Tuesday, February 16, 2010

GM Eggplant in India?

GM Crops are a bit of a grey area. Clearly we already have alot of GM cotton and corn being grown around the world, and nothing harsh has evidently popped up healthwise... and scientists generally seem to say they're OK, if not for the lack of long-term testing.
I'm concerned about them not so much from the health perspective (even though they could feasibly cause something nasty down the road, we don't know) but from the social perspective. For example, Monsanto puts a patent on GM corn crops, so you can't re-seed and you have to buy the seeds from them. Some small farmer growing a variety of boutique or organic corn that makes outstanding gritz has seeds from GMO corn blow in from the huge industrial farm next door -- Monsanto inevitably catches wind of their crop in his field, and sues him out of business. In the eyes of the huge corporate law machine, a team of greedy lawyers can easily convince a court that this is theft of intellectual property, and before you know it his farm is foreclosed. I bet you Monsanto, or somebody growing GM corn for Monsanto buys it up. Another one bites the dust.
I can hear my brother saying "who cares, let the more profitable system prevail." I'd say fair enough if this system wasn't rigged for corporations, Kelso, but consider this: Remember that little potato blight in Ireland that killed everybody? That was precipitated by a potato monoculture - they only grew one kind of lumper, so all it took to wipe out the whole country's crops was one strain of lumper-loving fungus. If we cover our continent coast to coast in one strain of Monsanto-owned GM corn, designed to protect against one strain of annoying insect, the chances are greatly increased that one flaw in its genetic code can lead to the collapse of our entire food system. Furthermore, that one strain of annoying insect develops resistance to the toxins in a GM product over 3 times faster than it does to chemical spray, because of constant exposure, so Monsanto will have to develop new organisms at an increasingly rapid rate. Not only does that make farmers increasingly reliant upon this one company (increasingly undermining the free market by supporting a monopoly of our food system) but it makes the science of GMOs increasingly specious. Sure, right now all of our GM foods have only one more gene introduced, and scientists are mostly OK with that... but what about 10 years from now when we've had to introduce a dozen new genes to keep up with how much smarter nature is than we are? Suddenly, we've engineered whole genomes, and quite honestly, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. I think we should just nip this in the bud now and buy preferably organic produce from preferably small, local producers, so that when the shit hits the fan in the GMO monocultures, at least the Fraser Valley has a strong system of local biodiversity.

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