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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't know it from the article but I thought the anti-GMO argument went something like: sorta different from natural breeding; long term effects unknown; moving anecdotes notwhitstanding, necessity is modest; crates some unappealing situations due to the scope and dynamics of food production.

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Can you fill in some of the blanks on why the necessity of GMOs is modest? Apart from things like "supporting the Ugandan cassava crop that would otherwise be devastated by diseases cured by GMO", don't most GMO strategies also drastically reduce other harmful chemical inputs to farming?

I'm not sure I understand the last argument.

Just curious; I know you're just explaining the argument, not making it.

Those anecdotes are powerful but I think they are mitigated by the fact that we can easily produce enough non-GMO food to feed the planet.

The last point was a weak attempt to note the problems you hear of, for example, proprietary strains infesting non-customer farms. Not strictly a GMO problem, tho.

I'm not reflexively anti-GMO but don't think the case is quite closed (for or against).

This is a little like the nuclear-vs-coal debate. We can generate more than enough power for the country with coal, and because we've been using coal for centuries, we're blinded to the costs (for instance, the annual death toll) of coal. The same may be true of the environmental costs of large-scale farming of genetically inferior crops.

I'm not sure what to make of GMO foods to be honest. Safety is a concern, as are concerns about crop patents.

My opposition to GMOs was softened somewhat by an incident a few years ago (2012) in the UK. Scientists at Rothamstead Research (an agricultural research institution) wanted to grow genetically modified wheat to deter aphids.

http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/our-science/rothamsted-gm-wheat-...

I thought the scientists put forward a good case for the research. But a campaign group opposed to the trial planned to destroy the crop. It prompted the scientists to make a public plea to the campaigners to not destroy the crops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9scGtf5E3I

I'd like to hear more from the scientific community on the topic of GMO. In Europe, there is a strong anti-GMO movement which skews the debate against GM crops.

I thought some of the anti-GMO sentiment is because some agri-chemical companies are just evil.

> I thought some of the anti-GMO sentiment is because some agri-chemical companies are just evil.

Which is like being anti-software because some software companies are just evil.

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