GMOs fooling the world for 20 years

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Myth: GE crops will end world hunger.
Fact: GE crops have nothing to do with ending world hunger, no matter how much GE spokespeople like to expound on this topic. Three comments give the lie to their claim: FAO data clearly show that the world produces plenty of food to feed everyone, year after year. Yet hunger is still with us. That’s because hunger is not primarily a question of productivity but of access to arable land and resources. Put bluntly, hunger is caused by poverty and exclusion.
Today’s commercial GE crops weren’t designed to fight hunger in the first place. They aren’t even mainly for human consumption. Practically the entire area planted to GE crops consists of soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. The first three of these are used almost exclusively to make cattle feed, car fuel and industrial oils for the United States and Europe, while cotton goes into clothing.
More damning, there appears to be an iniquitous cause-and-effect relationship between GE crops and rural hunger. In countries like Brazil and Argentina, gigantic “green deserts” of corn and soybeans invade peasants’ land, depriving them – or outright robbing them – of their means of subsistence. The consequence is hunger, abject poverty and agrotoxin poisoning for rural people. The truth is that GE crops are edging out food on millions of hectares of fertile farmland.
In the year GMO seeds were first planted, 800 million people worldwide were hungry. Today, with millions of hectares of GMOs in production, one billion are hungry. When exactly do these crops start “feeding the world”?
Myth: GE crops are more productive.
Fact: Not true. Look at the data from the country with the longest experience of GMOs: the United States. In the most extensive and rigorous study, the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzed 20 years of GE crops and concluded that genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant soybeans and corn are no more productive than conventional plants and methods. Furthermore, 86% of the corn productivity increases obtained in the past 20 years have been due to conventional methods and practices. Other studies have found GE productivity to be lower than conventional.
Crop plants are complex living beings, not Lego blocks. Their productivity is a function of multiple genetic and environmental factors, not some elusive “productivity gene.” You can’t just flip a genetic switch and turn on high productivity, nor would any responsible genetic engineer make such a claim. Even after all this time, GE methods are quite rudimentary. Proponents of the technology count it a success if they manage to transfer even two or three functional genes into one plant.
The bottom line is that 20 years and untold millions of dollars of research have resulted in a grand total of two marketable traits: herbicide tolerance and Bt pest resistance (see below). Neither has anything to do with productivity.
Myth: GE crops will eliminate agrichemicals.
Fact: It’s the reverse: GE crops increase the use of harmful agrichemicals. Industry people try to put this myth over by touting the “Bt gene” from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria, which produces a toxin lethal to some corn and cotton worms. The plants produce their own pesticide, supposedly obviating the need to spray. But with such large areas planted to Bt monocultures, the worms have quickly developed resistance to Bt; worse, a host of formerly unknown secondary pests now have to be controlled with more chemicals.
The other innovation trumpeted by the “genetically modified corporations” consists of plants that can withstand high doses of herbicides. This allows vast monocultures to be sprayed from the air, year after year on the same site. It’s a convenience for industrial farmers that has abetted the spectacular expansion of soybeans in recent years. Thirty-years-ago, there were no soybeans in Argentina; now they take up half the country’s arable land. Concurrently, the amount of the herbicide glyphosate sprayed in Argentina has skyrocketed from eight million litres in 1995 to over 200 million litres today – a 20-fold increase, all for use in GE soy production.

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