Page Last Updated: 2 November 2013
“A nation that destroys its soils, destroys itself.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
We often here of the great things that genetically modified foods have done for mankind, often touting “successes” such as the Green Revolution in India. But, these hybrid species of plants and animals are not as successful as big businesses would have us believe. In fact, equal success, if not greater success, could be found in organic farming. Maybe it’s our desire to use advanced technology that drives GMO or perhaps it is our desire to stay away from methods that are deemed “primitive.” I believe that there is a great deal that we can learn from the human past: forgotten methods, forgotten wisdom. We can learn much from people in other civilizations. The modern euro-American is not the end-all-be-all of humanity. We are not the pinnacle of evolution, standing alone at the top of great evolutionary tree or evolutionary ladder. Other peoples, past or present, are just as capable of thinking up solutions to problems and might even be able to come up with better solutions. I believe it was Benh Zeitlin, director of critically acclaimed and Oscar nominated film Beasts of the Southern Wild, that said having a low-budget forces you to be creative. Similarly, peoples that do not have the “advantage” of advanced technology are forced to come up with creative solutions, and usually solutions that have fewer side-effects, solutions that are crowd-sourced, rather than fiercely guarded by big businesses as GMO crops usually are (one example: DuPont Releases Seed Police).
Pushing all ethical quandaries about GMO usage aside, GMO crops are bad for biodiversity as all crops that are genetically modified are essentially clones of each other, making them much more susceptible to pests and disease. A disease could sweep through and destroy an entire crop. This might not be as hard felt in industrialized countries, but in developing countries, there is not so much room for crop failure. A single disease coming through and destroyed an entire crop would be devastating causing loss of livelihood and widespread famine.
Information of Note:
- GM technology is different from traditional cross-breeding by agriculturalists in three respects: genetic change is specific, planned, and deliberately sought, and there is an immediate, direct insertion of genes as opposed to multiple generations of breeding; the introduced genes can come from any species of plant, animal or microbe, transcending the natural barrios between related species; the technology requires the use of marker genes to confirm the successful insertion of the index genes
Ethics, Politics & Culture in Medical History 