Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?
A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now inspect the fields of people on the route of seed delivery and if they find any gene-manipulated crop (which is probable from wind-blown seed) they sue the farmer into oblivion.
This is already a risk because industrial agriculture is optimized for monocrops.
GMO risks present an additional risk over already problematic agricultural practices.
Cannot happen. If inter-plant gene transfer was that simple, it would already be an agricultural practice.
A weed-killer resistant species becoming a weed is something to consider though.
> Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?
No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.
80% is sci-fi hyperbole. But it's easy to see that monoculture could still be as much of a problem with GMO as without it.
Dutch Elm disease managed to kill 40% of Elm trees in Europe during the first big outbreak, and at least 66% in the UK during the second outbreak. (Maybe 25 million trees out of maybe 30 million trees in the UK).
Irish potato famine was caused by potato blight.
About half the world's crop of bananas is destroyed each year because of disease caused by monoculture growing.
Basically if you a corn farmer, have people around you start planting Monsanto Corn, you have two options: change to Monsanto or switch professions.
How do you prepare fields for cropping if all the weeds are resistant to herbicides? Use stronger herbicides? How is this not an environmental disaster?
What happens when altering the gene of a wheat plant to make it resistant to rust ends up adding a cumulative poison (e.g. a protein or prion associated with the rust resistance) causing the body to leech calcium from bones? Over 30 years we figure the gene was safe, then comes a 100 year long epidemic of brittle bones due to the rust gene being forgotten and no un modified wheat being available to breed clean strains from.
Or leaving the food chain entirely: what about living in a world where you are not allowed to grow food plants in your own backyard and collect the seeds yourself to provide for next year's crop?
Why do we have to increase the food supply to feed an ever-expanding population?
Hundreds of thousands of farmers taken advantage of by a monopolistic GMO company and ruins the lives of countless families sounds like a real-life disaster scenario to me.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2012/11/why-are-in...