bwansen:

social-darwin-awards:

poorpoorpitifulme:

tygermama:

sightseeinginskyrim:

enkiduofvideogames:

zennistrad:

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.

^^^^^

Those “artificially sterile seeds” don’t exist and never have done. The technology is most probably feasible and companies did briefly look into it but decided not to go any further than the drawing board for the very reason that the realised it wouldn’t be something that people wanted. And even if they did produce such a crop, there’s absolutely no reason for farmers to buy them if they didn’t want to (leaving aside the fact that basically all farmers in developed nations buy new seeds each year whether they use GM or not). 

Resistance to pesticides definitely is a problem, but it’s a problem for all types of crop-based farming, not just GM or even conventional (ie using pesticides etc) farming- many insects are becoming resistant to Bt delta endotoxin, for example, the natural pesticide expressed in some strains of GM cotton, but this likely isn’t because of its use within that cotton but due to it being used for decades now as a natural pesticide by organic farmers. 

The natural selection problem is also a problem with antibiotics.

Oh, self-sterilizing plants exist, but these are not “terminator seeds” with any kind of genetic use restriction technology (GURT), these are simply hybrid plants (not all of these are sterile, but with those which aren’t, the resulting seeds are inferior to the original hybrid plants).
GMOs aren’t evil themselves, but the business practices of big companies selling them, the madness of patenting genes, this whole global capitalist system… that is the actual problem.

Once again, the real problem is capitalism