Back to cross-pollination. If you have to keep a buffer zone to your neighbors, there has to a certain danger of cross-pollination. Or is this just an issue of fertilizers getting on your ground? I’m still not sure.
So, sandythecurhere I found something from Switzerland:
In july 2000 the swiss department of agriculture allowed 0.5% GM-contamination in seeds. Previously fields that were found to have any GM crops had to be destroyed.
Now here is the clue: "Most probably a gen-transfer occured from GM-fileds to the seedculturing fileds in the US from where the seeds were imported."
Maybe we should wait until all the studies are in before we end up contaminating the entire planet:
GM crops fail key trials amid environment fear
Two of the three GM crops grown experimentally in Britain, oil seed rape and sugar beet, appear more harmful to the environment than conventional crops and should not be grown in the UK, scientists are expected to tell the government next week.
The Guardian has learned that the scientists will conclude that growing these crops is damaging to plant and insect life.
The issue is much less the safety of the genetically modified plant itself, than the effect of growing that plant in quantity to its environment.
Some folks would greatly benefit from GM labelling because they suffer from allergies and would like to know if the food they are consuming has genetic material that might otherwise be unexpected. These folks (those with life-threatening allergies) may be a minority, but I don’t see why their concerns are invalid.
A concern for the rest of us is cross-pollination. Sure, the GM corn you plant today may need fewer pesticides than other corn grown “conventionally.” But what happens when the weeds surrounding your farm acquire that same pesticide resistance? It does happen. And it’s not going to be pretty when Round-Up becomes useless.
I must also challenge the assumption that organic growing methods are useless in “today’s world.”
The conventional farm, with its routine use of pesticides, is a very recent thing. My belief is that the “savings” are false and misunderstood. When you compare the potentially improved crop with the expense of the pesticides themselves plus the future depletion of soil, you end up with a false positive. Yes, the first year might look good. But 5 years later, when your soil is dead and dependant on both pesticides and artificial supplements (neither of which are cheap,) what have you truly gained?
akrako1, quite an interesting article. And it seems the same is true for the UK as for Switzerland as I reported above. But GM companies are powerfull, so the last word is not spoken.
OOC, how are genetically modified foods defined? As I only half-faceiously pointed out, people modify the genetic code of things by cross-breeding for certain strains all the time. Can a case not be made that there has been as much meddling with the DNA of corn to make it mass-producable as that tobacco plant with the firefly genes?
As akrako1s link points out, the question is not so much labeling - after all if ‘organic’ farmers feel their stuff is better, they can always label it as ‘non-GM’.
The question is rather: Are GM-crops a possible danger to the environment?
