BRATTLEBORO — I would like to applaud and thank Joëlle Montagnino and Aaron Goodier for their piece, which showed not only thoughtfulness but courage in a state where anti-GMO often seems to be the default opinion.
As with many public debates, the conversation around genetically modified organisms (GMO) lacks nuance. Not all GMOs are created equal. Making corn resistant to pesticides, for example, is a vastly different project from adding Vitamin A to rice to provide better nutrition in impoverished parts of the world.
So many of the reasons I've heard for an anti-GMO stance are related not to the process of genetically modifying something, but to other areas of food safety and sustainability.
GMOs don't encourage pesticide use, for example. Companies producing GMOs are responding to an agricultural norm that assumes that increased yields require greater pesticide use.
That norm is not a sustainable model for feeding the world, and I would rather see research money spent on figuring out how to work with the environment to increase crop yields than on GMOs. But GMOs are not the root cause of the pesticide use.
Furthermore, the science around GMOs, as the authors pointed out, is downright “iffy.” Studies on the human health effects of GMOs are flawed and arguments full of pseudoscience. No one has proven that GMOs are harmful. To be fair, no one has proven that they aren't, either. I wonder whether we aren't changing organisms faster than other organisms in a biome can adjust, but I have not seen studies on either side of the issue.
Do I think there should be more study of the effects of GMOs on human and ecological health? Absolutely. Do I think that money for those studies will come from the corporations that produce GMO crops? Absolutely not.
Perhaps the answer is crowd-funded science. If you truly think that GMOs are harmful, fund the science that will prove it - real science, with properly designed experiments and studies that stand up to peer review and repetition.