The future of GMOs

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Conventional agriculture is taking some hits today. A new UN report says industrial ag has failed…

The report challenges the basic tenets of the green revolution, which are based on the use of increasingly aggressive and expensive chemicals that seem to not only threaten the very soils they are supposed to protect but also water resources, the air and even the farmers themselves. To the authors of the report, “the ecological footprint of industrial agriculture is already too large to be ignored.”

When we now have a growing body of research that indicates we can achieve equal yields with no chemicals, one has to ask, why are we continuing down this road? Now there is THIS report from the Soil Association suggesting that GM crops do not yield more and many times yield less than non-GMO counterparts…

Peter Melchett, Soil Association policy director, said:
“GM chemical companies constantly claim they have the answer to world hunger while selling products which have never led to overall increases in production, and which have sometimes decreased yields or even led to crop failures. As oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, we need to move away from oil dependent GM crops to producing food sustainably, using renewable energy, as is the case with organic farming.”

And from the latest The Organic and Non-GMO Report, which has developed into a very nice newsletter indeed…

Expert predicts GM crops will soon be obsolete

Andrew Kimbrell doesn’t see a bright future for genetically modified crops. Speaking at the Organic Farming Conference in Wisconsin in February, Kimbrell said, “Genetic engineering for food crops is over. Genetically engineered crops will be obsolete soon.”

Kimbrell, a public interest attorney and executive director of the Center for Food Safety, gives several reasons for his prediction. One is the rejection of GM food crops in Europe, Japan, and other GMO-sensitive regions. “The United States has lost millions of dollars in exports (due to the rejection of GM crops in Europe),” said Kimbrell. Resistance to GMOs in these markets also stopped the development of GM wheat and rice. He also said that the science underlying genetic engineering is obsolete, and that genetic engineers have not been able to develop any other GM traits besides herbicide resistance and built-in pesticides. “They can’t develop other things,” he said. Finally, Kimbrell said the anti-GMO movement will stop the technology. “We will put pressure on companies that buy GM sugar beets. There is no way this industry can survive.”

Kimbrell cited last year’s court decision blocking sales of GM alfalfa as another reason why GM crops will not last. That decision is likely to set a precedent that could be used to stop other GM crops. The Center for Food Safety, which filed the lawsuit that stopped GM alfalfa, recently filed another lawsuit to stop GM sugar beets.

Kimbrell said that field trials of so-called “biopharma” GM crops, once hailed as a promising technology to produce drugs, have plunged from several hundred a few years ago to just a handful now.

Consumers also don’t want GM foods. “No one gets up in the morning saying they want GM food,” he said.

Copyright The Organic & Non-GMO Report April 2008.

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