Genetically modified (GM) food has never been something that particularly worries me. They certainly have problems – pesticide use, mingling with wild plants – but industrial agriculture has these problems anyway. The large companies that make them take advantage of farmers in icky ways, like making the crops sterile so farmers have to buy new seeds every year, but that sort of behavior has a legislative fix. If industrial growers, say in California’s Imperial Valley, were using GMOs that saved water and didn’t need pesticides, I’d think it was a great idea (assuming proper environmental testing).
However, I also believe that people have a right to avoid GMOs if they wish. So it was troubling that a recent study in Spain found that GMO agriculture drives out organic agriculture. The study showed that a small amount of genetically modified pollen fertilized nearby organic plants, making them also “genetically modified.” There’s not a lot of mixing – 6% seems to be the high estimate – but that’s enough to put organic consumers off their feed. Since the organic produce was not GMO-free, it was unsellable in Europe. This drove organic farmers out of the organic business, and they started planting GMO crops.
The European Commission’s GMO policy is based on “coexistance” – assuming that GMOs and organic produce can be grown side-by-side. This is clearly not the case, if cross-contamination is an issue for organic consumers. So if genetically modified foods have a place in modern agriculture – and I think they do, particularly because of climate change – that place is far away from organic agriculture.
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Did the organic farmers have legal redress against the GMOs for screwing up their crops?
I think that a great deal of resistance to the idea of GMO comes from the idea that they were introduced into the marketplace by large corps like Monsanto, Archer-Daniels Midland. While there are valid concerns, these sources make GMO automatically “bad” in the minds of its detractors. I am not saying that GMO is automatically good, I am just saying that it is important to separate the research from the emotion when it comes to GMO. One of my bloggy friends is Anastasia Bodnar, who writes Genetic Maize.</a. She is a PhD candidate at Iowa State who studies GMO.
She recently linked to an article in U.S. News and World Report. It’s a discussion of alliances between organic farmers and developers of GMO, who share the viewpoint that reducing fertilizer use is important not only because of the cost of fertilizer but the environmental damage that fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide does.
Here’s a short quote on how organic farming and use of GMO’s could work together:
There’s research to be done before farmers start jumping into lawsuits, and I do advocate food labeling so that people who are opposed to GMO can make informed choices. But the benefits of GMO are too promising to dismiss. As to sterility, Anastasia has examined that issue as well and has added some clarity to what is going on.
[...] problem for organic farmers, because once produce is cross-contaminated it is unsellable in Europe. Miriam at Oyster’s Marter reviewed the case of this happening in Spain, and farmers were in essence forced to switch from organic farming to [...]
When I first moved up here, I met a bunch of farmers from Vermont who were part of a group trying to get the entire state to ban GMOs because of the cross-contamination. I can’t remember if they were the same group that is always trying to make Vermont its own state…