[Vision2020] Avoiding Frankenfoods? Shop in Moscow.

[Andreas Schou]

On 6/25/07, Mark Solomon <msolomon at moscow.com> wrote:
> Andreas,
>
> What I'm objecting to is the absolute lack of a meaningful public
> forum for discussing these private products before they are released
> into the environment. Unintended consequences and all that. The cold
> reality is that most, if not all, the GE that is occurring is being
> driven by a profit motive not a public interest incentive. I don't
> trust the stock market to look after anything but itself. Between
> Roundup Ready Corn, Roundup Ready Soybeans, Roundup Ready Cotton and
> Roundup Ready Alfalfa the large majority of the entire country's ag
> land is now a super-weed production experiment.

The problem, though, is that we -- and by "we", I mean the entire
human species -- have backed ourselves into a corner, post Green
Revolution, where the entire human population is too large to
sustainably feed. That is: traditional forms of agriculture, including
the best forms of organic agriculture, don't have high enough yields
to feed the nearby people in several places in the world.

Though I think the human population should likely be smaller than it
currently is, I obviously don't support starvation as a means to that
end. To a certain extent, the only way out of the bind industrial (and
post-industrial) society has put us in is through, which is to say:
out the other side. Chemical agriculture is substantially more
unsustainable -- and has substantially more wide-ranging effects --
than all but the most wild-eyed doomsday scenarios associated with
genetic modification of food crops.

The attention being paid to GM crops due to unknown dangers is truly
disproportionate, given the *known* dangers of producing crops using
chemical-intensive agriculture*.

-- ACS

* Of course, it goes without saying that I think it's entirely
ass-backward to support genetic engineering of strains that only
facilitate chemical-intensive agriculture.