Genetically Modified Food Raises Issues

* “Activists Push for Labeling of Genetically Altered Foods” [June 18] pooh-poohs the idea that genetically modified [GM] foods may have an effect on human health, as if that were the only concern involved.

There are many other issues involved in the propagation of GM foods on our planet.

GM foods are designed according to economies of scale and would replace numerous varieties of the same class of food in commercial production, thus leading to a lessening of consumer choice and, far more significant, a reduction of genetic diversity over vast swaths of agricultural acreage. Lack of food variety also leads to nutritional deficiencies.

With GM foods we are subordinating evolution to commercial return. In effect, by using GM foods we will be restraining the ability of the genetic process to adapt to vagaries of climate, geography and time. With this sort of mechanically induced inbreeding, we could be reducing the basis of life on Earth to the level of congenital imbecility.

Also, many GM foods--the prime example being the “Roundup Ready” soybean--are actually designed to require the use of potent herbicides, without which they cannot grow. Requiring farmers to spread yet more poisons over already compromised land and watersheds is either cynical or stupid, and most likely both. This also has the effect of making us more dependent on petroleum-based products at a time when oil reserves are diminishing and the deleterious effects of exploration and refinement becoming daily more evident.

Furthermore, GM foods are used primarily to increase not yields of seeds, but yields of dollars--for the supplier, not the farmer. One of the biggest effects of using GM foods is an increase in farmers’ debt loads, leading eventually to foreclosures and the takeover of family farms by corporations.

Large-scale agribusiness cannot afford to provide diversified crops for local market tastes but must impose a uniformity of food usage over large and diverse populations in order to achieve a return for stockholders. Some traditionally bred products, such as the famous “cardboard tomatoes” designed for long-distance shipping but devoid of taste and vitamins, are but a harbinger of the blandness GM foods will present to eaters.

The final insult comes from such GM masterpieces as the “terminator” seed, bred to be sterile so that the farmer cannot retain part of his crop for planting next year but must repeatedly buy seed from the industrial supplier.

RICHARD RISEMBERG

Los Angeles