Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky. "We can't afford it," said a corn buyer at Kato Kagaku, a Japanese maker of corn starch. In the US, wheat growers and marketers, once hesitant about adopting biotechnology because they feared losing export sales, are now warming to it as a way to bolster supplies. Genetically modified (GM) crops contain genes from other organisms to make the plants resistance to insects, herbicides or disease. Opponents continue to worry that such crops have not been studied enough and that they might pose risks to health and the environment. "I think it's clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today," said Mr Steve Mercer, a spokesman for the US Wheat Associates, a federally supported cooperative that promotes Ameri can wheat abroad. The group, which once cautioned farmers about growing biotech wheat, is working to get seed companies to restart development of GM wheat and to get foreign buyers to accept it. Even in Europe, where opposition to what the Europeans call Frankenfoods has been fiercest, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of GM crops. They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated. In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month saying that "all resistance" to such crops "be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production." The chairman of the European Parliament's agriculture committee, Mr Neil Parish, said that as prices rise, Europeans "may be more realistic" about GM crops. "Their hearts may be on the left, but their pockets are on the right."