Cav's Place

A couple of days ago, the Greens’ Movement from here posted a link to an article about the Romanian government desiring to allow a large number of genetically modified crops to be grown in the country. Basically, they seem willing to allow everything that’s not for some reason banned by the European Union, supposedly in an attempt to make Romania’s agricultural sector once again competitive on the common market. Which, of course, didn’t surprise me, but did remind me that I should write something about this issue. Just know that I’ll sort of rush this post, so don’t expect links or too many details…

Let’s start with that economic perspective that is usually the main point anyone trying to support GMOs makes. They say that, since GMOs either directly resist pests and diseases, withstand the use of products that kill said pests, or both, the yields are much higher and therefore so are the farmers’ profits. Which seems quite true at first, until you sit and think about it for a moment.
For one, those yields tend to drop off after a while. Such intensive farming depletes the soil really fast, making it unsuitable for constant large yields, not to mention that those diseases and pests tend to evolve as well and possibly end up beating the GMOs’ resistance after some years. But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that a farmer using commercial GMOs is basically handing over control of their life to certain companies, and particularly to Monsanto. That means they’ll have to stick to the contract signed with said company, that they’re liable for lawsuits that they can do little to nothing about if for some reason said company feels like making an example out of someone, and, most importantly, that they’ll need to buy seeds from that company every single year. And, incidentally, that company will remain in a position to set the price for those seeds, as well as all the other products farmers need, as it sees fit, but high crop yields for GMOs imply a large supply of a product that many people try to avoid anyway, which results in lower income per unit for the farmer who still has to pay just as much per unit to use the company’s products. Therefore, while the total production may look like an increase in competitiveness overall and could likely also benefit the very large farms, the situation is certainly not lucrative for the average farmer, not to mention the average farm worker.

And we reached the issue of people. Another point those who support GMOs tend to make is that many people are starving even now and the population is set to increase further, so GMOs are the only way to ensure the yields required to feed everybody. Which is where I have to agree with them, as I don’t believe there could possibly be any healthy and environmentally-friendly methods of supplying even half of the current population with what they’d need to live decent lives. But that only means that the problem is the population, which is the main roadblock on the path to solving pretty much any major problem the world is currently facing anyway. As a result, anything meant to support a growing population instead of gradually reducing it in a rational and ethical manner is in fact extremely harmful, which means that this argument blows up right in the faces of those who support it.
Then again, considering the potential negative effects GMOs may have on people’s health, using them may actually be a method of reducing population, but in a very unethical manner. Whether that is in fact anyone’s intent or not is besides the point, what matters is that it may happen. And don’t bother pointing out the fact that every single one of them is only allowed to be used after passing supposedly rigurous tests, because the trustworthiness any laboratory or researcher who deems such products safe for human consumption has in my eyes is slim to none, seeing as they usually are paid, directly or indirectly, legally or illegally, just by these companies that have every interest to have all of their products on the market as soon as possible. Besides, it would be utterly impossible to properly approve such a product for human consumption right now because, when it comes to food, such tests can only be truly valid if done on a representative sample of the human population and covering decades of regular consumption. Which, incidentally, means that they are being done right now, but that the test subjects didn’t sign up for them…

And then you have the environmental impact, which should be the most important issue to consider and which is being completely ignored by GMO advocates because there’s nothing they can say on this topic that would put them in a good light. Quite simply, plants have evolved the way they have over millions of years for certain reasons, but that all changes, with potentially devastating consequences, as soon as GMOs end up pollinating them or spreading among them, which is unavoidable if any GMOs are allowed to be cultivated in the open. And don’t say that farmers have been genetically modifying crops ever since the advent of agriculture, because all those who carefully select the best seeds and mix the best types usually do is give evolution a helping hand, improving and strengthening the plants in question without altering their makeup in any potentially dangerous way, as the current methods of genetic modification do.
From this point of view, GMOs should only be cultivated and stored in perfectly sealed places and every person who enters such an area should be scanned very thoroughly before exiting to ensure that not even one seed or one grain of pollen is left on them when they go back out. Anything but that makes no sense whatsoever from an environmental perspective. And, incidentally, doing it like that could ensure a proper testing environment, which is required if any such crops are to ever be properly verified and, after the decades mentioned above, if by some odd chance one or two of them would actually happen to truly be fit to be released into the world, eventually approved.

In all, I can only hope that the approval of any GMOs will be delayed for the decades necessary for proper testing and that by then enough of us will have woken up for this perceived need of them to no longer exist, those who would still support them being immediately seen for what they really are. And what they are is either extremely selfish people fueled only by greed who would directly benefit from these approvals and don’t care about any other potential effects in the least or poor dumb people brainwashed by the ones I just mentioned into believing their fallacious arguments.