Comment Re:GM plants would be great, except ... (Score 2, Informative) 495
There is also the case of papayas in Hawaii. In the past few years, a new strain of papaya was developed to combat the papaya ringspot virus. This virus threatened to destroy Hawaii's entire commercial papaya industry. With the GM varieties, the papaya is now immune to this deadly rinspot virus. See this article from UH's student newspaper here http://www.kaleo.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/1 2/416b77d697d77
This is great news for any papaya farmer who wants to use the new GM varieties, but terrible for the organic papaya farmers. Recently, the organic farmers have found contamination in their crops. This could cause any organic farmer to lose his/her organic certification. In the world of organic farming, this is akin to a truck driver losing his CDL. In other words, all the work that went into getting certified for organic farming goes down the tube. As an aside, a large market for Hawaii's organic papaya crop is Japan, which has a zero-tolerance GM policy. Any contamination, and an organic papaya farmer would lose Japan as a market.
And what is the cause of the contamination? It looks like there are two possibilities. The first is contaminiation from a nearby farmer's pollen (if the neighbor uses GM papayas). The other is from buying contaminated seeds. When an organic farmer buys seeds that are labelled "non-GM", there should be absolutely no trace of GM in those seeds. This however is not the case - the quality control in keeping GM seeds and non-GM seeds is obviously not good enough and needs to be improved. Until these types of problems are worked out, I still see GM crops as dangerous. Not in the sense that the crop is necessarily unhealthy or dangerous to eat but, as in this case, could cost an organic farmer his livelihood.
Most articles list contamination as only a possibility, and rarely talk about the effects that GM contamination can have on a farmer. These effects are real and should not be ignored.
This is great news for any papaya farmer who wants to use the new GM varieties, but terrible for the organic papaya farmers. Recently, the organic farmers have found contamination in their crops. This could cause any organic farmer to lose his/her organic certification. In the world of organic farming, this is akin to a truck driver losing his CDL. In other words, all the work that went into getting certified for organic farming goes down the tube. As an aside, a large market for Hawaii's organic papaya crop is Japan, which has a zero-tolerance GM policy. Any contamination, and an organic papaya farmer would lose Japan as a market.
And what is the cause of the contamination? It looks like there are two possibilities. The first is contaminiation from a nearby farmer's pollen (if the neighbor uses GM papayas). The other is from buying contaminated seeds. When an organic farmer buys seeds that are labelled "non-GM", there should be absolutely no trace of GM in those seeds. This however is not the case - the quality control in keeping GM seeds and non-GM seeds is obviously not good enough and needs to be improved. Until these types of problems are worked out, I still see GM crops as dangerous. Not in the sense that the crop is necessarily unhealthy or dangerous to eat but, as in this case, could cost an organic farmer his livelihood.
Most articles list contamination as only a possibility, and rarely talk about the effects that GM contamination can have on a farmer. These effects are real and should not be ignored.
