Scientist:”Farmers Should Plant GM Crops”
June 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under News Stories
June 10, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
(NaturalNews) A former British agricultural government advisor has said that organic farming should embrace genetically modified (GM) crops as a way to make large-scale agriculture more environmentally sustainable.
Gordon Conway, a professor of international development at Imperial College London, told the Times of London that organic agriculture focuses excessively on what is “natural.” Referring to the exclusion of synthetic technologies from the definition of organic as “rigid,” he said that GM technology should be used to increase crop yields while limiting ecological damage.
Conway’s argument, as reported by the Times, did not appear to address the concerns that critics of biotechnology have raised with GM crops. Conway stated that GM agriculture is just as “natural” as conventional plant breeding, disregarding the argument that bypassing evolutionary processes completely is more likely to have unforeseen consequences. He stated that herbicide-resistant crops have lower carbon footprints because they require less tilling of the soil, apparently ignoring evidence that such crops lead to increased use of toxic chemicals.
