The Cutting Edge: Harvest of Fear 8.30pm, SBS ENVIRONMENTALISTS call it "Frankenfood" and want genetically engineered foods banned. Proponents say the technology has the potential to end world hunger.

Bananas that can deliver vaccines, rice plants altered to deliver vitamin A to African children who would otherwise go blind, potato plants that light up when they need watering following the addition of a jellyfish gene, corn and cotton that produce their own pesticides and reduce spraying of chemicals. These are some of the touted benefits of GM technology.

Critics, on the other hand, claim GM products have been rushed to market without consumer consultation. They question whether we need a technology that environmentalists claim will result in the unintentional spread of altered genes with catastrophic consequences.

With the debate over genetically modified foods intensifying in the US and Europe as well as in Australia, Harvest of Fear is a forceful, timely, and surprisingly even-handed presentation of the issues involved.

The hour-long documentary travels from the wheat and corn fields of America's mid-west to subsistence farms in Africa, from the offices of the environmental activist organisation Friends of the Earth to the laboratories of chemical giant Monsanto.

Just when interviews with the environmental lobby convince you organic farming is the only way for agriculture to proceed, African scientists appear arguing organic farming has failed the continent's millions and attacking Western critics who have never experienced hunger.

Conventional plant breeders can interbreed only two kinds of related plants or animals. Genetic modification is more precise, moving indi-vidual genes into plants and between life forms, crossing biological boundaries to create transgenic products.

Like humans, plants contain tens of thousands of genes and share about half of them with us. Because of this many scientists claim moving one gene into a plant will leave its essence unaltered. A tomato with a pig vitamin gene is still only a tomato, says one scientist interviewed for Harvest of Fear.

A more serious argument against GM organisms is their potential to contaminate and colonise unaltered nature. The program rakes over well-documented US examples such as the expensive Starlink corn disaster, the impact of BT corn - a crop genetically modified to produce its own pesticides - on populations of monarch butterflies.

Developments in the fishing industry as a source of concern are more scintillating. An American salmon firm has produced a GM salmon that grows four times faster than normal. If allowed to raise the salmon in offshore pens there are fears the GM fish will escape into the wild and mate with unaltered salmon, spreading the new genes throughout the world's oceans. The company, Aqua Bounty Farms, says escapes from offshore pens are unavoidable, but denies inter-breeding will occur, because the GM fish are sterile.

Stand-offs like this are symptomatic of the GM debate. The technology is so new that its long-term impact is not yet known. It is either exciting or scary, depending on your world view, and unravelling the truth of the arguments is almost impossible for the lay public.

Australia has not seen the violent demonstrations against GMOs that have taken place in Europe, nor have we experienced campaigns that have seen some European supermarket chains ban genetically altered food ingredients from their shelves.

This may change if applications by Monsanto and Bayer CropScience to grow Australia's first commercial GM canola are successful.

A new food-labelling regime introduced late last year should enable Australian consumers to make themselves more aware of what they are eating. Retailers have to comply with the laws by December 7, but labelling will not tell the full truth about what we eat. This is because only foods where altered DNA is still in evidence have to be marked GM. DNA in commonly used GM ingredients such as canola oil is destroyed in processing, and does not have to be labelled.