From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Mon Jul 08 2002 - 07:50:41 MDT
In addition to my admittedly knee jerk revulsion to the government telling me what to do I actually do have two additional reasons for opposing mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.
1) In most cases finding a test to determine for example if flower came from genetically modified wheat would be like finding a test to determine the astrological sign of the man who drove the combine when the wheat was harvested, so the only way to certify that the flower did not from gene engineered wheat is to ban the technology entirely.
2) Stopping the genetic modification of crops would increase the net total of human misery. There is not one scrap of evidence that genetic engineering of food crops has produced so much as a belly ache, but there is plenty of evidence that millions of people starve to death every year. If you could increase the amount of salt rice could tolerate by just 2% you could greatly increase the area of cultivated land because of irrigation and save thousands from death; if you could teach rice how to fix nitrogen from the air as soybeans can you could save even more. This "horrible Frankenstein technology" as some like to call it would save many people from a gruesome death and would be most dramatic in the third world, the very people the anti science people claim to love so much.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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