Nicolas Naranja

Wow,

Apparently I missed out on a really heated GMO conversation. I have a vested interest in the whole GMO debate, which comes from my own health and the reality of food production. I live across the street from some farmland that gets sprayed by air on a regular basis. The plane flies over my house and drops down to about 10-15' to start spraying about 100' from the end of my driveway. The first house I had in town he would actually start spraying at the end of my backyard. And we aren't talking about benign chemicals either, things like Chlorpyrifos, Parathion, and Methomyl. If farmers down here could use Bt(GMO) sweet corn those chemicals wouldn't be getting sprayed. And I'll bet if you asked the guys that lived around or in banana plantations if they would rather have GMO bananas that didn't have to be sprayed or have bananas that had to sprayed every two weeks I guarantee they would rather have the ones that weren't sprayed. Sure we would all like to go organic, but it just isn't totally feasible. Think about how many cows would be required to produce the manure required to switch the world to organic production. Somebody has already done the math behind it, and you would need billions more animals to make the manure required. Chemical fertilizer has saved more people from starvation than anything else, and right behind that you have agrochemicals. If you have ever had to hoe a crop like bananas, peanuts or cotton you would also readily appreciate things like herbicides that make the job much easier.

You know what really irks me: People that have never spent time farming who want me to use composted manure, manual weeding, and just accept the inevitable loss due to disease and then they want to pay the same price for it.

Question: What's the bigger moral hazard GMO crops grown in your region or organic tomatoes picked by children 100s of miles away?

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Some people go bananas, I went plantains.