Why not just make really big farms instead of using tractors? Or, perhaps, it gives people the choice of "Do I eat this plant, or do I eat that one?". Nobody is saying you cannot eat different things. Secondly, patents expire. Seven years in the future those crops will be available to everyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tomato Nope, nothing useful here. Just horrible companies making these horrible things that have taken 90 percent of the corn market, and are being voluntarily bought and used by everyone involved. Why, why must these companies give us what we want! As does our use of antibiotics. No silver bullets have ever existed, and pesticide resistant bugs have always been a problem. Secondly, it seems this is caused by misuse by farmers, rather than the crops: This isn't a problem with GMO, and it's not hurting our ability to use pesticides. The benefits were short lived. Weed species began evolving resistance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup Again, we see that this isn't a result of GMO, it's a result of overuse of a product. I agree that we should keep genetic diversity inside of crops. That does not mean abandoning GMO. In fact, it means embracing it even further with many types of pesticide resistance and pesticides going into use. In third world regions, where people do not have access to anything but local farms, GMO's can help people get more nutrition with the same resources they have now. It is true that dictators and corruption cause the large majority of hunger, but it doesn't mean that GMO's can't help where those things exist. Nothing to do with GMO crops. Again, seven years, those issues go away. (barring idiot patent laws and renewals.)
Secondly, people in third world nations aren't able to be touched by monsanto, where their government isn't really going to enforce the wills of a US company. The patent is not on the living organism, but on the specific, artificially created, gene/crop that creates that organism. Monsanto doesn't have a patent on corn, it has a patent on the type of corn that it spent money on creating. If it weren't for the ability to get those patents, those crops wouldn't exist in the first place, and you couldn't complain about them no longer being effective, or about having to pay royalties, because that crop wouldn't exist in the first place. If it isn't sustainable, then as it grows to a critical mass, farmers and researchers will find new and better ways of growing food. You can already see it in hydroponics, farm towers, and other technologies that people are thinking of. Nothing in human history has been sustainable. People were scared in the past of us running out of copper, running out of oil. In reality, we find these issues, and fix them as they come along, and have done so, and will continue to do so, without fail. People are a hell of a lot smarter, and a hell of a lot more adaptive than I think you are giving us credit for. We didn't move from farming by burning fields to farming through use of fertilizer by way of a change of thinking. We didn't move to having to no longer burn forests to have fertile land by way of thinking. Discovery of fertilizer, and learning to rotate crops did those things. The world is advancing to where we no longer need nature, and where we, as a species, will do away with it. As time passes we are finding new and interesting way to fuck things up, then fix them in a way that suits us. That is an amazing fact, and a great sign of things to come, not a negative one, IMO.I miss the usefulness of it. Why not eat vegetables and fruit which have naturally higher amount of anti-oxidants?
Useless crops like these are the strongest proof that biotech giants aim is to replace all already existing useful crops with their own patented version.
GM has yet to produce something new and useful.
This is creating new generations of "super weeds" and insects that are adapting and building resistance to toxins.
But Monsanto and other seed companies are unlikely to accommodate the farmers. According to Reuters, "seed companies say they warned Brazilian farmers to plant part of their corn fields with conventional seeds to prevent bugs from mutating and developing resistance to GMO seeds."
When Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” product line went on the market 17 years ago, it was supposed to reduce herbicide use. This convenient system of engineered seeds designed to work with the company’s Roundup herbicide enabled farmers to apply herbicides after crops were growing to kill weeds while leaving their crops unharmed. Farmers enthusiastically adopted these products as they saved time and made weed control easier. And initially, overall herbicide use declined.
The second link claims that GMOs will feed the world as if there isn't enough food to feed the world with regular crops. Hunger is a problem of logistics and political will, not lack of food.
The UN has concluded that small eco-farming is the way to feed the world.
The whole idea that poor farmers would be better off with a GM seed, which they must pay royalties for and can't save the seed of
Personally, I find the patenting and privatisation of living, self-replicating organisms troubling.
The agricultural environmental catastrophe started thousands of years ago with the mass burning of forests to plant annual crops. It was fine then but it's obvious now that modern intensive agriculture is not sustainable.
no amount of genetic manipulation will fix the core issue... the way of thinking.