Sonoma, California—Water shortages in California are nothing new; the last major drought occurred during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. But there’s a bitter irony in the critical shortage currently plaguing the state, which could cause major crop and pasture losses and widespread restrictions on water usage. Two of the three counties where water use is currently restricted by the local water authorities, Mendocino and Marin—both boasting chronically goofy, politically correct, far-left politics, not coincidentally—have banned a key technology that could conserve huge amounts of water.

This technology is gene-splicing, sometimes called genetic modification (GM), which gives plant breeders the tools to make old crop plants do spectacular new things, including conserve water. In the United States and at least 21 other countries, farmers are using gene-spliced crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower water inputs and reduced impact on the environment. In spite of research being hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by governmental over-regulation, gene-spliced crop varieties are slowly but surely trickling out of the development pipeline in many parts of the world. For the last decade, more than 100 million acres of them have been cultivated each year. Cumulatively, more than a billion acres have been cultivated worldwide during the past 15 years.

Farmers are using gene-spliced crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower water inputs and reduced impact on the environment.

Most of these new varieties are designed to be resistant to pests and diseases that ravage crops; or to be resistant to herbicides, so that farmers can adopt more environment-friendly no-till farming practices and more benign herbicides. Others possess improved nutritional quality. But the greatest boon of all both to food security and to the environment in the long term will likely be the ability of new crop varieties to tolerate periods of drought and other water-related stresses. Where water is unavailable for irrigation, the development of crop varieties able to grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could both boost yields and lengthen the time that farmland is productive.

Even where irrigation is feasible, plants that use water more efficiently are needed. Irrigation for agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of the world’s fresh water consumption—even more in areas of intensive farming and arid or semi-arid conditions, such as California—so the introduction of plants that grow with less water would allow much of that essential resource to be freed up for other uses. Especially during drought conditions, even a small percentage reduction in the use of water for irrigation could result in huge benefits.

Plant biologists have identified genes that regulate water utilization and transferred them into important crop plants. These new varieties are able to grow with smaller amounts or lower quality water, such as water that has been recycled or that contains large amounts of natural mineral salts.

Aside from new varieties that have lower water requirements, pest and disease-resistant gene-spliced crop varieties also make water use more efficient indirectly. Because much of the loss to insects and diseases occurs after the plants are fully grown—that is, after most of the water required to grow a crop has already been applied—disease resistance means more agricultural output per unit of water invested. We get more crop for the drop.

In spite of intensive cultivation of gene-spliced plants for more than a decade—during which time not a single person has been injured or an ecosystem disrupted—four California counties have banned them entirely!

The use of gene-splicing technology can conserve water in other ways as well. Salty soil is the enemy of agriculture: Fully one-third of irrigated land worldwide, including much of California, is unsuitable for growing crops because of the presence of salt, and every year nearly half a million acres of irrigated land is lost to cultivation. Repeated fertilization, growing seasons and cultivation causes this accumulation of salts. Scientists have enhanced salt tolerance in crops as diverse as tomatoes and canola. The transformed plants not only grow in salty soil, but also can be irrigated with brackish water, conserving fresh water for other uses.

Incredibly, in spite of intensive cultivation of gene-spliced plants for more than a decade—during which time not a single person has been injured or an ecosystem disrupted—four California counties have banned them entirely! These actions in Trinity, Mendocino, Marin, and Santa Cruz counties represent political leadership and voter ignorance at their worst. The measures are unscientific and logically inconsistent, in that their restrictions are inversely related to risk: They permit the use of microorganisms and plants that are crafted with less precise and predictable techniques but ban those made with more precise and predictable ones.

Even where gene-spliced crops are being cultivated, unscientific, overly burdensome regulation by the EPA and US Department of Agriculture has raised significantly the cost of producing new plant varieties and kept many potentially important crops from ever reaching the market.

The deeply entrenched, discriminatory and excessive regulation—which flies in the face of scientific consensus that gene-splicing is essentially an extension, or refinement, of earlier techniques for crop improvement—adds millions of dollars to the development costs of each new gene-spliced crop variety. These extra costs, and also the endless (and gratuitous) controversy over cultivating these precisely crafted and highly predictable varieties, discourage research and development.

Agricultural innovation that uses gene-splicing techniques to conserve water has become very costly and risky. That should provide food for thought as farmers’ profits dry up, our lawns turn brown, and the costs of food and water increase.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at the Hoover Institution, was an official at the FDA from 1979 to 1994. He is the author, most recently, of The Frankenfood Myth.

Image credit: Photo by Flickr user leesto