The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has asked the public to comment on what it’s calling a nutrition innovation strategy — and one main focus is how to encourage innovation in the food industry for healthy eating. It’s high time for the FDA to protect food innovation. The greatest tool for breakthroughs in food — genetic engineering — is being vilified in ways that break the law in order to get rid of the technology.

I grew up helping my father, a papaya farmer, grow our crops. I still help out on the farm and I have the callouses to prove it. Many Hawaii people might know that the papaya industry was hit hard by a disease in the 1950s called papaya ring spot virus, but they might not know how bad it was. Farming moved from Oahu to the Big Isle to try to escape it, but it arrived in Puna in 1992. In six short years, production went from 53 million pounds a year (down from the 1984 high of 80.5 million pounds) to half that number. Fortunately, in 1998 the virus-resistant Rainbow papaya was approved and commercialized, and the papaya industry was saved.

The Rainbow papaya is a genetically modified organism (GMO). This means that it was developed using genetic engineering, which has been studied extensively and found safe by scientific and regulatory bodies in the United States and around the world. Instead of carrying genes that are susceptible to the ring spot virus, the Rainbow papaya has genes that make it immune. Humans are vaccinated against diseases like measles and diphtheria — and while we can’t vaccinate individual papaya fruits, we can create a breed that’s already virus-resistant.

It’s impossible to go to the grocery store today without seeing products saying “all natural,” and “GMO-free.” FDA has realized that words like “healthy” give little guidance to consumers but fails to understand that allowing products to advertise that they do not have GMOs is a backhanded way of making the technology seem dangerous. It’s not different than a competitor badmouthing someone else making the same product — and it’s against the law.

The worst offender is the “Non-GMO Project Verified” label, an advertising symbol founded on the intention of making it seem like products without the stamp could be dangerous or unhealthy. It shocked me to read that the Non-GMO Project wants “to shrink the market for existing GMO ingredients and prevent new commercial biotech crops.”

The label tells customers to go to its website where food is classified according to how much “risk” there is of it having GMO “contamination” — both very scary, loaded words.

This is part of a marketing strategy by the non-GM folks to rely on people’s shortcut thinking. The FDA says it understands this. At a July public meeting to discuss this strategy, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition’s director, Susan Mayne said, “We know that claims are quick signals that provide consumers with important information about the nutritional benefits of the foods and beverages they choose.”

Negative claims, like the Non-GMO Project label, are sending the wrong message. Because of this bad campaign, even the makers of products that would never use GMO technology, like basil or garden seeds, think they have to use the label so that sales are not hurt.

This is exactly the type of misleading advertising that the Federal Trade Commission says is illegal. If it were up to the anti-GMO folks, Hawaii would have lost its papaya industry to the ring spot virus. I urge the FDA to please put a stop to these illegal claims for the sake of innovation in the food industry and an invaluable technology.

Joni Kamiya, a farm and science advocate, is the daughter of a papaya farmer; she blogs at HawaiiFarmersDaughter.com.