Debate: GMO Spells NO?

[Simon Brown]

Do you support GM food? Should they be banned? What is your view on terminator technolagy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_controversies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Technology

[MattBlackLamb]

No, I don't support it. There are some quite obvious flaws with GMO crops, the most obvious one is where the farmer plants one type of crop one year (wheat for instance) & the next year he plants something else (cotton maybe). What happens is that you'll never get all the wheat grains & some of them seed when the ground is ploughed for the next years crop. When they spray the fields with weedkiller the old wheat crop still grows because it's been enhanced to withstand the stuff they're spraying. It's not a perfect system, it certainly isn't if you want to rotate crops because of the afore-mentioned problem.

Organic is the way to go, it worked for hundreds of years & I still will work now.

Messing with nature is asking for trouble if you ask me, sure forwarding science is a good thing but I'd prefer it if they were looking for something like a cure for cancer rather than a way to play god.

[Bobofthedead]

The thing is, GM food will succeed whether the rich West likes it or not. The fact that GM crops can be engineered to give a higher yield, or need less water, or be resistant to diseases will ensure their success in areas where food is needed, and its highly likely that people there will just be thankful for the food, rather than pick apart whether or not it takes advantage of new technology, or relies on methods dating back to the dawn of civilization.

Myself, I think that it will be the way to go when the west works out that they will need food that can grow with more or less water in harsher conditions in the globally-warmed future.

[MattBlackLamb]

The problem with GM crops is that you can't rotate them. Any particular sort of crop requires particular nutrients from the ground & if you can't plant a different crop on a bit of ground because it'll be full of the crop that was there last year then eventually the ground will become devoid of all nutrients that that plant uses.

So for maybe 10 years crops could be grown somewhere, but my guess is that that is the absolute maximum.

[Simon Brown]

The thing is, GM food will succeed whether the rich West likes it or not. The fact that GM crops can be engineered to give a higher yield, or need less water, or be resistant to diseases will ensure their success in areas where food is needed, and its highly likely that people there will just be thankful for the food, rather than pick apart whether or not it takes advantage of new technology, or relies on methods dating back to the dawn of civilization.

Myself, I think that it will be the way to go when the west works out that they will need food that can grow with more or less water in harsher conditions in the globally-warmed future.

Soon science will advance and there will be all kinds of pysoctropic drugs on the market - the more science is linked with sanitation the more easily the government will be able to control you.

Paranoid but likley.