We Can Work It Out - Politics & Philosophy | Page 59 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I am totally against GMOs, as well many other US farming practices (such as washing chickens in chlorine after slaughter to rid them of germs and bacteria that wouldn’t be present if higher welfare standards were in place, or pumping beef cattle full of growth hormones so they put on weight faster).

One of my big problems with GMOs when it comes to plants is that, because of the control of the companies involved, it defeats the system of “seed saving” that has sustained farming and farmers throughout the centuries, making farmers completely reliant on the big businesses that own the copyright on their seeds.

Seed saving means that a farmer keeps a proportion of seeds from his current crop to give them the seeds for their next crop which makes it self-sustaining. Most GMO crops include in their modification an alteration which makes the seeds infertile, meaning the farmer has to buy new seeds for every crop, alongside putting in conditions that the farmer must buy pesticides etc. from that same company.

There is also the practice of many GMO companies who, when seeds blow across onto a neighbouring property during the process of sowing, and those seeds start to grow, sue the neighbouring property for copyright infringement.

GMOs, for all the hype, are not about creating better yields but, instead, creating client farmers who have to keep coming back to the company and spending money for their next crop.

And then there are the possible health implications which we have no idea about yet. It’s easy to say they’re safe and have been judged so by many experts, however it took decades for it to be discovered that the feed we were giving cattle resulted in BSE and that a human form of the disease, vCJD, was being transferred to humans through the meat.

I don’t want a few big multinationals controlling the food chain, nor the risk that decades down the line we discover they’re harmful to human health.

GMOs would be dead as a technology the moment Governments did that, @Dark Overlord. Why would companies spend billions on creating seeds that a farmer need buy only once? They only make economic sense if the farmer has to return year after year after year to buy more seeds.

While studies show some decrease in use of pesticides and weedkillers (varying between 8 and 37%), @Beatlebug, we know from our use of antibiotics that things evolve to get around the defences. Antibiotics have led superbugs which are increasingly resistant to them, and in some instances there’s virtually no antibiotics left that work. GMOs could cause the same effect in the plant and insect kingdom.

Companies would not have written into their contracts that you need to use their pesticides if GMOs eliminated their use.

As to large portions of the world not being able to afford non-GMO crops, most farmers in poorer countries cannot afford the prices charged for GMO seeds on an annual basis which means countries becoming dependant on GMO crops being imported from the wealthier parts of the world which allow them.