GMO: food crops

I listened to the World Service's feature about GMOs in Europe, and, along with the industry insiders, I thought that the slow and unnecessary bureaucracy that is holding back European research was not at all justified by the skewed opinions of the public: the idea that genetically modified organisms could be harmful to those who eat them (or much more so than the normal version) is laughable.

And yet Greenpeace had a good point to make: that GMOs are designed with the predicate that they will be used in a modern farm, with vast monocultures and large-scale use of unsustainable fertilisers, made from oil. This agricultural system is destructive, unsustainable and therefore wrong, and it is pointless to support it, or do research to improve it.

And yet it is also wrong to hinder GM research simply because of the context. As with my post about relationships at work, we need to identify what is wrong, and target only that, not everything that can be associated with it. In the case of relationships at work, it is the discrimination and unfair treatment that is wrong, not the relationships. In this case, it is the modern farming system.

We should both change modern farming and allow GM research. There is nothing fundamental in the concept of modifiying organisms that limits the research to modern agricultural practices. If all the money spent delaying GM research as a whole were spent on GM research that would help crops in different agricultural set-ups, the case for changing western farming would be strengthened.
This would also support farming in the poorer parts of the world, where western monoculture is not the typical method of farming, and where this research would also be applicable.

It's wonderful when both sides are right. It's less wonderful when there's hostility because they don't realise it.