ARTICLE: GMOs Are Good for the Environment

The following is an excerpt of an article by Ivo Vegter via The Daily Maverick on why GMOs can be good for the environment.

It is one of the great ironies of our time: wealthy environmentalists want to return humanity to some pastoral ideal in which everyone enjoys fresh farm food and clean air, but they also oppose the very technologies that can help to get us there. Their technophobia is pervasive, whether it’s about nuclear power, which is both the safest and cleanest source of energy known to humanity, or genetic engineering in agriculture, which can raise yields, reduce costs, and benefit the environment.

The roots of this fear of progress lie deep. They go back at least as far as the Enlightenment itself, when the Romantic movementrejected the learned, complex sophistication of modernity in favour of simplicity, intuition and a return to nature. While the aesthetic might be appealing in art and leisure, as a philosophy, Romanticism is elitist and harmful to human development.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a recent study conducted at Purdue University found that rejecting genetically modified organisms in agriculture would harm both the environment and the economy. “Higher food prices, a significant boost in greenhouse gas emissions due to land use change and major loss of forest and pasture land would be some results if genetically modified organisms … were banned,” the university reported in a press release announcing the study.

Read the rest of the article here.