While I don't claim to be an expert to make a comment on the Genetically Modified(GM) foods, I find something really odd about this whole GM thing, in fact something very unnatural. While most of our so called "development" has been using very unnatural and unsustainable techniques, it sounds very odd that the agricultural scientists or biotechnologists has to take this route to save the world from a very natural process of growing vegetables and fruits. Instead of looking holistically and trying to figure out the problems, they are modifying the seeds which would make the seed companies the key part of an otherwise natural process. You are breaking the natural cycle by doing that - may be they had done it before(hybrids) and got better results, but this more intrusive and more unnatural.
What's wrong with their approach is the typical western(followed or pushed out to the world) technique of "local sub-optimization" that fixes just one part of the complete chain in the short term creating significant problems in the future. Pesticide based food revolution was a great example of this. While I can't say for sure the GM foods would create such problems myself, I am not willing to believe the seed companies who are behind this research. To me, their approach is fundamentally wrong and I have every reason to suspect they are in it just to make money and dominate the farmers world over. I am very disappointed at this direction of agri-research which doesn't find anything wrong with introducing an external agent(seed companies) in a very natural cycle of cultivation. In fact the technique that they should apply is the "trimming" technique that would remove the unnatural agents in the cycle to make farming far more sustainable.
While you see this technique applied in other fields of science and engineering, at least that is in the domain where there were no natural process existed before - but typically it is a short term fix against a long term solution. In fact, I can't believe that you need such a complex research to go down really into the genes and fix the productivity issue - I am sure there are cheaper and simpler ways of doing this in an organic fashion. This is an excellent example of technology wasted and gone in the wrong direction.
But it looks like the powers that be behind this GM nonsense are too powerful to be ignored and they will ultimately push it down our throats. Bt cotton has already cultivated in large scale though we don't eat them. But when everything turns out to be a business, this is inevitable. Seed companies want to control the farmers, researchers get money from these guys to push their agenda and most of the farmers are also worried about short term money making, this vicious circle would finally take us in a very wrong way. Even if I want to cultivate in an organic fashion, I am not guaranteed it will be organic especially in a country like India where enforcement of any policy is pretty pathetic.
3 comments: