by Deb Baumann
Lake County News
One argument used to resist genetically modified organism/genetically engineered (GMO/GE) labeling sounds an awful lot like nanny-state thinking: “We must not allow labeling of GMOs because, given a choice, people would make the wrong choice.”
Poor silly foolish misguided consumers!
How lucky we are to have giant corporations and the government making the right choices for us, since we are incapable of deciding for ourselves. Sorry, but I just don’t have that much faith in corporations or the government. I would rather make my own choices. So would 87 percent of Americans polled.
On Feb. 15 the New York Times published a column calling for GMO labeling, citing the above poll. A week later, Forbes published a column insisting that we must not have GMO labeling. Why? Because then people would avoid such products.
Take a moment to absorb that interesting proposition, from a magazine which is supposed to be about business and economics. Not merely economics, but free market economics. Can there be a “free market” when consumers are denied the right to make their own choices? Can there be a “free market” when taxpayer subsidies are used to shore up a product which consumers don’t want to buy?
GMO crops would have no place in an agriculture economy based on sound, free-market principles. As in, cost of production should not exceed market-value of end-product. Fact: GMO crops cost more to grow than they are worth in the market. American taxpayers make up the difference, through farm subsidies, most of which are issued to recipients beloved by corporate ag. (Only a tiny percentage of subsidies are paid to organic farmers, one reason why organic costs more.)
Currently, the commodity-crop system is rigged to push the more expensive (more profitable) GMO seeds. And since many GMO crops are designed to encourage increased use of herbicide, GMOs also generate more profit for herbicide sellers (often the same company that sells the seeds).
And that, ladies and gents, is the reason GMOs are being pushed down our unwilling throats. Everything else (“feeding the world,” “higher yields,” etc) is just smoke and mirrors, created via bazillion-dollar PR campaigns that harken back to the days when Big Tobacco spent umpteen millions to poo-poo the possibility of any link between smoking and cancer.
Read the Full Article here: http://lakeconews.com/content/view/18526/925/
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