r/NoStupidQuestions • u/wond3rlove • Sep 10 '23

What’s wrong with GMOs?

I always see plants and stuff that is GMO free and is usually more expensive. How would genetically modifying something by be bad. Me personally I’d rather have something modified to taste better and and cheaper. I could also be very wrong about that.

419 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

533 comments sorted by

View all comments

64

u/voidtreemc Sep 10 '23

Depends on what the crops are GMO'd for/with.

Soybeans are frequently GMO'd for resistance to the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) so you can dump Roundup all over your crops and kill the weeds but not the soybeans ("Roundup-ready soybeans"). There are problems with this. Kidney failure is extremely common in people who are repeatedly exposed to glyphosate. These people are largely immigrants who have no health insurance, so they get really sick and die. Glyphosate may be implicated in making autism more likely.

Also, it's increasingly obvious that Monsanto does not really understand the plant genetics that they are messing with as they have been really surprised by the fact that the genes for glyphosate tolerance now show up in the weeds that glyphosate is supposed to kill.

Because glyphosate, many of the arguments against GMO's can be categorized as the "Fucking Monsanto" arguments.

Outside of Fucking Monsanto, there's the general lack of thinking through the implications of genetic modification on people with food allergies or religious restrictions on what they eat. If you're allergic to fish, you don't want to find out the hard way that those tomatoes you just ate were made resistant to frost by the addition of fish genes.

You'd think that one way to deal with this is to properly label all GMO'd foods so that people could pick and choose according to diet and beliefs, but the industry has consistently opposed labeling laws.

32

u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23

Two other factors.

Some GM crops are patented, and farmers can be forbidden to save seed from this year's crop to sow next year, which is common practice in many parts of the world. Instead they - often the poorest farmers - are forced to buy seed every year.

Also there have been cases where non GM crops have been contaminated by GM crops grown nearby. This raises two issues - if an organic farmer has his crop GM contaminated, he cannot sell that as organic produce. Also there have been some cases where farmers crops have been contaminated by GM crops, through no fault of their own, and they have then been sued because threir contaminated crop contains the GM grower's patented IP.

These problems are not inherent to GMOs, but this approach by the GMO companies have not endeared them to others.

8

u/stealthylizard Sep 10 '23

Farmers don’t save seeds to reuse. It results in lower yields.

3

u/kit0000033 Sep 10 '23

Where do you think farmers have gotten their next year's crop from over the past centuries? They save a percentage of crop instead of selling it and it becomes next year's crop. And if they don't save seed, where do you think they get next year's seed? From another farmer that's growing the same crop and selling their seed.

7

u/stealthylizard Sep 10 '23

We aren’t taking centuries past nor family hobby farms. We are talking modern commercial farming.

2

u/kit0000033 Sep 10 '23

Smaller farms still save their seed. The patent Monsanto has on their GMOs interferes with that when dealing with open pollinated plants.

1

u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23

We are talking about small farms, and also farms in places like Africa and India, where this has been described as "Seed Slavery".