GM foods

[Bessie21]

I've just been watching countryfile, they were talking about gm foods, and i wondered what every1's thoughts were on this,

they were explaining that they take some dna from one plant and add it to another in order to give the plant a better resistance to certain things such as being sensitive to frost etc,

now i'm normally wary of anything that has been messed with, but one comment made was that the worst side affects could be that it may turn out to be a different colour, such as a purple tomatoe,
they argued that it would mean that pestercides wouldn't need to be used as the plant would be stronger,

so whats your thoughts are you against this or do u think it may be the way forward???
i'm unsure if chemicals are used during this process which for me would be a big no no,

[Effie]

In a way, selective breeding in plants and animals has been genetic modification over the years. Direct GM give s a much faster result

I honestly can't decide. Generally, I feel that I prefer organic methods in terms of the minimised disruption to other wildlife, and, as orgasnic also means no-GM, I'm therefore no-GM if that makes sense.

[misty]

This is all in the hands of private companies. Apparently the seed is not gatherable so farmers in third world countries will be encouraged to buy this wonder seed but instead of keeping some of the crop for sowing the following year will have to buy again.
In the programme it was snapdragon that was introduced to tomatoes but what else would they introduce? I have heard of fish dna! We also do not know what would happen if these plants cross pollinated with other plants. I have heard (in one of my sleepless hours and listening to the world service) that where they grow gm maize in America it is devoid of wild life and plants. I have never liked multi national companies and while they are in charge of gm I will always be suspicious of their motifs, definately not for the benefit of mankind.

[wendy]

Personally I don't touch them with a barge pole, if I possibly can.
Wendy

[RoomandKitchen]

I'm not so hot on the science side but it sem to me that selective cross-polination/breeding and grafting etc are at least "natural" in that I mean there is not inter-species mixing, like fish and plant DNA. Also it is not so agressive i.e. it is done in the greenhouse/orchard, pasture etc and not at micro level in a lab.

I am also suspicous about who owns this technology especially that the seeds with not produce fertile "off spring" and that seeds cannot be saved from one season to the next making third world farmers especially vunerable.

I also suspect that it will lead to mono-cultures and any regional varities/breeds will be lost. e.g Yeotham Gypsy potato's and Hebridean Sheep I don't think production/yeild should necessarily come over variety (and taste).

[Homemade]

What sensible, balanced and informed answers. Yes all selective breeding is some form of GM - there were no orange carrots before people selected them, etc. Some of the main worries about GM crops are that they are bred by the chemical companies to be resistant to their herbicides -you spray the field and kill the weeds but your plants survive. That ties the farmer into buying your herbicide, and your seed. The plants may not breed true but their pollen can cross fertilise wild relatives giving rise to who knows what kind of resistant weed varieties. Hence the worries from organic producers about contamination of organic crops from nearby GM crops.
On the whole the mixing of species dna doesn't worry me, aren't we all 80% the same dna as a cabbage or something like that? They talk about putting luminous jellyfish genes in maize to create natural illumination for airport runways - how wierd but beautiful is that?
Insect resistant plants are bred with natural level of plant insecticides (such as pyrethrin) inside, by raising the levels of this natural insecticide GM crops can be made more resistant to bugs and therefore not need to be sprayed, but are the crops then good to eat?
Tomatoes are now being bred with extra long shelf life so they can be kept for weeks without going rotten - good or bad? Possibly better than irradiating with Gamma rays , which is done to keep strawberries longer.
Sorry, long post. There is no black and white answer only a range of greys. Personally I don't think it's bad of itself but I also don't think they have thought through the safety implications.

[lancashire lass]

Tomatoes are now being bred with extra long shelf life so they can be kept for weeks without going rotten - good or bad?

When I was studying for my OU degree, I covered the genetics course in 1990 and went on a voluntary trip where this particular genetic experiment was being carried out, so its not that new - LOL

I can see both the benefits and the problems with this technology, all of which have been mentioned. I do think contaminating wild plant species with GM pollen would be disastrous, yet looking to the future, we need to consider the ever growing human population and ways to avoid mass famines due to crop failures brought about by climate change. As climate change is being forecast as rapid and unpredictable, technology may well be the key to survival but with all things unknown, there will be winners and losers.

In response to your question Homemade - I don't eat (like) raw tomatoes so all mine get preserved as sauce in jars or frozen to cook later, so it wouldn't bother me too much. However, I imagine logistically it would not be so much a nightmare to transport such fresh produce based on time scale (things could go by ship, train or lorry other than air freight if you understand what I mean) and food wastage would be smaller as well.

[saint-spoon]

As an island we rely far too heavily on imported goods from all over the world to feed our ever expanding population; with the EU controlling who can make our island the differential between what we grow and what we consume is probably going to increase significantly. We have also destroyed vast quantities of our farmland to produce concrete jungles ranging from the leafy suburbs to sterile industrial estates further reducing our ability to feed ourselves. Globally the world population is also growing at an alarming rate meaning that there will come a time when we will no longer be able to buy enough food for our nation. For this reason we need to multiply the net output per acre so as to have some chance in the future; therein lies our choice of chemically enhancing or genetically modifying the crop. If we can create a strain of wheat that can grow in poor quality soils with limited water but maintain or even increase yields without resorting to chemical fertilizer then it’s good news IMO, although I do think that we’d be better served by doing this through more traditional methods of hybriding existing strains. Resistance to disease is also a major issue and it was interesting to note that on countryfile they referred to the losses due to disease in terms of monetary value rather than actual quantity; by this I draw the assumption that the GM movement is driven more by profit margins than an underlying desire to rid the world of hunger, from profit also comes tax revenue for governments. Once you add the financial considerations you can remove impartiality from those set to gain the most and I suspect that, like with the tobacco industry any health issues won’t be pursued to readily. It took a long time before many governments accepted the link between smoking and any number of horrible deaths associated with inhaling tobacco smoke and many of the producers still argue that the evidence is circumstantial even after the myriad of court cases. For want of a better expression it’s certainly food for thought.

[Sunny B]

I'm perfectly OK with the sort of selective breeding that has long gone on in the field to produce new plant varieties, but not the inter species DNA meddling that's going on in laboratories now. And what happens if the GM stuff cross pollinates with "regular" crops and they all become infertile? Sounds like it could be an environmental disaster, as well a a huge money spinning operation for the companies in control of it all.
The "terminator seed" technology is certainly bad news for the growers. I belong to an organic gardening group, we swap seeds and we know that the parent plants did well in our local climate conditions, which may not be the same as "up country".

[p.penn]

This is all in the hands of private companies. Apparently the seed is not gatherable so farmers in third world countries will be encouraged to buy this wonder seed but instead of keeping some of the crop for sowing the following year will have to buy again.

Yes, that is right. They also have to buy specific fertilisers tied in to the multi-nationals which means they need to produce cash crops to pay for them rather than subsistance farming. Totally inappropriate.

[saint-spoon]

Rather disturbingly I read in a fish keeping magazine the other day that a company had managed to produce glow in the dark fish in a variety of colours (the old jellyfish gene again). The purpose of this was purely for the pet trade. The problem is that if any ever escaped into the wild and crossbred with native fish they could also become glow-in-the-dark and therefore lose their capability to hide from predators.

[Effie]

The problem is that if any ever escaped into the wild and crossbred with native fish they could also become glow-in-the-dark and therefore lose their capability to hide from predators.

I suppose natural selection would weed that one out really quickly, possibly before the escapees even got round to breeding

[Greengrass]

GM crops are of great concern to me for many reasons. We have cross bred plants for many generations but at a rate evolution could cope with. What we are faced with now are GM crops that change ecosystems at an alarming rate.

We need to learn from past experience when farming practises changed the countryside, wildlife habitats were slowly eroded to the point that British wildlife has suffered on a massive scale. You only have to breed a crop to be impervious to attack from one insect to crash a whole ecosystem to be lost forever! This is the effect of pesticides so why breed plants to be pest resistant when we already know the effects?

As for feeding the world, we already can but due to distribution and waste it's not getting to everyone. We produce enough food to feed the world population with lot's to spare.

The most scary side to GM crop development is the splicing of plant and animal DNA!!! Cross species breeding can only lead to trouble.