Not legitimate problems with GMOs:
- They’re “frankenfood” or “dangerous” or “playing God.”
Legitimate problems with GMOs:
- Artificially sterile seeds which force farmers to buy new seeds from with every crop from corporations which have a monopoly on said seeds. Especially harmful for smallholdings farms.
- Like pesticides, pest-resistant GMOs become less effective at deterring pests over time due to natural selection.
licensing seeds which are then given away as a trial, then requiring farmers to either purchase the license again or destroy their entire crops. This is what at least one GMO corporation did in the wake of Haiti’s natural disaster.
We need to reframe the issue. Pretty much every “legitimate problem with GMOs” that one can think of is a problem with the corporations that create them and the cultural and legal environment those companies operate in. Patented gene sequences, artificially sterile seeds, GMO crops that take over other strains…those are all problems with the corporations that create them and the idea that doing those things is acceptable, not a problem with the GMOs themselves. We need to stop looking at this as a “GMO problem” and start looking at is as a systemic problem.
Yup! Because genetic modification can be done to increase crop yields, increase resistance to disease and drought, increase nutrition, etc. But it can also be used to fuck over farmers. And that last bit is what I have a problem with.
To be fair, the seed sterility was not done to fuck over farmers. It was meant to keep the plants from cross-pollinating with and adulterating wild-type or heirloom strains.
Genetic modification is a process. It’s a lot like drug development, where the end product can vary widely in application and risk. What we really need is a better process for testing the safety and efficacy of GM products, rather than attempting to legislate it as if all GM products are Bt-corn.
In the United States, the USDA, EPA and FDA can all have a role in vetting genetically modified products, but it’s a real mess that can take five years to wade through and I’m not sure anybody knows enough about the approval process to feel confident in trusting the results.
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