Canadian GMO apples approved for sale :(

GMO's have been in production since the early 90's. So your looking at around 20 years of data.
I'm not against genetic engineering as a science. In other areas of the field they are doing some amazing things.
It's the way it's being applied to plants that is the issue.
There are some in the field that are actually trying to improve the plants they are working on. They have been finding in every case that when you try to splice genes from two completely different species you always end up with unintended consequences.

I sense an IBP coming real soon (a.k.a Ignore Button Proclamation )

Gotta luv the OT Forum

Say what you want, but today we breathe rarified air. Seldom are the days that Claude admits defeat.


And what is that splendid aroma? That, my friends, is Schadenfreude.

Butters here's a different way of looking at the gmo issue.
When I was in college studying plant and soil science, we learned that if you use the same herbicide or insecticide to treat a problem, you will create immunities. This is currently what is happening with gmo's. Two traits that are engineered into the main gmo crops (and others) are having a Bt toxin in every cell as an insecticide and making the plant immune to the herbicide Round-up.
First look at the round-up ready trait. This trait allows farmers to spray and kill weeds throughout the growing season using round-up. Previously round-up could only be sprayed before planting or before the seed germinated. With the increased herbicide usage "super weeds" began to appear. This where weeds that happened to be immune to round-up and naturally they reproduced. The g.e. crowds answer to this was to make the plants immune to a stronger herbicide (2-4-D). Common sense tells you that in a short time there will be weeds immune to 2-4-D . The whole purpose of this technology is increased herbicide use (made by the companies that g.e. the plants)
By the way in my own experiences as a certified pest applicator I've seen the same thing happen, but naturally on a much smaller scale.
Now on to the Bt toxin. First it's in every cell of the plant.
The toxin is taken from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis which is a common insecticide. In it's natural state when an insect eats it the toxin in the bacteria eats into the stomach wall of the insect and causes it to starve to death. But it is for the most part insect specific.
When they inject this toxin into a plant cell, they have to know it worked. To do that they also inject a type of activator to "turn" the toxin on. When this happens any insect that eats it will die, it's no longer specific. Now naturally like with the round-up, after a short time only the insects that had an immunity to the toxin will survive and reproduce. The G.E. crowds answer to this? Use stronger toxins.
There are always unintended and bad actions caused by what they are doing and their answer has always been to make them worse. Do you see where this is going? What they do is like putting a band aid on a hole in a dam and calling it fixed.

One way or another all those chemicals make their way into the environment non selectively killing and polluting as they go.
You can only poison and kill the environment for so long before it no longer produces the food we need to survive.

Monsanto is all over our legal and legislative system. They actually wrote the Monsanto protection act, which is an obnoxiously flagrant violation of the people's rights to not be poisoned and farmers rights as well.

Monsanto's going to be hard to stop. They won out on the labeling law here by spending millions on false ads. Now here's the fun -- the ads are libelous, and they will get sued again for false advertising (as they were in California) - but it doesn't matter and won't come out of their profits - because they are being subsidized with our tax money to the tune of 9 figures.

I started studying the population problem in the early 70's. When the UN started the Milleneum talks (somewhere around 1990) - that's what they were about. They were trying to devise population control strategies and were already recognizing the dangers of urban sprawl, etc. At one point it was suggested to enforce a global policy of one child like China and then abandoned it because they expected mass revolt against it. About that time they came out with the first GMO crops -- and found that they are sterilizing. They sterilize within three generations. The babies the lab rats had were smaller, less healthy -- and then in a few generations, very few.

This is the reason they are fighting labeling so hard. The general population doesn't recognize a GMO food when they see it.

It makes farming more expensive because of the pesticide cost and the need to buy seed each season rather than using some crop for reseed.
It uses way more water.
It causes health problems and sterilizes.
It kills soil building microbes.
It kills bees and other pollinators.
It spreads pesticides throughout our environment.
It's now known that the "more yield" is false.

There's not one plus to these crops outside of population control -- and if we allow them to kill off the bees, that's some real population control that we don't even want to have to face the reality of.