GMO's in practice
It is often claimed that genetic engineering could increase production, reduce pesticide use, make plants drought resistant, and so on. However, the reality of GMO's in the past 30 years is a completely different story. Basically, only two practical applications have been realised, leading to increased use of pesticides, monocultures, soil depletion, and biodiversity deserts.
In the first use case, food crops are made resistant to Roundup, an aggressive weed killer based on glyfosate. The crop will not be killed by glyfosate, while all other plants are. This allows farmer to kill all weeds and plants in a field, while only the GMO crop survives. If we ignore the repulsion the whole idea causes, this has also led to "superweeds" in the USA, weeds that are impossible to control and can only be suppressed with oldfashioned and poisonous herbicides.
In the second use case, a certain gene (the Bt-gene) is built into a crop, inducing the crop to produce it's own insecticide. Bt-cotton is an example. In theory, the Bt-component should kill harmfull insects, so farmers don't have to spray any other pesticides. In reality, what happens is very similar to what happens with the Roundup-ready crops: resistent "super-insects" develop. The farmers then often turn to old-fashioned, forbidden and heavily poisonous insecticides.
In the past 30 years, the practical application of GMO's has lead to large scale monocultures, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and appallingly ugly landscapes. Also, it has led to financial dependance and despair of thousands of farmers, most notably a large number of farmers suicides in India.
The main companies that develop GMO crops all originate from chemical industry, and therefore have a keen interest in maintaining the chemical and industrial approach in agriculture that has led to so much environmental destruction since WWII.
