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Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

I thought the main health problem with GMO crops (other than overzealous IP management and such) wasn’t even that they’re engineered - it’s that we engineer them to deal with heavy pesticide usage, proceed do so in a way that it’s impossible to clean out, and then consume that food.

(and the insect apocalypse, but that’s an indirect effect on human health)

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Yes. That's the main point. Many GMO stuff are made by pesticide companies

GMO can also be engineered to inherently be pest resistant and thus require significantly less pesticide

"By 2018, farmers were spending an average of $23.58 per hectare on insecticide — 37% more than the pre-Bt levels." https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-twisted-trajector... Unfortunately the field isn't a lab, and making it look like a lab is very resource-intensive and environmentally damaging. "The cost of ignoring ‘desi’ varieties for decades has been high for India."

But how does that allow our company to sell more pesticides?

The resistance tends to last only a few generations before the pest population evolves past it.

In areas where BT-Maize gets planted, Corn Ear Worm has been observed to evolve resistances in as few as 5 or 6 generations. You might think you've deployed a pest-free plant, but in reality all you've done is deploy an evolutionary pressure on the target population, and nature has had like 800-million years' practise out-evolving bad shit happening.

Viewed in a systems light, the whole notion is little more than a grift; at best a temporary solution that takes longer to develop than ecosystems take to out-evolve.

This said, using alternative pesticides like copper sulfate used by some of the "organic" food production can be as bad if not worse for the environment and humans.

Copper sulphate is not a pesticide for corn so not applicable here as a comparison. It's a fungicide for orchard crops usually.

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