Ask any farmer in America's major wheat-growing regions about this year's crop and you'll get an earful. A severe, prolonged drought - which in some places is in its fifth year - has cut the winter wheat crop drastically.

American farmers will harvest 1.264 billion bushels of winter wheat, down 16 percent from last year's crop, according to forecasts released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Government analysts predict that in Texas, production will be the lowest since 1971, and in Oklahoma, the lowest since 1957. The hard red winter-wheat crop, grown from Texas to Montana and used to make bread, was estimated at 659 million bushels, down 29 percent from last year.

The map of regions affected by the drought - available on the Web from the National Drought Mitigation Center athttp:// drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html - is sobering. It shows the severity of drought conditions from south Texas to South Dakota and Montana, including Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. Arizona and New Mexico are also badly affected.

What the map doesn't show is the heartache of farmers who see their crops burning up.

But droughts are just acts of God, about which nothing can be done, right? Wrong. Scientists might be able to provide a partial solution - at least they might, if federal policy-makers permitted it.

Spectacular new things

Gene-splicing, sometimes called genetic modification, offers plant breeders the tools to make old crop plants do spectacular new things. In the United States and at least 17 other countries, farmers are using gene-spliced crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower inputs and reduced impact on the environment. In spite of research being hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by governmental overregulation, gene- spliced crop varieties are slowly but surely trickling out of the pipeline in many parts of the world.

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.

Ability to tolerate drought

But the greatest boon of all both to food security and to the environment in the long term may 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 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 - 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 - the use of gene-spliced varieties that experience lower post-harvest losses in yield means that the farming (and irrigation) of fewer plants can produce the same total amount of food. We get more crop for the drop.

Burdensome regulation

However, unscientific and burdensome regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture in the United States - and by the agencies of the United Nations elsewhere - has raised significantly the cost of producing new plant varieties and kept many potentially important crops from ever reaching the market.

In several European Union countries, national bans on gene-spliced varieties are in place, in clear violation of EU rules, and the European Commission has repeatedly proven itself incapable of removing the barriers. Such policies exert a chilling effect on U.S. farmers who export to the EU.

In fact, one irony of the current plight of farmers is that, fearing resistance to American gene-spliced wheat in major export markets, some wheat growers have resisted the introduction of gene-spliced drought-resistant varieties, causing Monsanto to give up its research and development efforts in 2004.

Calling for changes

Earlier this month, however, a coalition of four major wheat industry groups called for changes to make American wheat more competitive; and among these was the introduction of gene- spliced varieties.

Easier said than done. The 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 R&D.

Innovation has simply become too costly and risky. That should provide food for thought as the drought continues to parch the nation's heartland, as farmers go bust, and as the price of bread and pasta increases.

Dr. Henry I. Miller is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and was an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 1979 to 1994. Gregory Conko is the director of food safety policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They are the authors of The Frankenfood Myth (2004).