GMO's: The Monsanto Strawman

Monsanto is, as most of us know, an example of crony-capitalism at its worst. It has bullied its way to the top of the food chain thanks to government support.  Monsanto operates exactly in capitalist system libertarians disapprove of - one in which cronyism destroys the free enterprise concept.

Monsanto is just another example of why the government and bureaucrats should not intervene in the market.

However, in the case of GMO's, just because Monsanto is a hideous monster on the block doesn't equate to GMO's being bad.

Story here.

"The depredations of the multinational agricultural corporation Monsanto are rightly condemned by many. Monsanto is a prominent example of a crony corporation – a company that bolsters its market dominance not through honest competition and innovation, but through the persistent use of the political and legal system to enforce its preferences against its competitors and customers. Most outrageous is Monsanto’s stretching of patents beyond all conceivable limits – attempting to patent genes and life forms and to forcibly destroy the crops of farmers who replant seeds from crops originally obtained from Monsanto."

"...Indeed, the loathing of all GMOs stems from a more fundamental fallacy, for which any criticism of Monsanto only provides convenient cover. That fallacy is the assumption that “the natural” – i.e., anything not affected by human technology, or, more realistically, human technology of sufficiently recent origin – is somehow optimal for human purposes or simply for its own sake. While it is logically conceivable that some genetic modifications to organisms could render them more harmful than they would otherwise be (though there has never been any evidence of such harms arising despite the trillions of servings of genetically modified foods consumed to date), the condemnation of all genetic modifications using techniques from the last 60 years is far more sweeping than this. Such condemnation is not and cannot be scientific; rather, it is an outgrowth of the indiscriminate anti-technology agenda of the anti-GMO campaigners" 

"...Just because the primitive “paleo” diet of our ancestors enabled them to survive long enough to trigger the chain of events that led to us, does not render their lives, or their diets, ideal for emulation in every aspect. We can do better. We must do better – if protection of large numbers of human beings from famine, drought, pests, and prohibitive costs of food is to be considered a moral priority in the least. By depriving human beings of the increased abundance, resilience, and nutritional content that only the genetic modification of foods can provide, anti-GMO campaigners would sentence millions – perhaps billions – of humans to the miserable subsistence conditions and tragically early deaths of their primeval forebears, of whom the Earth could support only a few million without human agricultural interventions."
 
 This is the point Kevin O'Leary tried to clumsily make when he debated that young lady.

"We do not need to like Monsanto in order to embrace the life-saving, life-enhancing potential of GMOs. We need to consider the technology involved in GMOs on its own terms, imagining how we would view it if it could be delivered by economic arrangements we would prefer."


Food for thought - excuse the pun.