Economic downturn in the "Last Mile"

[Dagnabit]

As far as GM foods go, put me in with the heretics. It's an ecological fuck-over.

Maybe we would be a little more inclined to care about food safety - like the Europeans - if we had an inexplicable outbreak of a hard-to-understand brain disease crush one of our most basic agricultural industries.

GM potatoes were designed to grow their own pesticide A bacterial toxin was widely used to kill pests that eat potatoes. So they engineered a plant that could produce and release this toxin itself. A classified pesticide, which farmers would use very carefully and make sure was gone at harvest time, is now produced by the plant itself; it will never be gone at harvest time. (Some of those potatoes made it into McDonald's fries, by the way.)

Guaranteed, these potatoes will kill every one of the pests it has been engineered to wage war against. But the story won't end there. The pests, following laws of nature, will re-engineer themselves. So the same GM potatoes grown in 2000 won't work in 2005.

This is only an advantage to the agribusiness companies, who will just be able to charge more for another set of GM potatoes. Its effect on the rest of the ecosystem simply isn't a part of the equation.

Maybe we would be more concerned about this if we had experienced a famine where a blight killed almost every potato as happened in Ireland. Or every wine grape rootstock as happened in France and Spain. The Europeans understand agricultural paranoia... from experience.