by Laurent Belsie

About the author: Laurent Belsie is a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper.

Two plants sit side by side in a greenhouse.

One is healthy and untouched by pests.

The other is leaf-eaten. Having bored a small, brown hole through one of its cotton bolls, a worm now sits drowsily on the inside of a blossom.

“That’s going to make zero cotton,” says Rob Horsch, manager of crop transformation for Monsanto Company’s agriculture group in St. Louis, Missouri.

What’s the difference between the two plants? Biotechnology.

The first plant is a new bioengineered variety that’s unappealing to pests.

A Silent Revolution

Twenty years after the green revolution, which boosted wheat and rice yields dramatically in parts of the...