8. GE crop varieties are simply an extension of modern industrial-chemical agriculture (MICA) -- the use of fossil fuels to run machines and produce chemical fertilizers and pesticides in order to profit by producing food in the most "economically efficient" way while destroying the ultimate resource base, the soil. This does not reduce pressure on marginal land; it generates marginal land. Farming-for-profit agribusiness will always expand onto new lands, and also cause deterioration of existing land by eliminating inconvenient hedgerows and woods in order to farm the land more energy-intensively.[4,5]
9. Another lesson the Green Revolution taught us was that monocultures of new varieties designed to be cultivated using the MICA system are ultimately inferior to traditional food-producing systems. New varieties might give higher yields for a time, but they are more susceptible to pests, diseases and other disasters than traditional mixed-variety crop systems. At the same time the new varieties drive out the traditional ones, making them hard or impossible to obtain later -- an irreversible loss of possibly crucial biodiversity.[3]
10. Further, susceptibility to pests and diseases encourages the use of chemical insecticides and pesticides, leading to severe degradation of the wildlife environment[5] and insecticide/pesticide resistance. This latter problem forces farmers to use chemicals more intensively and to have to switch to new chemicals and crop varieties every few years in order to keep up with resistance development, thus generally driving up the cost of inputs and increasing chemical contamination of the food we eat. GE crops will simply accelerate this treadmill.
11. Since it does not seem that GE crop varieties will actually give greater yields6, then the benefits must be mostly economic (less spraying = reduced input and labor costs), despite the "technology fee" the farmer will have to pay for the privilege of using GE varieties. Thus real human benefits turn out to be zero. (A very high-yielding rice, 13 to 15 tons per hectare, is in the offing, but the rice is said to be good only for livestock feed. As one of the things we should be trying to do is reduce amounts of grain fed to animals, this does not really solve any problems, and could end up creating more.) So why are the biotech corporations so gung-ho about GE crops?
12. The way the biotech corporations are going to make their money is through patents. The owner of an invention is allowed exclusive rights of economic exploitation for 20 years. Fair enough, but during the 70s and 80s American courts allowed the extension of the patent system to cover GE "inventions."7 True, the companies have invested millions in the research, but ask yourself whether or not patents on life are OK. Can we "invent" life? Is it OK to claim ownership rights over life forms or parts of life forms? (Oh, so GE stuff is unique when you make it, but the same when you eat it?!)
13. Everyone knows that you can plant seed and it will sprout and grow a new plant. Even hybrids, though you may not get the product you are expecting. With GE crops it is now illegal to plant the seed you have harvested -- you have to buy a new bag of seed if you want to plant the crop again, or face legal proceedings. In a few years we will begin to see (perhaps) the introduction of "terminator" seeds. These produce a crop of seeds which will not grow if replanted. This could effectively give biotech corporations control of the world's food system. Thus the corporations are happy to see traditional seed varieties disappear and contribute to biodiversity loss because of the profits and power it will bring them. But suppose something goes wrong and we end up with a biodisaster? Who will (who can) take responsibility for adverse and irreversible alterations to the genetic material of the biotic community?
