New West Blog
Five Experts On Genetically Modified Crops: Why All the Opposition?
By Courtney Lowery, 6-23-09
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SEED magazine calls it a “scientific flip-flop.” Why?, writer Maywa Montenegro asks, do environmentalists champion science when it comes to issues like climate change buy decry it when it comes to genetically modified crops?
“Is the fear really about the technology itself or is it a mistrust of big agribusiness?”
Montenegro’s question sets up a fascinating collection of essays by five experts that is aimed at getting to the root of the cacophony over GM.
Included in the collection is an interesting piece by Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, and also the wife of an organic farmer. She writes:
“My overwhelming sense is that public skepticism about GM crops, and the foods derived from them, is not about the science—it is about US corporations. Some consumers have not forgotten that Monsanto was a producer of Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War. Others worry that corporations will control the global seed supply.”
The collection also includes some thoughts from my personal favorite new food and ag writer, Tom Philpott, of Grist, who writes:
“Ultimately, scientific responses to the advent of climate change and the rise of GMOs make a poor comparison. The consensus around climate change developed in spite of a multi-decade campaign by some of the globe’s most powerful and lucrative industries—the petroleum and coal giants—to protect markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The consensus around GMOs—or at least the specter of one—arose through the lobbying and support of an industry desperate to protect its own multibillion-dollar investments. I predict this bought-and-paid-for consensus will prove short-lived.”
All of the essays are worth a read and when they come together, they make for a fascinating back-and-forth. Click here for the whole thing.
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Comments
There has been a massive and overwhelming PR and political/economic/academic campaign to suppress the research showing that GMO's pose a threat to the environment (not to mention health and agricultural economics) exceeded only by the threat of nuclear winter. Climate change is a distant third to these two issues.
Countless scientists, research programs, public policy initiatives, and other opponents of GMO's have lost their funding, been fired, sued, or otherwise shut down - mainly by Monsanto, although Dow and other companies have also been involved in this (Dow made Napalm, not Monsanto - but Monsanto was largely responsible for "agent orange" and its successors like Roundup.
The costs to American and global agriculture of "Roundup-ready" seeds is in the hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars, and the death and disease count will be comparable to the Vietnam or Korean wars. We saw what happened in the last legislature when a simple bill to protect the PROPERTY RIGHTS of farmers was ruthlessly and irrationally defeated by the heavy handed Monsanto lobby. Wake up people! This is our food supply!
It took nearly 20 years to ban RBGH milk! The costs of that, alone, will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands dying of breast and colon cancer, etc. It's still legal, most places, but Monsanto spun it off to avoid the liabilities. They also produce most of the anti-biotics which have created superbugs and poisoned the confined meat supply.
New West should be reporting all this stuff, instead of marveling at the "anti-science" stance of food safety people.