GMO Environmental Myths | Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health

Myth: GMOs Can Alleviate Global Poverty

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:31:44 +0000

It is often claimed that the presence of GMOs in our food chain decrease costs for citizens and help to alleviate the effects of poverty—that GMOs will feed the world. This is simply not true.
• In 2009, the World Bank and the United Nations published a 590- page report concluding that GMOs have no role to play in relieving poverty.
• In India, an estimated 125,000 farmers have committed suicide because they have been bankrupted by Monsanto’s GMO seeds.
• Biotech companies are discovering how to create exotic spices (e.g., vanilla, saffron, patchouli) from GMO yeast and other microorganisms. Despite claims that these GMO spices are “natural” and “environmentally friendly,” they are anything but and threaten to put microfarmers in developing countries out of business.

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Myth: GMOs Will Feed the World

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:21:59 +0000

The biotech industry claims that GMO crops deliver higher crop yields. The facts, however, do not bear this out. According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Only one kind of GMO corn (corn that has been genetically altered to express the bacterial Bt toxin, which is poisonous to certain insect pests) has been shown to even marginally (0.2 to 0.3% per year) increase yield.
It’s true that, generally, corn and soybean yields have risen over the past fifteen years. However, this is mainly because of traditional breeding or improvement in conventional agricultural practices.

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Myth: GMOs Can Coexist With Organic and Conventional Crops

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:15:34 +0000

The ability of conventional and organic farmers to produce GMO-free food, as well as the ability of consumers to buy GMO-free products, is being threatened by the biotech industry:

GMO seeds can drift and contaminate organic crops.
More than 30% of farmers seeking to grow organic crops reported that unintended GMO presence has been found or suspected on their farms.
GMO crops reduce genetic diversity, which can lead to massive shortages and the destruction of small farmers. Take, for example, coffee: 65% of our coffee comes from a single coffee bean species, which suffers from extremely low genetic diversity and is increasingly difficult to find in the wild. This type of monocrop creates an environment where one good disease could wipe out our ability to grow that crop. In this case, coffee. This is also becoming increasingly true of other crops like bananas, corn, and soy, since crop choices are increasingly driven by profit margin.

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Myth: GMOs Are Environmentally Friendly

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:14:09 +0000

GMOs are not environmentally friendly, and have not lessened the use of toxic chemicals—in fact, they’ve increased it.

Many crops are genetically modified to withstand the use of extremely toxic herbicides like Roundup. However, weeds are becoming increasingly tolerant of Roundup, creating “superweeds;” so much so that a new generation of crops is being engineered to withstand an even more toxic herbicide containing 2,4-D (a known carcinogen and one of the two ingredients in the infamous Agent Orange, used as chemical warfare in Vietnam).
Beyond super weeds, glyphosate is environmentally toxic, and is contaminating our ecosystem.
Recent studies show that glyphosate-resistant crops are destroying bee populations and threatening our food supply.
The widely-planted ArborGen’s GMO eucalyptus trees show the unintended consequences of introducing genetically modified species into the wild. According to the Center for Food Safety, these trees could devastate the environment and threaten natural forests by sucking up at least twice as much water as normal seeds, requiring increasing amounts of fertilizers, and contaminating vulnerable wild trees.
From 2012 to 2013 Monarch Butterfly populations were reduced by over 40%. This dramatic decrease has been linked to the increase in the use of glyphosate and other insecticides in industrial farming. Like bees butterflies play an important role in pollination and serve as a bellwether for environmental health.

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