ARTICLE: GMOs: A Scapegoat of the American Food System
The following is an excerpt of an article by Kavin Senapathy, Dr. Alison Bernstein, and Dr. Layla Katiraee at Medium.com addressing some of the common myths about GMOs.
We recently published an article on this platform highlighting that we avoid the Non-GMO Project’s label because it does not tell consumers any information regarding the item’s healthfulness, its impact on the environment, or the pesticides used to grow crops. Many of the comments we received expressed that although GMOs may indeed be safe, there are socio-economic factors surrounding these crops which give consumers pause. Today, we write to address these concerns and highlight that such socio-economic factors are not unique to GMOs
Comments we received regarding our last piece highlight numerous myths and falsehoods about GMOs and agriculture. We are providing links to articles and documents disproving these myths:
- Farmers have not been sued for inadvertent cross contamination.
- There is no evidence that organic food is healthier, nor is it free of pesticides.
- GMO seeds are not sterile.
- GMOs are not associated with the suicide of farmers in India.
The concerns that many readers have regarding the strength of multi-billion dollar agricultural conglomerates, the undue power of these companies in our political and regulatory system, and other such factors are concerns that we share. Again, these are not factors unique to discussions on GMOs or even exclusive to agriculture. These factors impact all of agriculture, whether the crops grown are GMO or Non-GMO, grown using conventional or organic farming practices. As tempting as it may be to simplify these complex political and economic problems to a GMO debate in search of silver-bullet fixes, by reducing our scope we are prevented from finding genuine solutions to these issues.
To read the entire article, please visit Medium.com.
