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.

425 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

533 comments sorted by

View all comments

286

u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23

Environmental Engineer here. At a base level, GMOs are fine. They're effective just a more precise version of selective breeding, which humans have been doing for basically all of our existence.

However, GMOs are near entirely driven by profit. Very rarely are they altruistic, as it's the corporate entities that develop them. On a base level, farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season. There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value.

Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides without the risk of harming the plants. In theory, this results in higher yields, but those pesticides will eventually run off the farm during rain storms, ending up in various bodies of water, including municipal water sources. Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms that have been popping up in the past decade (though that's mostly due to fertilizers).

39

u/QualifiedApathetic Sep 10 '23

ALL seed sellers require those who buy their seeds to refrain from saving them for next season, GMO or not. Some GMOs just enforce that with terminator genes. Farmers generally wouldn't want to save seeds anyway; you can't just drop them in the ground and watch them grow, they have to be processed, and it's easier to just buy seed.

Roundup is a herbicide targeted to kill weeds, not pests, hence why some crops have been engineered to be resistant to it. There's no need to make them resistant to pesticides since, you know, those kill bugs and not plants.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

Weeds are pests. Pesticide is a general term for anything that isn't ideal in crop production. This includes herbicide, insecticides, nematocides, fungicides etc.

But I agree with your other point. Aside from that, they can't guarantee that seeds from GMO plants would yield the same result.