Is genetically engineered food good or bad for you?
The shelves of our supermarkets are already full of Genetically Engineered foods. From popcorn and tomatoes, to beans and berries - they are all around us. Farmers are growing larger amounts of them every year, and multinational corporations in pursuit of profits are investing billions of dollars on research and development of GE foods. And I think that's great!!
Genetically Engineered foods can be produced in greater quantities, in greater varieties, and at lower costs than traditional foods - the trend seems almost inevitable. Yet, there are many people and organisations crying aloud the extreme dangers of GE foods. Some go as far as demanding that they be banned altogether.
Who is right? And who HAS the right to ban them anyway?
To answer these questions, let us start by simply describing what GE foods are. Genetically Engineered foods are produced when genes are transferred from one species to another. In this way, physical attributes are also transferred. As a simple example, a 'frost-resistance gene' transferred to tropical plants might allow them to grow in cold weather.
For the first time in human history scientists are controlling life at the genetic level, and by any standard they are doing amazing things -amazing things in mapping human genomes, amazing things in medical research using genetic modification, and amazing things in genetic modifications of food.
Consider: Swiss scientists recently inserted a gene into a variety of rice that has the effect of increasing production of beta-carotene, essential for making vitamin A. Each year, two million children die, and half a million go blind for the lack of vitamin A. Over one hundred million others suffer from its deficiency. This new Genetically Engineered rice has the potential to put an end to all this suffering and dying.
Or, consider this: Researchers at Novartis Seeds developed vegetables resistant to one of the world's most harmful plant infections. They have identified a naturally occurring virus resistance gene and have transferred it to tomatoes, melons, lettuce and peppers, giving them immunity from infections.
Or try this: A GE brand of potato has been produced that is resistant to leaf roll viruses and to beetles. It was planted in Colorado and it was proved that NO insecticides were needed.
Or consider this: GE soya beans are being produced that are weed-resistant and herbicide-tolerant - herbicide use drops as much as 40% in some cases.
Farmers seeking to produce food have of course long had to fight innumerable pests and parasites in order to do so. One such is the terrible corn borer, which destroys the corn from the inside out. To combat it Bt corn was engineered. Usually six sprays of insecticide are needed to safeguard traditional hybrid corn; Bt corn needs only one.
Another such parasite, and the biggest pest farmers and producers currently have to face, is the environmentalist movement. They denounce farmers and businessmen as wicked on the face of it, 'proving' it by pointing out their profit motive in all this. Unfortunately, many producers have accepted this unearned guilt, and damned themselves for it. THEY SHOULD NOT! Profit is not only their appropriate reward for their efforts, it is also the best protection WE have that foods produced in this way will NOT be toxic - after all, ya can't make huge profits by killing your customers! There are - properly - already laws on the books against selling poisoned food - we do not need any more! What we DO need is for the businessmen and the scientists who produced these products to stop apologising for them, to stand up for their right to profit by their work, and to point out the pseudo-scientific quackery that their environmentalist opponents are peddling.
Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest that the real problem here today is not one of poisoned food, but of poisoned minds! Of minds poisoned against profits, poisoned against science, and poisoned against reason - which underpins both. The battle is not one ABOUT profits; it is a battle FOR the right to profit from one's work. The battle is not in fact one OF science, but FOR science!! For with increasing unreason, science - and production - will not be able to survive!
Consider: Former Canadian Greenpeace advisor, Dr William Plaxton, Professor of Biochemistry at Queen's University in Ontario, recently resigned FROM Greenpeace because of the increasing irrationality of activists. As he pointed out: "Activists concerned about the safety of GM foods often say that they require more testing - then if that's the case," he asks, "why vandalise test plots that would establish either danger, or safety?" Why indeed? Perhaps our own dreadlocked eco-vandal can explain that absurdity?
Consider: This govt imposes a moratorium on GE food research, while making its own stand against business abundantly clear: "No one needs genetically modified food," they say, "except the companies investing in it. The only reason for its existence is to increase agribusiness profits." So? What's wrong with profits?
Or consider Greenpeace again: "Trade in GE food and crops is dominated by a handful of multinational corporations," they pontificate. "It is widely believed that these are the only beneficiaries of genetically engineered foods." Believed? By whom? Why ignore the usual beneficiaries of any deal - the participants? The farmers, their families, their communities, and the consumers.
And why evade that businesses not only have every right to make a profit, but in fact they cannot exist WITHOUT a profit; nor yet can they make a profit by offering unhealthy food to their customers. Their statements really mean that they would see businesses go to the wall, rather than have them make a profit. They would rather watch all of us starve, than see any of us prosper.
Environmentalists also claim that GE foods are dangerous - or potentially dangerous - to consumers and to the environment. Environmentalist scare stories against - well, everything really - from global warming, to global cooling, even to the over hyped and non-existent millennium bug - all are littered with the words: 'may' 'perhaps' 'might' 'could'... they seek to reverse cause and effect, and to reverse the burden of proof, making this food - and the scientists and businessmen who produce it - guilty, before any presumption of innocence. People! It is not possible to prove a negative! Yet that is the irrationality producers today are faced with. Does that bother environmental activists? Do their own irrational, and sometimes manufactured claims, disturb them? Not a bit! As One Greenpeace organiser has said publicly: "Our purpose is not to be scientifically correct; that's the corporation and robber-baron's job!" Did you get that? "Our purpose," she says, "is NOT to be scientifically correct"!
Very well, let us take them at their word, and ignore their science. But let us question their purpose. Patrick Moore - who founded Greenpeace, but who is another to leave over the increasing irrationality of environmental activists - observes the purpose: "The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid '80's," he says, "just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and couldn't get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists, who use environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that have more top do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they do with the actual science of the environment". In short, once the Berlin Wall came down, and capitalism won, the socialists had to find a new approach. This approach, ladies and gentlemen, is the Greening of Socialism - they simply joined a new movement, but never changed their goals.
This, I remind you, is being pointed out by the former founder of Greenpeace. Think he's wrong? Green Party leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, protesting recently over field trials on sheep to try and cure cystic fibrosis in human beings, announced that 'we shouldn't promote human health and long life - because it's "unnatural"!' Unnatural! To promote human life! I remind you that this woman holds the balance of power in this parliament, and she thinks it 'unatural' to promote human life! We should instead, she says "have respect for ALL life" - effectively placing human life on a par with the smallpox bacillus and the Aids virus! I have a very simple message for Mzzzzzz Fitzsimplesimons: f**k you!! If you want to grant equal status to your sad little life, and to that of the smallpox virus, then fine by me. But leave me - and sufferers of cystic fibrosis - out of your little suicide pact.
So, their purpose is anti-life, and their arguments reveal their ignorance. What they unwillingly admit is the knowledge that there were no damaging health effects observed since the introduction of GE crops, in 1996. Today, these cover about a hundred million acres in the US. This means that more than one hundred billion kilos of GE foods were produced last year alone! Our shelves, as I said, are already full of them, YET THERE IS NOT ONE CLEARLY DOCUMENTED CASE OF A COMMERCIAL GE PRODUCT HARMING A HUMAN BEING!
The arbitrary assertion that GE foods are potentially dangerous - that they may possibly be harmful in some unknown way at some unknown time is no reason for banning them. On the contrary - BECAUSE the assertions are arbitrary is precisely the reason that the assertions themselves should be ignored - and so too should the peddlers of such tripe! All available evidence indicates that GE foods are safe for our health and offer no greater health risks than do traditionally produced foods.
In regard to harming our environment, the opposite is true: GE foods actually make our environment much better, requiring fewer pesticides and insecticides, reducing or even eliminating populations of insects, weeds and parasites, and by producing more food with less land, making more land available for other uses. But the best change they bring in our environment happens in our supermarket shelves, where we find them stocked with ever more variety, and ever better quality. Just one example is the GE tomato that stays firmer for longer.
By manipulating plants still further with the new technology, scientists will be able to produce more nutritious and healthy food, with higher protein and vitamin contents.
New varieties of fruit and vegetables will be created that will enrich our choices and delight our tastes. We soon might even see food especially engineered to combat disease, such as the production of sheep's milk to combat cystic fibrosis - a possible cure that Fitzsimplesimons finds so 'unnatural'. . It is important to note that increased yields will follow as a DIRECT consequence of fewer losses in better protected crops, making food cheaper and more plentiful in the future.
Ladies and gentlemen - and students - We are at the beginning of a revolution in agriculture that promises to change and improve our health and lives in unimaginable ways. All we need to achieve a better future is to leave scientists and businessmen free to research, to create, to produce and to trade, and leave us free to choose; free to purchase - or not - the things they produce.
Science and business together, relying on reason in an environment of freedom, have delivered and will keep delivering constant improvements in our existence, and ever longer life expectancy. Our lives will be healthier, longer and more pleasurable - IF we get out of the way, and leave them free to produce. Don't let the environmentalists scare you, and make no mistake: In fighting for GE foods we are fighting for our lives.
27 Jun 2005, 5:18 am
*cough* BOLLOCKS *cough*
