ONE DAY UNTIL THE END.
OK, now that this is out of the way, let’s spend what some nut thinks is our last day on earth talking about 9 stupid arguments against genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Excerpt:
When discussing and writing about GMOs, many arguments are put forth on why they are “bad” and should be avoided. However, many of these are not about GMOs, but rather, are issues that we’re facing in modern agriculture and in our economy. In this post, I examine nine common reasons I’ve encountered for opposing GMOs that are much broader in scope.
Transgenesis, or the method used to make most GMOs, is a tool and it makes no sense to oppose a method with broad applications. It’s like opposing electronics as a category because you don’t like Microsoft or because Apple dominates the portable music electronics business. In fact in the comments section of an article just written in the NY Times about GMOs, you’ll see the reasons below being listed time and time again.
Here are a couple of my particula
r favorites, with my comments:
5) GMOs are being made by Big Ag to line their pockets. Unless your problem is with making money in general, then this doesn’t make much sense. Of course agribusinesses want to make money. Why would any corporate enterprise embark on a project where they think they’d lose money?
The proper response to this is “duh.” Of course corporations exist to return profits to their shareholders; every corporation, everywhere, since the 16th century has existed to do that. But it’s a fundamental law of the universe that whenever someone starts of an argument with a catch-phrase like “Big Ag,” or “Big Oil,” or “Big Anything,” that you can safely disregard anything else that they say.
2) GMOs promote a monopoly. Every time I see this, I think that someone over at Dow Agro is cackling. I work in a field in biotech where a single company has between 70-80 percent of the market. Google web searches are used almost 70 percent of the time. Android has 80 percent of the market in operating systems for smartphones. But strangely enough, I’ve never seen a “March against Google”.
Anti-GMO’ers using this argument, as the author points out, almost seem to revel in their own hypocrisy. It’s as deliciously stupid as the would-be “anarchists,” none of whom would survive ten minutes in a real anarchy, railing about “corporations” and “capitalism” via social media 
posts on their iPhones and sipping a latte from Starbucks, all the products of the world’s most successful capitalist culture.
Here’s the troublesome fact: Every modern crop planted and raised for human use has been genetically modified. Corn was bred from a Central American grass called teosinte. Potatoes were first raised up from a humble tuber in Peru. Every human crop has been genetically modified – by selective breeding, by hybridization, and more recently, by direct genetic modification.
So why should we cease agricultural innovation now, in response to the bleatings of the ignorant?
GMOs have the potential to feed the world. Drought- and pest-resistant crops, crops with enhanced yields per acre, crops that can grow in poor soils – the Third World clamors for such advances.
It’s ridiculous that science-illiterates in the developed world would deny them those advances due to idiotic arguments like the ones presented in this article.
