Comments abbdrb has made

Thanks once again for looking at both sides

Count me among the people who don't trust ADM and Monsanto to decide what goes on my dinner table. We are losing diversity in what we can find in the grocery store, and farmers are losing their choice of what to plant. Organic farmers are stuck with the threat of pollen drift from non-organic farms, and lawsuits if GMOs show up in their crops even though they didn't want them in the first place.

If you take a US-centric view [I will bow out of the GMOs-can-feed-all-the-hungry-people-in-the-world argument, admitting that I do not know whether they are truly helping to feed the world, or keeping the world from feeding itself] our farms do not lack for productivity. This actually may be one of the reasons farmers are so "poor": food is so plentiful that it drives the price down. I must point out that I found lots of literature on the Web that refutes the assumption that the American farmer is "poor," and even goes so far as to say farmers average a somewhat higher annual income than most people. I have not researched those sources thoroughly so I can't pass judgement either way, and my own exposure to farming came from living in Southern Illinois as a kid: the farmers weren't rich, but hardly anybody else was, either. So using GMOs to increase yield, at least on American farms, is not an argument I'd buy, either.

I do thank you for pointing out that there are different types of GMOs, and that is a point definitely worth studying. I personally feel there is a difference between speeding up hybridization that maybe could have been accomplished "naturally" through cross-breeding over many years, and making pesticides or herbicides part of the plant itself.

Probably the biggest problem I have with GMOs though is the lack of labeling. If they are so wonderful, why won't they tell me which foods have them so I can make up my own mind? The public has a right to be suspicious since as a rule, if a large corporation is trying to force something on a market that doesn't want it (or they won't even give the market a chance to see if they want it), they usually don't have the consumer's best interest in mind.On GMOs have their upsides and downsides; a little balance is in order. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 10 Responses