I hold a BSc in Biological Sciences, including major units in Ecology.
My final year thesis was "Biochemical Genetics of Phosphate Dehydroginase in
Lumbricus terrestris" - good enough for you. I am broadly in favour of GM
crops, but the current thrust in GM production is towards making US and European
style "deserts of corn" approach to agriculture more efficient.
> 1) small farmers, infact it will increase yields and decrease
> expenditure.
Small Third world farmers currently save seed from this years crop to
sow next year. This will not work with GM crops. This forces the subsistence
farmers to grow more cash crops, but the problem is they can't grow sufficient
to both buy seed for next year and feed the family, so they don't buy GM seed.
The big farmers do, they get bigger yealds and so food prices fall. The
subsistence farmer can no longer get enough for his cash crop to buy the small
quantities of fertiliser, new tools and other needs, so his crop falls further.
If this isn't harming him, what is your definition.
> As for saturating the market? We are currently
> approaching the limit set by us by out present technological
> resourses. In contary, the human population in still expanding
> exponetially.
We are currently capable of producing sufficient food to feed the world
10 to 20 times over. The fact that we use the food to feed to cattle, pigs,
poultry to raise cheap meat is the reason it doesn't seem that great. The main
problem with world food shortages is inability to buy food, not lack of it.
> Most of the engineered plants are bred with "sterilty" genes
^^^^
Says it all really
> the next generation will be 25% infertil and 50% only barely.
> If the plant had to "escape" it could not compete
> with the natural vegitation.
And 25% will grow at full vigour, having in one 2 generations eliminated
the Sterility gene from the gene pool, what then?
> 3) there is no proven threat to human health. Despite claims by
> "Green" groups.
Neither is there any evidence that it is safe. There was no evidence
for about 10 years after we started doing it that feeding sheep brains to cows
was harmful, and look what happened there.
Roger