Gm Crops Quotes

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.

And in those same years, the farmers in the developing world would come to be encouraged to use the patented descendants of the seeds their ancestors had once freely shared. And once they did that, once they bought the new seed and stopped saving seed as they had for centuries, they not only lost the old varieties but they were trapped in a system that indentured them to the seed companies. And if they resisted buying the new seeds, even if they resisted because they were not convinced about the safety of the new seeds, they were told they were causing starvation in their countries. And if they thought to demand royalties for the germplasm their ancestors once had given freely, they were called greedy.

. The Truth: In this case the negative effects completely outweigh the positive. Sure, GM crops may be “no-till,” but we have effectively increased the amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment while simultaneously creating a new breed of “superweed” that is resistant to “safe” herbicide. Myth 7: Monsanto's glyphosate, known as Roundup, is a nonthreatening, biodegradable herbicide. The Truth: Roundup was forced to remove the term biodegradable from its packaging.  Roundup persists in the environment and has toxic effects on wildlife. During crop growing season, the toxin known as Roundup was found in 60-100% of air and rain samples taken from the Midwest. Yuck. Myth 8: GM and Non-GM crops have

The number of genetic engineers currently working on DT traits continues to grow, but given the high regulatory costs of bringing any entirely new GM crop to the market, the first commercialized version of an engineered DT crop will almost certainly come from one of the three big biotechnology companies now in pursuit of this objective in the United States: Syngenta, DuPont/Pioneer, and Monsanto.

An important early test of donor interest in sponsoring a GM DT crop project for Africa was provided in 2004-05, when Monsanto took the initiative and offered to share its newly discovered DT traits for humanitarian purposes.

Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood) rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical.

it is now pretty well impossible to avoid GM foods because GM crops have cross-pollinated with traditional crops.