GMOs: Fantastic Boon or Frankenfood?

Are Genetically Modified Organisms really the bugbear people think they are? Or do they have the potential to end world hunger and improve the quality of life for all our planet's billions?

I was against GMOs at one time. The argument that it's unnatural to splice frog DNA into wheat was used on me at one time when I was more innocent and I fell for it. But no longer.

World hunger is a real problem. There isn't enough to eat in many parts of the world because of drought or other poor growing conditions.

We have been creating GMOs since we started farming, though heretofore it was done slowly through selective breeding. Now we have the technology to speed up the work of hundreds, if not thousands of years, and people are screaming "burn the witch" as if it's the biggest threat to mankind since ebola.

If the bees are dying and there will be no more pollinators for specific plants, doesn't it make sense to engineer plants that don't need the bees? Or should we just let the bees die and then feast upon one another?

I'd welcome a lively debate on this subject.

[edit on 12-5-2007 by MajorMalfunction]

I agree that our digestive system manages to break down most of the various genes in our food into simple standard compounds before we absorb the nutrients. A few areas that trouble me are:

Large bioengineering corporations making seeds that grow very well, but the second generation goes to hell. That way, they give the third world farmers the fancy seeds, the farmers use them instead of saving some seeds from their original crops. Then, when they try to plant the next generation they are screwed and have to start buying seeds. A similar case was where Indian farmers used the seeds from their crops and were sued by the company for using seeds that contained their patented genetics. The court told them they had to buy seeds all the time and couldn't just put aside some of their crop for planting the next year.

Because of a minor problem with weeds in cotton fields, the cotton was bioengineered with a herbicide resistant gene. Then the sprayed the fields and all the weeds died but the cotton stayed healthy. However, because plants occasionally take genes from pollen of other species, in a few generations, all the weeds were also resistant to the herbicide. And this drove the food crop farmers crazy because they couldn't even kill the weeds prior to planting their crops.

I think genetic engineering has great potential, but corporations are often in too much of a hurry to make a profit so they don't watch out for unintended consequences.

Occam

Oh, so very true. The corporate robber barons always have to let their greed get in the way of doing the right thing.

So for you the objections are more about planned obsolescence and careless planning than the actual engineering of new strains of food cultivars.

I just don't know how these big multi-national corporations can be sufficiently and efficiently regulated to prevent such nonsense.

How anyone can extortionately profit from starving people is beyond me.