Saving Lives: Genetically Modified Foods
Rich-World Snobbishness vs. Real-World Poverty
People who know me can tell you that I don’t like Greenpeace.
It isn’t to say that I don’t find their grab-bag of causes important. It’s simply their methods, with the sensationalism, deliberate distortion of scientific facts, and knee-jerk reactionary conservatism (because it certainly isn’t progressive) that annoy me to no end.
However, there is one cause, above all others, that has caused me to personally hate the organization. GMOs, or genetically modified organisms (food in this case).
There was a recent CNN article describing a team of researchers’ work on genetically modified rice that caught my attention and reminded me of this. Basically, what these scientists did was take a specific gene from a low-yielding variant of rice, and splice it into the normal taste high-yielding breed of rice that is widely grown in India. And as the article points out, it’s already having an impact on the test fields that it has been seeded in. The farmers and their families have more food. They are economically more wealthy, and more importantly, not starving.
Despite the tangible value to humanity that these crops have, Greenpeace and their cousins (both more and less radical), consistently oppose them and have succeeded in turning more or less all of continental Western Europe against GMO crops. Fine. If these rich-world countries would like to indulge in “natural” (which, by the way, is highly misleading, considering human selection and domestication of crops)—so be it.
But I personally say that one can begin to argue the tangible human benefit if Greenpeace did not exist, especially when they go to the UN and various aid organizations to prevent GMO food from being distributed… and even worse, block these variants from being allowed on African, Indian, Southeast Asian, and whatnot fields. As said, if Western Europe, especially France in this case, would like to turn their collective noses upwards at GMO food, and indulge in their “organic” and “natural” food, fine. But do not tell me that you are doing good by helping starve third-world countries and keep them from being sustainable by barring the fruits of scientific research from them.
Tell me, Greenpeace, if you actually went out there and asked these families, if they would like to have GMO crops or (in many case) be malnourished or even starve, what do you think the response would be? This isn’t a straw-man. It isn’t a “false” choice. I personally saw these sorts of farming families when I traveled in Asia—it’s all too real.
It isn’t a matter of us “foisting” these crops on them. Or forcing it on them. These countries, the governments and the people, genuinely want them. They want to have a better life—they want to not be constantly on the edge of starvation in their subsistence-level farming existence.
I’ll grant that we should closely monitor what we do with genetics, but there is no controversy, there is no “unknown factor” in these genetic sequences that we have to fear. We’ve been modifying our plants and animals since the beginning of the agricultural revolution (the one about 10,000 years ago). We can just do it more precisely and faster now.
Here, where we can clearly better people and make this a better world to live in… these “activists” would instead prefer to continue to perpetrate a human tragedy. Perhaps these sheltered, rich-world, and probably rich, “idealists” should actually go out there and take a look at what is actually out there. Maybe then, they might realize that ideology isn’t everything (how ironic) and that their juvenile posturing has real consequences, especially when they succeed in shutting these life-saving innovations away from those who truly need them.
