To eat GM food, or not to eat: that is the question in China after the Ministry of Agriculture allowed field trials with genetically modified rice seeds. The experts' world is divided.
GM seed supporters argue the world's hungry cannot be fed if agriculture doesn't change its traditional ways (read: if farmers do not use GM seeds). They say if the opponents can accept Bt cotton and genetically engineered medicine, why cannot they accept GM rice.
Let's take China and India, where Bt cotton is grown widely, as examples. GM seeds were introduced in these countries as high-yielding varieties. Very few, if any, farmers were told at the outset that they would have no choice but to keep paying exponentially more to buy them season after season. The Western world, which claims to have gifted the magic seed to the poor, is obsessed with democracy. But after using GM seeds does a farmer have the democracy of choice to revert to conventional seeds? To be honest, he has - but the soil, contaminated by GM seeds, would at best yield a poor harvest.
Thousands of farmers have committed suicide in India because their GM crops failed. They could not repay the loans they had taken from banks and/or moneylenders to buy GM seeds. The lure of GM seeds is still pushing hundreds of thousands of others under insurmountable debts. But they are not part of the West's democracy program.
Earlier this month came a confession from Monsanto, the world's biggest GM seed-maker, that pink bollworms insects had developed resistance to its Bt cotton crop in India's western province of Gujarat.
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