Having just come across some observations here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2175216.stm, concerning Russia becoming an agricultural exporter rather than an importer (the article does not specify but I am assuming a combination of land reforms and western farming practises), this thread was brought back to mind. I certainly agree with most of what Hermit said, but I am left wondering whether GM could not become the saviour of green and organic farming.
As Hermit observed, conventional farming techniques can have adverse consequences for the biosphere (I'm presuming that pesticides running off into rivers being the sort of thing that was intended by that comment), but said techniques remain problematic even when side-effects like that are discounted. Decreasing numbers of insects intentionally killed by pesticides have an obvious impact on bird populations for example (I admit that increasing agricultural production on certain land can allow other land to be returned to a wilderness state, and that this is clearly not to be sniffed at). Since not using those techniques results in the aforementioned loss of production, it seems to me that the possibility of developing GM crops that are more robust might provide a suitable via media between two equally unpleasant prospects.
Certainly, when saying this I have no concerns regarding health implications where I see no reason that GM crops are any cause for concern, or at least no more than anything else. Culturally, we have come to errect an arbitrary dichotomy between natural/healthy and artificial/unhealthy which seems difficult to support. There may still be some environmental concerns, in terms of more robust strains could naturalise and displace other species, but that is hardly new; the risk in this case seems much lower than with Japanese knotweed, the cane toad or the kudzu vine, all of which proved extremely virulent outside their native habitat. Overall, I suspect the changes being made to gm crops are likely to be much smaller than the changes wrought previously through breeding and hybridisation.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25919>
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