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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum
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To: Ron Bower who wrote (9593)4/5/2000 7:15:00 AM
From: nihil  Read Replies (2) of 9980
 
I own a corn-bean farm in Southern Illinois. We buy hybrid corn (maize) seed every year and pay 20x the price per bushel of the corn it grows into. Until recently we kept seed for beans. It is simply a matter of benefit-cost analysis. The amount of nitrogen fertilizer we put on the corn depends on the yield increase caused by nitrogen. Nitrates leaching into the creeks is not charged for. If families drink water from the drainage the rate of child retardation increases. The government knows this and so do the farmers, but the farmers continue to dump on the fertilizer because they must to survive economically.
If we could buy corn seed with nitrogen nodules on the roots that would reduce or eliminate the use of chemical fertilizer we could reduce the contamination of the streams.
IMO it is very simple. Genetically modified corn seed will reduce contamination.
Much of the corn is destroyed in the field by corn root worm. Bt will kill the worms and segments of Bt genome included in the corn will protect the corn plants from the root worms. Wind blown Bt corn pollen may destroy monarch butterfly larvae. Monarch butterfly lovers are deeply disturbed by this, but the milkweed (on which monarch larvae feed) lovers may be happy.
Significant ecological decisions should not be left to the greed of individual farmers and seed companies. There is too much interaction between the components of the biome to ignore. We need a great deal more research and more control. We should avoid irreversible decisions. But we must experiment. Population is growing rapidly. People need better diets. On the whole, market systems with free entry and subsidized research have worked remarkably well. So well, in fact, that we have vast surpluses in Europe and America. Farmers are driving each other out of business. In much of the underdeveloped world productivity improvement means more and more surplus rural population.
My guess is that more than a billion people need to be moved to some other occupation than farming and farm labor over the next 10 years. GM foods simply increase the number and the rate to find something else for them to do.
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