In Australia ’s southern state of Victoria, the land is still recovering from a decade-long drought and farmers are now looking at new technologies to help them stay productive. Among them: genetically engineered canola, authorised for the first time in Victoria and New South Wales.

“We’re looking forward to putting new technology into the ground and watching it grow,” says grain grower Andrew Weidemann. Vice-president of the Victorian Farmers Federation, he is an enthusiastic booster of GM technologies.

Weidemann believes genetically modified canola will improve annual yield by at least 20% while reducing the use of pesticide. But it’s the next generation of GM crops that excite him most – crops designed to tolerate drought and frost.

“In my area,” he says, “frost and dry conditions have really impacted heavily on the local area. If we really want people to stay here in rural areas, we need to be profitable. Farmers need to be profitable.”

But profit isn’t everything for organic farmer Helen Chambers. She’s very proud of what she grows and how she grows it. For her, farming is about providing food and getting healthy nutritious food to mankind.

The Chambers have been on the family farm for five generations, surviving the latest drought through biological farming practices. Their closest neighbour is planting GM canola this year and the Chambers are worried the GM plants could contaminate their own organic crops.

“The winds can blow,” Helen Chambers explains, “the pollen, the beehives that have to be around the area to pollinate the canola crops, all these things have the opportunity to contaminate our farm.”

At the university of Melbourne, Professor Rick Roush from the faculty of land and food resources plays down the risk of contamination, drawing mostly on his past experience in the US.

“From 2003 to 2006 I moved back to the US,” he explains, “and I was very interested in looking at how this has been handled in the US and Canada. What I discovered was that there were no big problems with coexistence between organic, conventional and GM growers.”

Professor Roush is also satisfied with the level of testing on GM crops, claiming that genetically modified crops that are currently out and commercially used are as safe for human health and the environment as anything conventionally grown. Such claims outrage Scott Kinnear, a spokesperson for the Biological Farmers Association. “No one has looked for that evidence of harm,” he argues. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and people need to really understand that.”

Kinnear finds the claim that GM technologies will one day help address climate change laughable. “We don’t need GM foods to feed the world. We don’t need GM food to solve the problems of climate change. This is persuasive hysteria from scientists and it’s very unethical to make these claims.”

In the meantime, concerned consumers may be left in the dark: Australia does not currently require special labeling for GM canola oil.