Europe’s Drought Might Force Acceptance of Gene-Edited Crops

The big pharma/food companies are pushing really hard to this.

Daily reminder that the "GMO for herbicides and pesticides" actually means that they can spray the crops with SHITLOAD MORE PESTICIDES since it doesn't actually provide natural insect protection but it makes the plant more resilient to those sprays.

So as the side effect of that you now eat shitload more of those insecticides and herbicides in your plants.

Not everywhere in Europe. In Poland, despite the drought that caused various local problems as as a whole this season's harvest was a good one (I even heard it described as _very_ good in comparison with recent years). PL is a big exporter of food within EU and elsewhere.

Alternative headline from a saner and more practical world: "Europe's drought might force acceptance of landscape-wide rainwater harvesting earthworks." The effectiveness of such earthworks is pretty shocking to witness: -- https://youtu.be/8QUSIJ80n50 "Lessons of the Loess Plateau"

The permaculture folks have been implementing functional solutions to drought for 3 or 4 decades now, repairing large-scale damaged ecosystems and halting desertification. The problem already has a simple effective remedy, and gene-edited crops are a band-aid non-solution that does nothing to change the underlying conditions by which drought is created and perpetuated.

It is widely understood that forests attract/create rainfall (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941). Large scale water harvesting earthworks attract/create forests by creating the hydrological conditions amenable to increased vegetative cover. To put it simply, here is what is do be done: an army of people use whatever earth moving equipment they have available (from shovels to machinery) to dig a network of swales and catchments across the landscape, and then plant them with early successional "pioneer" species (sun/drought tolerant, often nitrogen fixing woody shrubs). In 5 to 10 years, the soil will be holding onto to the rain for much longer periods of time , creating the conditions such that longterm forest trees will begin to establish (attracting more rain), and staple crops can be reliably grown. This a proven method, it absolutely works, and it needs to be widely implemented across the globe.

Hopefully this comment get read by the heads of public works agencies of numerous governments in drought affected regions around the world.

anti-GMO is anti-science just like anti-vax. They both rely on similar FUD and blame the bogeyman of big Pharma/Ag. They also ignore massive scientific evidence backing the safety.