all the new technologies, yield increases of late are thinner. However, those increases should be compared with yield increases in the GMO hostile countries of Italy and France.

"In marked contrast to yield increases in the U.S., yields in Italy and France have leveled off," he says.

His main defence of GMOs is that farmers are not stupid. Ninety per cent of the soybeans grown in the U.S. and 63 per cent of the corn are biotech varieties. GMOs have been so widely adopted in the U.S. and in developing countries in the last 13 years because their value goes beyond yield statistics, he said. Herbicide tolerant soybeans lower energy costs and are more convenient and save time.

GMOs are a key to expanding no till agriculture. He says a report in 2003 says no till agriculture saved a billion tones of topsoil from eroding. Bailey is the author of The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution.