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dubfan | 11 years ago

> * GMOs tend to promote monoculture and pesticide use.

That's true for industrialized agriculture in general and not specific to GMOs. Growing GMOs doesn't promote monoculture or pesticide use any more than growing conventional crops do. In fact the same farmers that grow GMOs often grow conventional crops at the same time, or switch from year to year, with very little change in their practices.

> * Studies have shown that the same developments that make GMOs more insect resistant can also make them more difficult to digest.

Without knowing what studies those are, it's impossible for me to rebut or defend it. I will say, the record on studies that claim to show that GMOs have safety issues is not a good one (http://academicsreview.org/2012/09/scientists-smell-a-rat-in...)

> * When it comes to animals, GMOs tend to have much poorer quality of life and tend to be completely incapable of surviving without constant support (chickens who can't stand on their own, cows who can't go more than 48 hours without milking, etc).

I am not aware of any GM livestock in use. Monsanto, the bogeyman of anti-GMO activists, does not research or produce GM animals. AFAIK the only GM animals on the market are things like glowing goldfish.

> * GMOs almost never focus on the true value of a food item, but rather the sell value. A food that looks nutritious is more valuable than one that actually is and GMOs make it easier to create that false association (deep red tomatos that taste like wall paper glue, etc).

Again this is a broader symptom of industrialized food production and is not related to GMOs. Yes, there are GM traits that are meant to do what you expect (e.g. the Flavr Savr tomato which was a commercial flop, and the Arctic Apple which is just recently rolling out) but this is a trend that goes back decades.

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sdenton4|11 years ago

Funding for GMO seed development is a hard problem, so the only people really doing it are the monsantos of the world. Which pretty much guarantees that the product is going to be fubar. You can bet that industrial seed research, if it were subjected to any rigorous safety standards, would go much the same way as industrial drug design, with all of the falsified studies you care to count. As it is, it's easier to ban the practice than trust the big producers.

The Open Source Seed Initiative is doing some really cool work to change this, and sits at an interesting place in the GMO debate. But barring a huge amount of institutional and policy support, I'm sticking on the side of banning GMO's.

dragonwriter|11 years ago

> Funding for GMO seed development is a hard problem, so the only people really doing it are the monsantos of the world.

This is emphatically not true, unless you mean it in the trivial sense (where "monsantos" are "any companies funding GMO seed development".)

Its not quite as inaccurate as saying the microsofts of the world are the only people really funding software development, but its the same kind of inaccurate.