It goes beyond the GM product bulls hit. I wrote an article quite a while ago about the liscensing and ownership of created plants and animals (biologicals like GM bacteria etc) and posed several questions. I don’t really care about GM to a large extent, but what Monsanto and their ilk do and have done is take over our food supply and other crops by owning seeds and the entire product line to grow, fertilise, weed and harvest. That cotton in your shirt you are wearing was harvested using a defolient. The cotton grown was probably designed in a lab to produce the most possible fiber and for the usable fiber to absorb as little as the defolient as possible. Both seed and defolient was probably designed by the likes of Monsanto.
Monsanto seeds can’t be reused. Every planting season, the farmers are made to buy the seed and are not allowed to collect and reuse seed from last season. Monsanto designs plants to be herbaside resistant so that the farmers and spray weed killer on the field and it just kills the broad leaf and other weeds. The whole system is screwed. The farms using those production methods produce more, lowering the price of the harvest, so that the farms using lower yeilding systems get screwed over and in the end are forced to use these ‘modern’ methods.
The weird thing is that it isn’t the actual active herbaside that is toxic, but the surfactants and additives in the Roundup-like products and seem to pose the greater danger. The use of chemicals like this, does, however, create resistant strains of plants, just like anti-biotics create resistant strains of bacteria. ‘Life finds a way’ as Ghandi said.
It is problematic and they are not listening to the research and experts and they are muddying the water with bulls hit and letting strawmen arguements make the opposition look bad.
The floride argument is for another time, I think. I support floride added to water.