GM wheat crops in Australia, Greenpeace takes action

[Tsyal Makto]

Originally Posted by Banefull

The emergence of superweeds is inevitable regardless of GMO use or not. The main cause of superweeds today is heavy use of herbicide which GMO crops have the potential to curtail. Although GMOs may be a directly responsible for the creation a few superweeds themselves, in the long term will slow down the creation of superweeds in the long run. Also, genetic engineering icnreasing the flexibility of farmers to employ crop rotation techniques which are a very effective means of controlling superweeds. Additionally, increasing amounts of GMOs are produced to be sterile so that they cannot breed or produce offspring thereby eliminating any risk of cross-breeding.

GM crops really don't decrease the amount of herbicide used, all they do is make the crops resistant to ever-more volatile forms of herbicide. In conventional and GM farming, herbicide will always be used to keep weeds at bay in non-rotating farms. If they somehow develop a GM plant that can kill weeds, then that opens up a whole new can of worms if it gets loose.

In organic farming, crop rotation is already an elemental practice, so GM crops really don't have any advantage in that area.

Yes, the terminator technology in the end results in sterile seeds, but that only keeps the seeds from germinating. The terminator trait is usually activated late in seed development, meaning that the plants still produce pollen that can be cross-bred with wild plants. And for the terminator gene to activate requires chemical triggers, which will only increase the farmer's dependence on Big Ag corps.

And really, seed sterility isn't a form of environmental protection, it is only a way to prevent farmers from saving seeds. It's not the environment that is in mind, it is copyrights and profits.

I find that to be a rather arbitrary distinction and purely based on semantics. Both methods feature the introduction of new traits. What makes genes arising from the same plant species any better?

Because those are traits that will have emerged from the plant naturally on it's evolutionary path. It's accelerated natural selection, not the introduction of alien traits that would take the plant on an entirely different evolutionary path.

In the time that the US has been planting GMOs, there has never been a single death, complication, or allergy attributed to GMOs.

Only because no one has been actively studying it. GM foods are not labelled, so any ill effects caused by them would not be determinable, because they are simply integrated into the rest of the food supply. There was only ever one study on the effects of GM food on humans, and YES, it did find negative effects. The problem was that the study was never followed up on.

GM Health Risks

Also we must consider the quantifiable economic benefits of GMOs



Link to study: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

Read some of the links I posted previously. Organics can produce better yields than GM, and even conventional, and are more profitable than conventional and GM.

Bigger yields - Genetically modified crops - Organic Yields Are Better Than Conventional, Including GM Crops
Bigger profits - Report shows organic better than GM - The Ecologist

GM crops not needed to feed the world

If organics have the potential to provide what the world needs, why continue to risk security of the food system with GM?

Not all farmers are opposed to Monsanto either. For example, in 2009, in the United States, the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG) poll of 7000 of its members found that 76% supported a petition for Monsanto to resume and continue its development of GMO wheat/

Firstly, I'm a little weary anytime I hear the findings of PACs (Monsanto has already lied in the scientific field, I doubt it faires much better in the political field), and secondly, even if it is true, these farmers are probably going to end up the same way the soybean farmers ended up, as in the end of the farmer's soveirgn control over their farms. They'll probably end up changing their tunes in the end. FOOD INC gives a pretty good look at what being a Monsanto farmer is really like. It looks good now, but reality will set in when the Monsanto boot-thugs come knocking on the door.

(I'll respond to the video later, still watching it)

"The World According to Monsanto" is a good watch, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvGddgHRQyg

I'm also looking into a movie called "Fresh." Haven't seen it yet, I'll post it if it's any good.