The recent report by the National Academy of Sciences on genetic foods, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s disqualification of these foods from organic standards, strongly suggests that the federal government is getting the message that the public has been sending for nearly a decade. The academy’s report has the potential to change the debate on this controversial topic.

Though the academy panel, which included industry representation, focused only on GE food that could produce its own pesticides, many of its conclusions could be broadly applied. Their review of these new types of food turned up the following: The Environmental Protection Agency should regulate the industry and strengthen the current informal policy agreements it has been operating under; the EPA’s regulation should be extended to crops altered to be resistant to viruses; more tests need to be done to determine the potential creation of allergens or toxins in the new foods.

The academy reported emphasized that there was no evidence that food currently being sold was unsafe and that the process itself of genetic engineering was not necessarily dangerous. But its calls for increased testing of these products formally recognizes what consumers have been saying for years — that inserting the genetic material from different plants or animals is not the same as creating a hybrid from species within the same family, which farmers have done throughout history.

The academy conclusions properly send the industry back to where it should have been in the early 1990s — in the arena of more research and a greater inquiry into the long-term effects of their products. It also gives credibility to grass-roots efforts to label GE foods on the supermarket shelf. Without the kind of testing the academy is now calling for, how else were consumers to make informed choices about what they eat?

Given the widespread rejection of GE food in Europe and the growing concern about it in this country, increased demands for testing and greater government oversight may do more to reassure the public than any number of industry feel-good advertisements. It is also the kind of official scrutiny the industry should have had from the beginning.