Elf Sternberg

A part of the problem is that all the different sorts of genetic engineering tweaks do different things. And some of those things are already happening in the wild.

There's a couple I know of in food plants. One makes the plant resistant to a herbicide called Glyphosate (sold by Monsanto under the name Round-Up). It's a mutation which occurs naturally, though it's fairly uncommon. Glyphosate is one of the safest herbicides around, and is joyfully eaten by soil bacteria.

Another, which is still going through trials, the last I heard, prompts the plant to produce corn with a much higher starch content. This makes it into a useful industrial crop, to produce alternatives to oil-dependent plastics. How about a replacement for those plastic packing pellets?

Neither of these add anything to what you eat, were you to eat food derived from the plant. And if that Glyphosate-resistance gene gets into the weeds you just use a different herbicide, as you had to do before the genetic engineering.

There are things which I wouldn't want to see in food crops, such as the gene which makes the plant produce its own insecticide. I'm not sure of the safety, but it does creep me out on some more visceral level.

And neither side on the GM Crops argument is being entirely honest. The Anti-GM movement seem totally ignorant of farming, and claim we'll suddenly have unkillable weeds. The people selling GM don't mention that Glyphosate is out of patent, but if you grow Monsanto seed you have to use Monsanto herbicide.

And the farmer is stuck in the middle, with both sides poking him with the shitty end of the stick.

I am very glad I am out of that business.


And the new genes make the plants less competitive in other environments. Stop using glyphosate, and the plants with the tolerance gene are at a disadvantage. Remember, we're not making new genes. There's a reason these genes aren't naturally in every plant.