Biotech companies insert toxins into every cell of some plants, our food, as insecticides. The toxins are also released into the ground where they kill susceptible insect larvae and degrade the soil. Low-level toxins in the entire cellular make-up of crops provide ideal conditions for resistance to develop in weeds, insects and bacteria. So dangerous compounds like paraquat and atrazine are being re-introduced to outsmart the pests, though they in turn will become ineffective. In most GM crops the use of herbicides and pesticides is increasing, often just before harvest, so the amount of residues (POPs and EDCs) left on food is also increasing.
Now for the really scary stuff: 'horizontal gene transfer'. Genes are units of heredity - part of the magic that shapes future generations. They go 'vertically' from plant to seed, parent to baby. But Harvard University and others have found that modified genes also move 'horizontally' from plants to bacteria. They can move from food to the bacteria in our gut and breach the lining of the womb; we are warned that baby food should not contain GMOs, and it is wise for an expectant mother to avoid GM foods.
Pollen can travel four miles. Draw this circle around an organic or a GM farm and there is no space for the other. Already a farmer with land near a GM plot has been denied the right to grow organic food. The public wants organic food and there is zero demand for GM food. We can have either one or the other. Not both.
GM foods have been consumed in the US for seven years without harm, they say. But during this period food-derived illnesses have doubled. In California the number of children with autism has doubled in the last four years. The sperm count of men is steadily reducing. Allergies have greatly increased. But no one knows if this is consequence or coincidence because no monitoring of the long term clinical or biochemical effects of GM has been done in Britain or the US. The EPA warns that many effects, like cancer and damage to the immune system, could take many years to show.
