flawed_human:

I’m not talking about money and control, I’m talking about the pure mechanics of crop yield. Like it or not, you can grow a whole lot more Monsanto corn or soybeans on an acre of land than you can Farmer Brown’s generations old family seed stock. And where are you going to find all that idyllic pastureland for your beef cattle?

We can cry all day long about how agribusiness and their fleet of lawyers are evil to the core, but that merely ignores the real debate whether GMOs, feeding more people using less land than ever before, are a good or bad thing.

GMO’s maybe here to stay in America where Corporate farming and corporate interests dominate, but that’s not the case in the rest of the world.

The corporate insanity of GMO’s has yet to make much headway in Europe. There have also been massive protests against Herbacide use in Argentina, and American beef in South Korea. 

The chief barriers to expansion of Organic farming are psychological, not monetary.

To the high cost of using petro chemicals to farm, and adding, only N, P, K to soils, must be added the high costs of health care issues for people whose food has practically no nutrional value.

To these costs must also be added the the costs of increase in cancer rates, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.

In addition there are also the costs of infertility, and probable tetrogenesis, of herbacides like Atrazine, and Glyphosate. 

Then there is also the cost of government subsidies that keep GMO’s, cheap compared to sustainable, organic agriculture.

It’s all well and good to come up with a “natural” or “organic” standard, but GMOs are here to stay. If we eliminate them, we’d have to at least quintuple the amount of land under the plow worldwide to maintain current food production levels. Because of GMOs there’s a lot less starvation in the world. “Natural” and “organic” food sources are a luxury unaffordable by poorer food consumers.

The Bio Tech industries will not be happy with this, neither will the FDA, USDA, EPA… because their job is to protect the profits of Agribusiness, not the consumer.

Recently, there was a switch to sugar produced with genetically altered sugar beets, so almost everyone comes in contact with GMO’s in their diet.

Since no one knows, for sure what the effects of exposure to GMO’s does anyway, the food companies and revolving door government regulatory agencies, are playing Russian Roulette with people’s health, for the sake of profit.

No one can be sure, of what protiens they are getting when the eat GMO’s, nor do scientists understand the role of protein folding in diseases, like NVCJD.

The topography of DNA, is not very well understood, thus inserting new DNA into an existing DNA molecule may create unstable forms,that have the potential to cause prion like disease in humans.

It may well be that Mad Cow diesease was caused by genetic engineering of Cattle, rather than exposure to rendered beef.

Another example of GMO’s in food is the insertion of human DNA, in pork to make it leaner, what role this plays in the ease with which Swine Flu passes into humans, is beyond the capacity of our health organizations to assess.

If the federal government has to be expanded it should be with the FDA, USDA, EPA, OSHA, SEC and other regulatory functions, cut back the military.