GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children

>After a quarter of a century of growing biotech crops in North and South America, Asia and parts of Africa, the evidence is now clear: they have caused no human or animal illness, and have huge environmental benefit, such as greatly reduced pesticide use, less ploughing, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less land required to grow a given quantity of crop, lower costs and higher yields.

Good heavens... I hope nobody actually believes this stuff. How many uncited pro-GMO talking points can you spot above?

This article brought to you by Syngenta's PR department.

The gains from GM crops are a lie[1] - most GM crops are made so agri-chemical companies can sell more pesticide for pesticide-resistant crops. Overuse of pesticides is killing all the insects and ruining soil quality.[2]

If you want to get more efficiency out of the food system you can easily do that by going vegan. Raising livestock provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. If you cut out meat you get 83% of the farmland back. You don't even need to cut out meat completely - just have a couple more meals each week without meat and you're saving many times more than any GM crops could achieve.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/failure-yield-evaluating-pe...

[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...

Promoters of GM crops always trot this out, but the overwhelming majority of GM developments are much less beneficial to humanity, some actively harmful, some just anti-competitive, some with unknown or unknowable consequences. They generate legitimate suspicion about the technology itself.

BT toxin is an essential tool of organic farmers, that in normal circumstances only ever appears on the surface of plants, and can be rinsed off. Some GM crops make the plant produce the toxin throughout, where it cannot be rinsed off. Nobody knows whether BT toxin is safe for humans to consume in such quantities, but in any case a very likely short-term outcome of widespread use of such crops is insects resistant to BT toxin, and farmers in need of a new alternative.

Most of the GM crops are less pernicious but no more defensible. Soybeans that are resistant to glyphosate are patented, so farmers have to buy new seed every year, and they drive increased use of glyphosate on farms.

How do we get yellow rice without getting all the crap? Nobody knows.

Is there a word for when sociopaths use people's feelings of empathy against them?

I find myself seeing this pattern everywhere but I'm not sure if I've got an appropriate word to describe it.

Like a climate change denier pretending they're worried about birds being killed by wind turbines. They know that we know they don't care, but they say it anyway, because they know that we can't help but care about that kind of thing.

If it's so good it help just children. Sob-story included in the title makes it look biased to me...