I actually see great promise in GM foods. If you set about to make, say, higher yield crops, or crops with more resistance to pests, or something like that, and if you succeeded, and provided no unexpected bad side-effects popped up, of course GM food would be a good thing. GM may be one key to how humanity can survive the twentieth century population boom without us suffering a worldwide catastrophic die-off at some point in the twenty-first.
But I know of only two instances of Monsanto's deliberate use of genetic "engineering" upon food crops. Instance one is the "Roundup" combination of herbicide and GM soybeans. The purpose of "Roundup" is so farmers can drench crops, which ultimately humans are supposed to eat, with previously intolerable levels of toxic herbicide. Instance two is "Terminator," mislabeled "GM" when the proper acronym would be "CBW," a truly diabolical genetic technology deliberately designed to destroy the fertility of essential food crops.
The science of GM holds great promise for mankind, but as always, capitalism ruins everything. You or I would use GM to improve the quality and quantity of harvests, for the benefit of the people who eat the food. Instead, look at what GM is actually being used for today. Monsanto openly uses it deliberately to poison the people who eat the food, or to starve them.
Nature, indifferent to the welfare of our species, might do this kind of thing by blind chance. Every thousand years or so, there might arise a mutation in a strain of grain which makes for better harvests, or conversely, which renders harvests toxic to humans who eat them, or which wipes out next year's harvest. But Monsanto's profit-mad management apparently has deliberately selected out the most nightmarish possibilties, and forced them out into nature at the riot speed of purposeful human action, not even moderated by sensible caution. That is why Jim Heartfield is wrong, and Monsanto must be thwarted.
(Words notes: in case you don't know, "CBW," a cold-war acronym, equals "chemical / biological warfare," that is, the anthrax and nerve gas trade, the quintessence of state-terrorism, ostensibly the very reason we bomb Iraq every day these days. I'm tempted to suggest that we fire off a few Tomahawks into Monsanto's executive suites. Keeping Sudan in mind, let's be sure we do it during the working day rather than late at night so as not to accidentally kill any guiltless security guards or janitors.
I used quotes in the phrase "genetic 'engineering'." I work for civil engineers, no quote marks there, as the science and technology of civil engineering are so stable, so widely known, and so predictable that an engineer can say with virtually perfect confidence, "Yes, these steel beams, of such-and such a spec, will hold up that much concrete." You know that the GM "engineers" are on the edge of scientific knowledge and I'll bet there are discoveries and surprises in the labs every day of the week. "Genetic alchemy" would be a better term at today's level of understanding. Now how would you feel about driving over a bridge or living downstream from a dam where the design was calculated by alchemists, and safety-approved only by profiteers?)
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net
** Sancho, que te parece, cuan mal quisto soy de encantadores? **