I have never felt that the Corporate pushers of GMOs were looking out for anything other than their own profits. That has led me to look on their actions in an unfavorable light. While this has always been a personal “feeling”, I find my concerns expressed very well by this interview with Claire Hope Cummings
The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. » Blog Archive » Defender of the seeds: Q&A with Claire Hope Cummings, author of “Uncertain Peril”
What motivated you to write this argument against the use of genetic technologies in agriculture?Because GMOs (genetically modified organisms) don’t seem like an immediate personal threat, their risks to our health and the environment are fairly subtle. They’re real; they’re just not the kind you see on the evening news. There’s a lot of information about those risks already available. I wrote the book because I’m very concerned with the political and moral aspects of the technology. As a public-interest lawyer I was appalled to learn how this was invented and imposed on us. We were never given a choice. There’s a whole matrix of control involved, from the biological level — the way they are engineered — to the social level, how they are being imposed on people and nature.
It seems to me that we are traveling in uncharted waters where the consequences of our actions won’t be known for decades if not longer. It reminds me of what we are beginning to see from the last half century of antibiotics use in our animal “husbandry”. It has taken almost 50 years for the results of antibiotics in the food and water of chickens, cows and pigs to begin to show in the health of the meat consumer…But show they are, even when not recognized…yet.
I do not know if we can afford the unseen results…
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Gary, if you believe this, then you would really like the movie Michael Clayton. Saw it this past weekend – full of anti-corporate sentiment and conspiracy in the agricultural industry.
Jim, as usual you see conspiracy where I see incompetent self interest. My problem with industrial agriculture is it’s religious devotion to profits at any cost, damned the consequences.
If you really look at our food “industry” for the past few decades you begin to see that our scientific farming and animal “husbandry” has been based upon a lack of understanding of the outcomes we would get from our “tweaking” of the system.
My only complaint against corporations is they make it too easy for good people to be corrupted by the greed inherent in the race for profits. When the government turns it’s regulatory eye away, the few bad apples ignore the laws and try to game the system. Sadly, history seems to prove this is the norm and not the exception.