resistance to pesticides and pests, better and more consistant crops.
Take for example this hypothetical situation:
A plant is plagued by a fungus that lives in the soil. It affects the roots and eventually kills the plant. now say there are fields and fields of such plant, and one of them just happens to have developed a rare genetic mutation (mutations in DNA happen naturally in quite large amounts but few have any effects) that just so happens to make it resistant to that fungus. It grows to be healthy while all the plants around it die. This plant then flowers and seeds and produces a whole load more plants, all of which are resistant to this fungus. Now just suppose this plant has fruits and a farmer spots these plants are flourishing and takes them back to his farm and replaces his mouldy plants with these improved ones. Everybody is happy because there are now healthier plants and more fruits.
But say a scientist spots a plant that suffers from a similar problem and uses some genetic tools to tweak the plant to solve its problem and gives it to a farmer who is happy because his plants no longer die. This ‘modification’ may or may not have happened naturally given enough time.
The public are however not happy.
Now why is this?
nothing as far as i can see—actually we have been genetically modifying crops for the past 30 or 40 years or more
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in my opinion nothing is wrong with it,the problem lies in people fearing change.
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Artificial GM crops can have have adverse affect which may take decades to show its symptoms. Artificially made GM foods can produce produce toxicity/allergy. Maybe god’s technology is better than humans, thats why we prefer naturally occuring crops.
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I agree with the other posters. Maybe a nitpick with DarkAngel’s. We’ve been selectively breeding, thus genetically altering, since antiquity.
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There are several disadvantages of genetically modified (GM) crops.
Ethical question: Do we have a right to play God?
1) GM crops may cross pollinate with similar crops to create new varieties of weeds
2) GM crops may grow again a second year as a “volunteer crop” which the farmer may not want and it is tougher to get rid of.
3) Some GM crops have been found to be carcinogenic (cancer causing) years after it was developed.
4) GM plants may have genes transferred from animals.
5) GM food may accidentally have toxic substances.
6) Fungus may adapt quickly to fungus-resistant GM plants
7) GM food may accidentally have allergenic substances (people are allergic to it).
9) Farmers may choose to stop growing traditional crops and grow only selective GM crops.
10) Chemical companies may charge high prices for farmers to use their GM seeds.
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Selective breeding is great crops can be manipulated naturally for better produce.
Most GM crops have been modified to make money not better foods.
Putting fish splices with tomatoes to make self fertilizing plants has not improved the quality of our tomatoes just made it more difficult to find tomatoes with out fish in them.
putting spiders silk with cows milk to make military hardware
sucks
Most crops are genetically modified to withstand more poisons from pesticides produced by similar companies, so much poison that all other nature dies around while the gm crops can take excessive amounts of poisons and still live and “look” good.
My rabbit won’t eat a lot of the foods he likes for this reason although it looks good to me and he normally likes them some produce he just walks away from even when hungry. I’d sure like to take cuddles shopping with me for my own health benefits.
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