GMO’s, just like your local politician
There’s a sadly funny joke out there that aptly describes politicians. ‘It’s too bad it’s the 90% that give the other 10% a bad name.’ While this article talks about the positives of a small proportion of GMO’s, the vast majority do nothing but promote the seed/pesticide company’s bottom-lines.
In fact, a better title might have been “GMOs might be the future of food, but not in the hands of Monsanto.” Papaya is a great case study for what GMOs could be, but it isn’t a good example of what they actually are, most of the time. Transgenic papaya was developed by the University of Hawaii, not Monsanto, and was never designed to be used with herbicides or pesticides. Unlike 90% of GMOs in use today which are patented seeds designed to create a monopoly and to get farmers to buy more chemicals.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the data on GMO’s grown in America and I’ve gotta say, it ranges from ‘not good’ to ‘unremarkable.’ Frankly, even their promise of yields and reduced pesticides are unremarkable. Talk to your average farmer in Iowa growing GM crops and they’ll tell you that they are ambivalent to GMO’s. They’ll grow them if people want them. They won’t if people don’t. They’re business people, just like any other entrepreneur out there.
And they’re not alone in thinking that. The USDA report on the first 15 years of GMOs in the USA released last year summarizes 40 studies of the yields and returns from planting GMO crops compared to standard ones. Less than half of the studies showed any increase in returns and some even showed decreases.
What the data did unequivocally show is that the real, inflation-adjusted price farmers must pay for these seeds has gone up by 50% since 2001. Funny that.
And what about reducing our reliance on toxic chemicals? Until the lobbying efforts of Monsanto and other seed companies convinced the USDA to stop tracking pesticide use in America in 2008, here’s what GMO’s did for our crops:
Total lbs of herbicide for:
- Corn went down from 2.64lbs/acre in 1996 to 2.29lbs/acre in 2008. Boring.
- Cotton went from 2.09lbs/acre in 1996 to 2.37lbs/acre in 2008. Huh? Went up?
- Soybeans increased a lot from 1.19lbs/acre in 1996 to 2.28lbs/acre in 2008. Whaa? doubled?
source:
GMO’s do better on reduced insecticide, but in corn they do it by putting a naturally occurring pesticide into the corn itself. A pretty messed up solution when we’re putting that food into our bodies.
So we have questionable increases in yields, a slight reduction in herbicide use for corn, and huge increases for the other two major crops? And this is the success story? Actually it is, for the seed companies, as they’ve somehow managed to turn this fiasco into an excuse to jack-up prices and decrease regulation.
And, perhaps you skipped over the paragraph about the USDA no longer tracking pesticide use… are you friggin’ kidding me? We’re in the middle of a huge debate that impacts everyone in this country, and generations to come, and the government isn’t measuring this? Possibly a clue that the evidence for GMO’s is not strong enough to stand-up to scrutiny without these kind of dirty lobbying tactics.
Regardless, if I was in charge of Monsanto, this is not exactly Change the World stuff. Certainly not Feeding the World stuff. 40% of corn GMO’s went to Ethanol production. An idiotic business and technology for everyone except the seed seller. The real question is ‘Who Cares?’ Why does this writer and the GMO lobby want to push it so hard? It’s certainly not for organic production.
Tomorrow’s Table, the book referred to in the article, came out in 2008. I read it and got excited to see if GMO’s would lead to less pesticide use and more nutritious food. Nope. No evidence. Just more feed for factory animal farms and high calorie, low nutrient food for Americans. Did it reduce pesticide use? Oh yeah, we’ll never know because the USDA says we’re not allowed to track that anymore.
And this is the rub, the industrial food system, of which GMO’s are a core part, is basically a giant, awful, obesity machine in America. Not feeding the world. Making the world fat and starving at the same time with cheap, processed food.
No one wants GMO but the seed and pesticide companies. The author is right to say that better biology is at the heart of organic farming. But the industrial food companies aren’t interested in better biology. They are interested in selling more seeds and pesticide. Period.
So, ignoring the ideology of one side or the other, here are the facts for the 99.99999% of GMO’s in production in America:
- Pesticide use has remained about the same
- Yields have remained about the same
Until there are actual examples in America that are doing good for the consumer, the farmer, the community and the planet, talk to the hand because the face ain’t listening. Yes, its possible that 0.00001% of GMO’s have been to good use but that makes your local politician look pretty good.
