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With medicine, the boon 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 purveyors of GM technology the best hope of a speedy return. For consumers, especially in the rich world, the benefits of super
