So well said, and you spoke for many of us here.I an anti-GMO for two very simple reasons. The first reason is less to do with the fact that the crops are genetically modified and more to do with HOW--if I'm not happy with the quantity of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals being used on crops now, why would I want crops that are modified so that they can survive the application of even MORE chemicals? Most of the GMO's I've been hearing about aren't modified to have larger yields or be resistant to disease--they're modified so that farmers can spray more roundup crap on them without killing them. That idea does not appeal to me.
The second reason is the way these huge companies *coughMonsantocough* destroy farmers' liveliehoods. If you're a farmer growing soybeans in a field next to a farmer who grows Monsanto's GMO soybeans, and the breeze carries pollen from that GMO field onto yours, if you save the seeds from your OWN CROP, you are considered a criminal. We have become a country where huge corporations are allowed to tell an American citizen what to do with his own crop, where someone is punished as a thief because of the direction of the wind, and where we are not allowed to provide for ourselves--we either buy from the big, all-powerful corporation, or we don't grow food at all.
There's also the small matter of some genuinely scary GMO's going on, like putting human genes into food that is grown openly in the great outdoors and can then cross-pollinate with anything withing blowing distance of the wind. How do you feel about human liver genes in your next bowl of rice? We have no way to control where this GMO "data" gets carried by the wind, what it cross-pollinates with, or what long-term effect it may have on us and our food supply. We're not taking the time to test these things, or what effects they may have before just chucking them into our entire food supply. I don't know about you guys, but I don't like the idea of our food supply--our ENTIRE food supply--being the guinea pig for every GMO frankestein they can come up with.
I think the science of genetically modifying organisms is fascinating and potentially very useful, but anything we create needs to be tested thoroughly BEFORE being inflicted on the public. It needs to be labeled clearly, so that we the people can make informed choices, and it needs to be changes that are actually of benefit rather than just trudging down the same failing road we've been on for decades with pesticide and herbicide resistance. Also, the American people need to be guaranteed the right to preserve and produce our own food so that monsters like Monsanto can't come and and tell us what to do with our own crops. It's one thing to hold a customer to contract who purchased your product, but to go to his neighbor who has never bought a Monsanto product and take him to court for violating your patent because the wind blew your pollen onto HIS field... That's just BS. I cannot support GMO's as long as that continues to happen.
