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ARTICLE: Answering the 3 Most Common Internet Objections to GMOs

The following is excerpted from a blog post written by Marc Brazeau at the Food and Farm Discussion Lab website addressing 3 of the most common Internet myths about GMOs.

Any discussion of GMOs on the internet brings a swarm of commenters. No matter the topic, an inevitable pattern of comment is “Yes, but what the author ignores is (insert common anti-GMO myth)”.

Here are three of the most common tropes that litter those discussions.

1. “I don’t want to eat a tomato that has fish DNA. Breeding in a laboratory is not the same as breeding that happens in nature over hundreds of years.”

An article might make some nod to the fact that genetic engineering and traditional breeding both modify the genetics of plants and they lie on a continuum – and that humans have been modifying the genetics of crops for 12,000 years. The common response is something along the lines of: “I don’t want to eat a tomato that has fish DNA. Breeding in a laboratory is not the same as breeding that happens in nature over hundreds of years.”

There are a number of problems with this. The first of which is that no one is saying that using recombinant DNA breeding methods are the same at traditional breeding methods. It’s just a simple observation to put things in context – we have been manipulating the genetics of our food for 12,000 years and there really isn’t any reason for getting worked up about the fact that we are doing in laboratories now....

2. “I don’t want to eat food that makes insects stomachs explode! / I don’t want to eat food that’s been bred to withstand being drenched in toxic herbicides”

This may be the most common misconception out there. Let’s try to reconnect it with reality a little bit. There are currently two major traits that GE crops have been bred for.

We’ll start with the second most common trait, the Bt trait. This has been bred mostly into corn and cotton, but is making it’s way into other crops as well. Corn borers and bollworms are two major pests for corn and cotton. These pests have been managed for decades with the organic pesticide Bt which is a soil bacteria which is poisonous to these insects. It’s important to understand the ‘mode of action’ through which Bt kills these insects. In fact, it’s important to understand the concept from toxicology of ‘mode of action’.

Mode of action is the way that a substance acts as a toxin. Most so-called poisons aren’t poisonous in a vague general way. They do something specific to their ‘targets’. The more specific, the better, because something can be very toxic to one organism and harmless to another....

3. “GMOs may be safe but I have a problem with patenting food and companies that sue farmers if their neighbor’s pollen blows into their field.”

On to patents and plants.

There is some odd and fuzzy-headed thinking that asserts that crop breeding should be exempt from intellectual property protection. Often expressed as “Nobody should be able patent life”. There is a certain emotional appeal that makes sense there, and maybe a moral intuition that could be expanded on coherently. I think if people want to hold those views, that’s fine, but they should understand their history and the economics of plant breeding a little better.

It’s a bit curious that people think that plant breeders should not have the same protections as other inventors and innovators. In support of the Plant Patent Act of 1930, Thomas Edison testified before Congress in support of the legislation and said that “This [bill] will, I feel sure, give us many Burbanks.” referring to Luther Burbank the great plant breeder of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Plant Patent Act of 1930 didn’t cover sexually propagated plants, so corn wasn’t covered until the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970. However it was also around 1930 that hybrid breeding became the norm for corn. This meant that farmers had a reason to buy new seed every year and breeders could make money by giving them something better every year. Hybrids work by cross breeding two “inbred” varieties with complementary traits. On top of combining useful traits, the first generation of this crossing exhibits what’s called hybrid vigor – the children don’t just combine the positive traits of the parents, they are more robust as well. Thus, in crops where hybrid breeding works, they took the world by storm....

To read the entire post, please visit the Food and Farm Discussion blog