I'm not sure about DDT, but RoundUp is being used like that which is why Monarchs are headed towards extinction. One should always ask "what happens next". The food can be 100% safe but cause terrible destruction in real world situations.
I've seen quite a few things lately that indicate that some pesticides are ultimately responsible for the colony collapse disorder that's killing off honeybees.
I get the impression that it's more of a deep distrust of Monsanto and their motives and trying to avoid giving them even more control over the food supply.
They push for fewer regulations and spend quite a bit on lobbying to that end. I'm sure it's because the regulations aren't strict
enough, and they feel that their altruistic duty is being held back.
That's the issue I have with it: It's not the modification itself that's the issue. I love the concept of effectively rewriting and editing genetic code for our benefit. But:
1) We constantly screw up computer code because it's very easy to create an extremely complex system. DNA is what we have after many hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Reverse-engineering it to the point that we can call ourselves "experts" at recoding it isn't an easy task.
2) The corporate politics guiding how and why it's being pursued.
...
Monsanto hardly has a stranglehold on the market. Lots of other companies (eg: Syngenta, Bayer Agriculture, Dow, DuPont, BASF, Simplot, and other smaller players) all play a part of the agriculture market. It would hardly be in Monsanto's interests to kill their customers with toxic foods. Am I completely trusting of them? No.
You do know of the phrase "Buyer beware," right? It's not around because sellers are always fully concerned about the safety of their customers. Plenty of people would willfully sell you poison if they thought they could get away with it and keep the money.
Remember, we're the same species that needs rules to serve as reminders that:
- It's bad to torture someone for information.
- We shouldn't murder other people.
- Owning other people and working them to death is bad.
- Companies shouldn't employ children to work long hours around dangerous machinery.
We have a tendency toward being self-serving even if it is directly detrimental to
many other people, up to and including killing them. If fully left to our own devices, we can get to some pretty unsettling behaviors in a surprisingly short period of time.
On the less-extreme side, consumer safety can take a backseat when things like profitability and duty to shareholders constantly get the focus. "It must be entirely safe!" can be touted, but the undertone is "It must be as profitable as possible. When and if you have time, make sure it's safe."
But they also have large regulatory hurdles to overcome when bringing any of their genetically modified products to market.
...regulatory hurdles which they are constantly working to remove.
as our world population keeps growing, we need to increase the amount of food we can produce off of our limited land. GMO allows us to do this.
It'd be nice if we could drop that increase to a slow crawl, or replacement levels only. Good
god there are so many people now.
We're just doing what life here does though, right down to bacteria:
Provide bacteria with an abundant but limited food supply. They'll rapidly reproduce and quickly consume the food, right up until it runs out. Then the majority will die off, leaving only a small and stable population, at least until the next abundance of food shows up. I'm sure it was an evolutionary survival tactic. If you expand your population as much as possible when times are good, even if there's a future die-off, the survivors will likely be spread out over a larger area, thus providing geographic diversification and a subsequent increase in chances of long-term survival.
We have data to show that the population growth rate can't continue indefinitely, but it's pitted against our powerful instinct to reproduce unabated, which led to outgrowths like ancient religions which promote exactly that sort of behavior.